Why we can’t manage without habits
Would you like to be more conscious, more aware, more with it? Would you like to be able to transcend your present limitations?
Then you need habits.
Imagine you had no habits. Imagine that, despite having no habits, you wanted to bend a finger. Nothing complicated, you just want to bend a finger. How would you do it?
You’d have to wiggle your limbs in a random manner trying to find out how to bend the finger. Gradually, you could gain a little awareness and control of your muscles. You could begin exploring what each of your muscles does. Eventually, you could learn how to combine those separate muscle actions well enough to wiggle all your fingers together. (Bending just one finger would then be a whole new challenge).
You’d also have to learn how to move your eyes so you could look at your hand. Then you’d have to learn how to focus your eyes.
When did you learn to do all that?
A new-born baby has no habits
You had to learn all these things when you were a baby. As a new-born baby, you hadn’t yet developed any habits. You had to learn how to focus and move your eyes; you had to learn how to bend your fingers.
Only when you had learnt these basics could you gradually move on to more and more complicated tasks. Eventually, you learnt to roll over, to sit up, to stand, to walk. And then the world was your oyster — but you still had to learn every single new skill you needed. Even now, when you need a new skill, you still have to learn it.
Each skill is a set of habits, a learnt set of automatic patterns.
Habits are our autopilot
Anything you can do, you can do automatically, simply relying on the habits that you’ve built up. Otherwise, you have to pay attention to every detail of what you haven’t yet learnt how to do.
That means you can’t do two new things at the same time. Each new skill has to occupy your whole attention. (Like President Ford being unable to walk and chew gum both at the same time. Yes, I know that story’s a myth but you get the idea, don’t you?)
Well-tuned habits are indispensable.
Then why do habits get a bad press?
Being so totally indispensable is also why habits get a bad press.
Huh?
Being always there in everything we do, we take our well-tuned habits for granted. We fail to recognise them. Some people even deny their existence.
It’s only when things go wrong (because a habit is badly-tuned and mal-functioning) that we notice it. We then blame the bad habit — and quite rightly, too.
Bad habits are a serious problem. They limit what we can do and how well we can do it. Getting rid of those bad habits is a major undertaking. If we don’t go about it in the right way, it can become a nightmare — a nightmare that usually ends in abject failure.
But that’s only true for badly-tuned habits. Forgetting our necessary dependence on well-tuned habits, we glibly demonise all habits. As we struggle to become more and more conscious, it’s tempting to think of habits as the antithesis of conscious awareness.
Does becoming more conscious mean discarding habits?
It’s easy to imagine that developing greater conscious awareness would be a process of uprooting all habits. After all, habits are, by definition, automatic and unconscious.
The reality is different. True, our learning processes should be as conscious as we can make them. Learning is much quicker and sharper when we apply the full power of our conscious awareness to the task. But we forget that learning is actually the process of developing new habits. We forget that we need to relegate what we have already learnt to habit in order to free up our conscious attention for learning new things.
Once we have freed up our conscious attention, we can then use that attention for whatever we want. We can even use it to transcend our present limitations, limitations imposed by our existing imperfect habits.
The other articles in this category are here:‒
Personal Coaching by Philip Pawley
If you want to get the best kind of help, come to me for an introductory lesson in Liverpool.
If you’re too far away, then the next best thing is to get personal lessons and advice from me online at Repoise.com, my on-line school. (Both far-away and local pupils use Repoise).
In more detail:–
If you’re in Liverpool (or can get to Liverpool)
- There’s nothing better than individual lessons. My practice is at 37 Hope Street, Liverpool L1. Ring me on 0151 708 6172 to book an initial consultation and first lesson. (Leave your number so I can get back to you).
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If you’re short of funds, you can still have first class training from me — though it will require a little more work on your part.
The thing to do is have an individual, in-person lesson just once a month. That will entitle you to also get regular on-line lessons from me through Repoise. That way, you have the best of both worlds: in-person lessons and very regular, even daily, on-line Personal Coaching by Philip Pawley from me. That’s a real bargain because Repoise costs the equivalent of three lessons a year to everyone else.
Ring me on 0151 708 6172 if you want to arrange this.
- I occasionally run group lessons. If you’re interested in these, go here for details.
If you’re further away and can’t get to Liverpool
- There’s still nothing better than individual lessons. Here’s where you can find a teacher near you in the UK or elsewhere
- I suggest you also get direct day-to-day guidance from me by joining Repoise.
If you’re having plain Alexander Technique lessons from someone else, you still need to discover the Smiling Back Method of the Alexander Technique. You’ll get a lot more out of your lessons when you do.
37 Hope Street, Liverpool, Merseyside L1 9EA, England
Telephone: +44 151 708 6172 Mobile: +44 7872 905 154
Copyright © 2007-2012 Philip Pawley
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