photo credit: columbialifechurch

What little change can you make today?

In last week’s post, Play It Again, Sam, I talked about using habits to help maintain a good mood when dealing with the frustrations that we face every day.  Because I’ve been there too, I know that creating new habits is hard work.  Now, there is an explanation of how the function of learning works in our brains.  In the past what I’d learned was that when we repeated a behavior it carved a path in our brain.  The more often we repeated the behavior, the deeper the path, until finally you had a rut – maybe a really deep rut.  For good habits, this was really good.  For bad habits, this wasn’t so good because it took forever to develop a new habit rut that was deeper than the old habit.

In The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle, he discusses the new information that has been developed on how we learn new skills.  This new information focuses on successful people and how they get to be that way.  In the US we have what I call the Great American Myth… a young person is born with talent and with the passage of time talent overcomes all obstacles and the talented person becomes an “instant success.”  The Talent Code explodes that myth.

There is good news and bad news in this.  No longer can we bemoan the fact that we just didn’t have the talent to be a… (fill in the blank)  We can now understand and accept that if at first you don’t succeed, work harder.

Persist.  That’s the bad news.  No excuses.

The Good News

We know that if we work at something, we can succeed.  There are no hidden talent genes that you missed because you were behind the door when God was passing them out.

When I was a really small kid, I was told that I took after my mom and she was uncoordinated and had never succeed in sports and neither could I.   Even when I did well playing softball, nothing changed.  My parents accepted – and more importantly – I accepted that I was no good at sports.  Because it was an accepted “fact”, nobody actually took time to teach me how to hit, or throw, or catch.  It became a self-fulfilling prophecy.  No instruction and no practice resulted in no skill growth.  My skill level quickly fell behind the other kids my age.

The thing is that learning resilience skills is no different from learning how to play softball.  We tend to believe that if you’re good at something, it will come “naturally” and if you’re not good, there’s no point in trying.  This myth does us a great dis-service.  “Girls aren’t good at math.”  “Italians/Irish/Hispanics aren’t smart enough to be doctors/lawyers/Supreme Court justices.”  When we ascribe talent to genes as opposed to the willingness to work and improve our skills, we have the perfect excuse for quitting.

Just Plain Stubborn

There are those who know me and would say that I am just plain stubborn (or too dumb to know when to quit.)  I prefer to view it as persistence – it sounds so much better.  And for me there is one big difference: persistence is continuing to pursue a goal even though you fail along the way.  The good news is this kind of stubbornness or persistence is how we learn.

The latest brain research points to myelin as being the key to learning.  As we consciously repeat the actions needed to learn a skill, more myelin is deposited around the nerve cells in our brains.  It is similar to insulating electrical wires.  The more myelin deposited, the better the conductivity of the nerve cells and the better our performance.  There’s just one little catch… we learn best when we fail along the way and solve the problem about how to succeed.  Honest.  (Read or listen to The Talent Code if you think I’m nuts.)

So, here’s the bottom line.  Persist.  Persist in developing those resilience skills.  Had a bad day today?  When did it go bad? (I know – when you got out of bed this morning.)  But seriously, what could you have done to either change how it went bad or to convert it to only half a bad day?  Or a quarter of a bad day?

What can you do tomorrow to make it a better day?  How can you catch yourself earlier in the process and consciously choose to make it better?

Don’t try to make HUGE changes.  Make conscious little changes, adjustments really, to how you deal with disappointment, frustration, difficult people.  As you practice these changes, new layers of myelin will insulate those nerve cells and you’ll get  better conductivity of the nerve cells and that means stronger resilience skills are building and you are more resilient.  Try, fail, adjust, try again.  Those are the steps that lead to improved resilience and better days.