This paper presents a new method for identifying mutually exclusive operations pairs in behavioral descriptions in the context of high-level synthesis. It is based in two main features: i) the choice of a suitable formal representation of the behavior that exploits its maximum degree of parallelism and ii) a behavior preserving transformation of that representation in order to overlook the "non-intended" design decisions (like implicit hardware reuse) taken by the designer when writing the system specification. As a result, a simple and unified method for identifying all the mutually exclusive pairs can be defined, which provides a higher potential reuse in the final implementation.