Of Old Roads, New Paths and the People Who Take Them
I found this article in the New York Times very eye-opening.
Especially this:
"...don’t bother trying to kill off old habits; once those ruts of procedure are worn into the hippocampus, they’re there to stay. Instead, the new habits we deliberately ingrain into ourselves create parallel pathways that can bypass those old roads..."That definitely catalysed an Oprah Aha! moment for me. It made me realise that I'd been focusing precious change energy in the wrong direction.
Instead of trying (with limited success), to block off "the old roads", I ought rather to be concentrating on building "new parallel pathways". Instead of concentrating my efforts on not doing things the old way, I should in fact be expending my energy imagining, inventing and learning new ways of doing things.
And then there's also the bit about the three zones of existence: comfort, stretch and stress:
"...Comfort is the realm of existing habit. Stress occurs when a challenge is so far beyond current experience as to be overwhelming. It’s that stretch zone in the middle — activities that feel a bit awkward and unfamiliar — where true change occurs ... Getting into the stretch zone is good for you ... it helps keep your brain healthy. It turns out that unless we continue to learn new things, which challenges our brains to create new pathways, they literally begin to atrophy..."
We live, We learn.
(I so love that we get to do that.)
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1 Other Thoughts:
I have been a student of psych and the psychology of change for a LOOONNNGGG time and so reading that article was taking a nice familiar road down memory lane.
The one new thing that I had never read before was not to kill off old habits because they are there forever. The school of thought I currently subscribe to says that we should always create a new habit THAT FULFILLS THE EMOTIONAL NEED that the old habit was filling. So rather than creating a parallel habit or even a new, opposing habit we should create a new habit that acts as a different train to the same old destination.
Another thing that got reinforced that I heard sometime last year that is really beginning to click, actually two things:
a) Any time you learn something new it's going to be uncomfortable because of the journey into unfamiliar terrain. Push through it and eventually you'll develop the habits and the skills until eventually it becomes well...."a habit"
b) Confusion is a good thing: This is a point at which-to use a metaphor-your brain is at a fork in the road and is unsure of what direction it wants to go in - the old way or the new way. Chose the new way and you have crossed a major hurdle and began the process of creating new neurons and habits.
Tony Robbins was great for teaching me about this stuff.
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