Old Dogs CAN Learn New Tricks

When we choose to engage in the process of adaptability — pause, reflect, and make a change—we are doing so to better respond to what’s happening in our lives right now,
so we can move forward consciously, with less automation.

It’s remarkable how adaptable we are, isn’t it? I think we sometimes forget that capacity within ourselves, until something like this happens. And like this I mean, something big enough to cause a re-evaluation of life, whether it’s a worldwide event or a very personal event in our lives. We’ve all said this and heard it said: “Well that’s just the way I am!" Whether it’s about our character or habits or bodies, we so oftentimes believe we are unchangeable. Born a certain way or too ingrained in our ways to change. Old dogs. Yet, here we are, with a life-altering event upon us, and we ALL have been forced to adapt. The words might be used interchangeably, but there’s a distinct and substantial difference between the words change and adapt. When we think about changing who we are, there is an undertone of loss, un-doing, irreversibility, letting go of something we deeply identify with whether it’s good or bad. While adapting may involve some of those things for sure, the word itself connotes something more uplifting — a shift, an adjustment, a resiliency, a way forward. 

A few months ago, I wrote a post about our environment and how it affects our lives. So many of our daily actions are actually not conscious decisions as we may give ourselves credit for, but automated actions as a response to our environment. For example, we think we’re choosing to buy that croissant and coffee every morning on our way to work because we simply just want a croissant and coffee. But actually, we’re especially drawn to it and likely to take action on it because: 

1. It’s easier than making coffee at home because our kitchen in our small New York City apartment is too small to have a coffee machine so we have a drip filter but that takes an extra 10 minutes to make.
2. It’s on our walk to the train station so we see it every morning.
3. We hate everything about waking up early yet our job requires it, so it’s something to look forward to.  

These subtle cues in our environment are regularly operating on an oftentimes subconscious level but guiding us all the same.

There’s an interesting flip side to this coin. Because we think we are actively making these daily decisions that dictate the course of our day and lives, and yet we oftentimes struggle to change these daily decisions even when we think it might be good for us, we solve this conundrum by assuming that “that’s just the way we are.” For example, let’s say pre-COVID you complained to a friend about not having enough money. Your friend suggested, “Hey maybe you should try cooking at home more to save money.” You give it a go and can’t seem to get into it. It feels cumbersome, uninspiring, time consuming. You return to your friend and say, “Yeah, I can’t get into cooking, I just don’t like it.” But actually, here’s why you don’t cook. It’s less effort to eat out and you have a stressful job that requires a lot of effort-ing already, you like the social aspect of eating out, you’re constantly reading about new restaurants opening up and you’re excited to try new things. These are environmental components to your day that dictate your decision, however, you don’t notice them. You assume that you’re unchangeable, that not liking cooking is part of your personality which is why you actively choose to eat out regularly. Enter the pandemic. These components have now changed in our new world. And guess what happened?  You now have the headspace to learn something new, you enjoy taking a break from sitting in your living room all day, and you’ve started a ritual of listening to your favorite jazz and enjoying a bottle of wine while you test a new recipe. Your preference for cooking has changed, which means it actually wasn’t a personality trait. You could have given yourself a chance to like cooking pre-pandemic had you noticed the environmental components of your life that were getting in the way and worked to change them. 

So, it’s this fascinating paradigm where we simultaneously believe we’re conscious, active participants in our day to day habits, and that we are set in our born-and-bred ways. We are wrong on both counts. 

The beauty of this pandemic lies in the way we have been forced to evaluate, to notice, to become aware. Our environmental influences are so obvious now that they’ve all disappeared at once.  Life will return to some kind of normal eventually, but that doesn’t mean we have to succumb to things as they were and I genuinely hope we don’t. This is the golden opportunity to actively, consciously dictate our environment instead of allow our environment to dictate us.  Adaptation occurs the moment we choose to be conscious and make decisions to change our habits to better our lives. The moment we choose to pay attention, we become the actual active participants we thought we were all along. A lot of us are spending a whole lot less money, realizing we don’t need half the stuff we buy. Our hygiene routines have shifted as we shower at different times of day (or don’t shower at all . . . ). Our meal times/types may’ve shifted with less takeout options and no dine-in options. Our preferred form of exercise may have changed as we realize all of a sudden we love running or we actually only enjoyed spinning because of the music and the high energy instructor. All of these are changes we’ve made to survive well in this new environment. We’ve adapted. So, you are an old dog very capable of learning new tricks. 

What does this have to do with our moving bodies?  James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, discusses that awareness is the first step in adapting—i.e.modifying our behavior to better suit our current needs. (I wrote a blog about that too, you can read it here.) We have to notice what it is we’re doing before we can go about making changes. He’s referring to daily activities.  Interestingly, the same awareness prerequisite exists when working to change a movement pattern within our bodies. We have to notice/feel/become aware of what we’re already doing, or not doing, in order to create an effective change. 

You may notice things about your body now, that it’s not moving in the same way it’s been habitually moving for however many weeks, months, or years now. What changes do you notice? What pains have crept in and which pains have actually disappeared? Which routines are challenging to maintain and which ones are easier? Which new physical habits have you developed that feel like good ones, and which ones would you like to get rid of before they cement into place? How can you carry the good ones into your life as we move forward? 

keep moving.