I was clinging to my boyfriend’s back, hands around his waist as he turned onto the main road and accelerated. It had been ten years since I last sat on a motorbike and even back then, I wasn’t sure wether I really liked it. This time I was plain scared, even mortified, as he navigated the curves in the road and I felt the bike tilting towards the asphalt.
“Remember to lean in”, I told myself, scared as I was that I would cause a crash. Of course, nothing like that happened and some 20 minutes later we stopped to admire a cute medieval town in France’s Dordogne region. That wasn’t so bad. Maybe I could get used to that again, I thought to myself. After all, this is how the brain learns: repeat stuff, get used to it and process it in a faster and easier way.
Previously, I would have been a lot more scared over the experience. But over the past years, reading tons of information about the plasticity of the brain, I have come to realize that finding something scary is not necessarily forever. As your brain is exposed to new conditions and circumstances, it adapts and develops new pathways that integrate the experience. So what seems scary at first, becomes normal after a while. It’s what exposure therapy is based on. And of course you could use this in a totally different way too.
Extra attention for new stuff
About every person I have ever coached wanted to change their behavior and found it challenging to do so. The reason why change is so difficult is because it provokes a similar response in your brain as my daunting ride through the French countryside did. Doing something different than before will feel uncanny and is met with extra attention and resistance. And until your brain has incorporated the new experience, it will keep feeling that way.
It’s only natural that my clients are struggling to adapt to whatever change they want to make, since their brain is using a lot more energy during the experience. It feels uneasy, uncanny, not natural, tiresome, and so on. And it will continue to feel that way, at least for a while.
The good news is that your brain slowly starts to ignore some of the brain signals. Because, when you keep executing your new routine, those changes are becoming normal. The feeling of that motor bike tilting and the fear of slipping away? Normal and unnecessary, the brain has learned after a couple of rides. Or the feeling of restriction one of my clients felt when he first started using a time boxing technique? It quickly turned into a gentle sense of pressure, that helped him focus and increase his productivity.
The trick is not to let that feeling push you away from what you are trying to achieve.
Same feeling, different interpretation
In fact, at some point during the process of change, your brain starts reinterpreting all those signals. Some will be ignored and others will receive a different tag. It will change from a negative one (new and potentially dangerous) to neutral (this is annoying but might help me) and then, hopefully, a positive one (this will help me).
The trick is not to let the initial connotation, the negative one, push you away from what you are trying to achieve. Just keep going, keep doing what you need to do, and it will get easier. Your brain will start processing those signals in a different way, get used to them and then either ignore them or turn them in something helpful. The simple fact of knowing that this will happen eventually, has helped many of my clients to overcome their obstacles. It facilitated their change, even before they started changing anything.
Just like it helped me overcome my fear of getting on the back of that bike.