What new anything did you do for the first time in the past week? Not much, probably. Brain based success nudges us into the flexibility it takes to begin again … and again… Yes, even when the brain protests! How so?
In spite of our need to shift it up, our brains come primed to keep us doing the same thing in the same stubborn way. The world changes around us, but our brains rarely catch up, unless we do some familiar thing, in an about-face or unfamiliar way.
Not that it’s easy to take a new approach, or begin something again from scratch. Take physical fitness. As an avid golfer, I started to bowl as an active way to survive Edmonton’s endless winter months. My first game landed me with a broken foot after a heavy ball landed on it. My bowling team still practices patience when my errand balls head off down the lane as if torn apart with indecision about where to go.
Check out below, the ease related to operating your brain’s basal ganglia storage and retrieval equipment with familiar skills and habits, compared to the discomfort and difficulty of engaging working memory for navigating newly learned skills.
It’s all about choice! Begin again in better ways or settle for stagnation.
Recently, I decided that perhaps pickleball may be a better option for my fitness fun. So I joined a drop-in team at a nearby community center, and attempted to apply pickleball rules I’d studied ahead on YouTube. I crammed all the pickleball moves that resemble tennis, badminton, and ping-pong, into my tiny working memory capacity, and then tried to hit balls over the net. The result?
After returning a few lucky shots into valid zones, I stumbled over a damp patch and face-planted onto the gym floor. Luckily, the only thing hurt was my pride. The fall, however, added to my determination to begin fitness again, in a way that masters fun and activity on cold days.
It’s not just sports that we change up in the interest of gaining brainpower. Unlike me you may already rock at most sports. Perhaps you could use a mind-lift in another domain. Either way, beginning again means we head back to pre-kindergarden to develop new skills that arouse less used mental equipment. How does it work?
Let’s say you like to write, and may even be a talented author or columnist folks flock to daily to read your latest gems. Here are eight different domains that could offer you a choice for new starting places in the interest of optimizing less-used mental equipment. Think of these domains as different castle towers through which you view new angles of your writing topics.
What would it take to start something familiar again today in another way that inspires others to do the same?
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Practical Guides Created by Ellen Weber, Brain Based Tasks for Growth Mindset