CTRL-ALT-DELETE for the nervous system

One of my clients asked the other day, "Isn't there a ctrl-alt-delete function for the nervous system?"

Remember this error message? I've been in situations myself where I wanted a reset button. We are always impacted by new information, and we're always doing something with it so we might as well be aware of what that is. After all, we learned how to respond to the world once, we can learn it again.

However, we cannot re-learn by telling ourselves off.

Many years ago, I became interested in Non-violent Communication as developed by Marshall Rosenberg. An important aspect of NVC is that you make requests of others, not demands. It is the same with the nervous system: requests work better than demands. You might have heard me say, just a few hundred times, that the nervous system does not learn if you are mean to it. Hence, if you tell yourself, "Sit up straight!" it is doomed to fail, because it not only relies on your attention span, which is limited, it also relies on telling yourself off, which is a demand.

A Better Way

Demanding a correction doesn't foster movement intelligence. You can correct your biomechanics all day long and still move poorly, painfully, and inefficiently, given how you're directing your motor control from the inside. I've seen people stand up gorgeously tall and straight, all the while in a raging inner fight with themselves to hold it together, both muscularly and emotionally. But they sure look good!

A better way is to self-organize rather than self-correct.

When we correct ourselves, we know intellectually what we "should" do, and we do it by force of will. Yes, this might lead to more conscious control over our mechanics, but its value is limited inasmuch as our conscious attention is limited.

Consider developing options instead of telling yourself off. Your innate kinesthetic sense, your natural ability to self-organize, and your very smart sensory-motor cortex all help you adapt to external conditions. Your cognitive brain, not so much. Best to train extensively in creating more movement options, then get out of your own way and quit telling yourself off.

When you have a broader movement repertoire, it's like having more clothes in your closet: you can navigate with ease from your known patterns into unknown situations by choosing a different outfit. Applying correction and control just forces us deeper into our habits, neuroses, and limits. All it takes to reset our response to the world is to create more options, find new pathways, take novel roads, and restructure our perception of possibilities. It's like having a million more mix-and-match outfits.

Ctrl-alt-delete sounds simple, but it takes time. I recently watched a cool video on "how to be great at anything in three easy steps," and the presenter said:

Learn the fundamentals
Be willing to accept criticism
Put in your 10,000 hours

That's all.