Can Cognitive Therapy change my tastes?

Outside of marriage, one of the most committed relationships we have is with our tastes. By now, you've developed a stable set of tastes for certain genres of food, music, religion, and people. How do we acquire our tastes?

I want to know so I can understand how to change my current tastes.

I used to be a prolific web designer in the 90s, but then became on-and-off-again during college as my interests shifted into writing. Writing has yet to pay off, and so I'm going to return back to serious web design. Unfortunately, my return is met with some reluctance. Sure, I understand and still value the benefits that freelance web design entails: freedom, money, and technology. However, the actual task of preparing HTML and cooking Flash is no longer appealing in and of itself. As a result, my only motivations for freelance web design are the external rewards. This, for one, makes the part of the day that I spend working feel like "work" and not like "passion." Second, without a natural zest for picking up my web design tools, I am slower, less motivated, and my business suffers.

So, can I revert my tastes back to how they used to be in the 90s? I used to love the feel of HTML, the sense of satisfaction creating a complete interactive communication device (a website), and the gestalts of programming. Can I bring those back?

My first thought from Cognitive Therapy is to use the "cognitive spectrum" technique. Compare the target belief or task to something else in order to change the value that that object has. For example, to make web designing more attractive, I should try to imagine myself doing an activity that is a much worse alternative. Here we go.

Okay, I am bagging groceries at Whole Foods. A rich tarty lady gets mad at me for putting her tomatoes with her eggs and asks for separate bags for each one. I smile it off, but I get tense for the next 10 minutes, and then my manager says that I need to lighten up. And I do this everyday in the morning, and I have to wake up early. Or how about I'm doing data entry for a hospital. For 4 hours non-stop, I'm looking at a piece of paper while in a crappy fluorescent room, reading numbers, and punching them onto a screen, and it sucks, and I'm hungry, but it's not time to check-out yet

Hmm, this is weird, somehow I the negative vignette has the opposite effect. Because they are so laborious, I seem to want to do them more, to somehow dig in and experience pain. Not what I intended.

Also, I am scared to change my tastes. I'm afraid that I'll get sucked back into web design. That's what my heart says. My mind refutes though, "if I really want to do something other than web design, then I'll prioritize that. And I can't get "sucked in" to anything, since I pursue happiness with the fiber of my entire body."

Changing tastes and personalities is a weird process like that. How can you change the hand that changes? If I have a taste for something, how could I convince myself to change it, since my taste would interfere with my desire to change. Of course, once the change is over, that taste no longer has a hold over your desire to change, and is then moot. But the self doesn't really internalize that subtly and is stubborn to change.