I love learning new things. Right now, it’s driving on the left side of the road. It’s trickier than I thought because I kept avoiding it for such a long time, but it’s very rewarding. When you start, it’s difficult and ‘foreign.’ Then, for the first time, you succeed. But then you fail again, succeed, fail, and so on until it becomes automatic and you master the new skill at some point. It’s that ‘I can ride a bike!’ moment. You don’t need to focus anymore. Suddenly, you can think of something else or talk to someone. For example, at the end of my 2-hour driving session, I was having a comfortable conversation with my driving instructor without mixing up the windscreen wiper and the indicator.

Another recent learning journey is kitesurfing, and I’m still learning. I’ve never done any kind of wind or board sports before, and I have to learn everything at once and from scratch. Control the kite, make sure your way is clear and safe, position your legs, lean back and, and, and. My last kitesurf teacher corrected a lot of the ‘mistakes’ I picked up during my first kitesurf experience. The wrong moves were about to become automatic, but it was still very early in my journey, and after some trials, I was able to switch to the new moves. I got rewarded with surfing smoothly on the water. Then I freaked out about the speed and fell. A classic, but I’m making progress.

Both experiences make me think of two things: the video ‘The Backwards Brain Bicycle’ about re-learning how to ride your bike by Destin Sandlin and the book ‘Power of Habit‘ by Charles Duhigg. 

The quite entertaining video explains how it is much more challenging to re-learn something when it becomes deeply ingrained compared to the recent learnings of a child. It takes much longer, and you will still have that old way of doing things somewhere in your mind. 

The book talks about the habit loop – cue, routine, reward – and gives you a step-by-step guide to changing your habit. Essentially, you have to attack the ‘routine,’ but to do so, you need to understand your cues and the rewards very clearly. Or, if you want to build a new habit, you need to create those cues and rewards to be successful. I am reading the book for the second time and am once again surprised by how good it is. 

In my recent kitesurfing experience, I was still in the process of learning something new but was already building on a little bit of experience. Habits were forming, but they were weak (since very recent), and I did not experience a reward yet. Change was easy.

In real life, it’s often more difficult to achieve a change. Especially as we notice ‘bad habits’ usually only when they start really bothering us, which means it’s not in the ‘learning’ phase anymore.

I decided to trick myself. I will see each ‘bad habit’ not as a change effort. Instead, as learning a new way of doing things. I love learning new things, right? Then, instead of feeling like I am failing when I fall back into old routines and do not succeed in the new ones, I will just look forward to the next opportunity when I can practice the new way of doing things again. 

By the way, another learning: save yourself some time and effort: aim for a high ‘first-time-right’ ratio and don’t develop ‘bad routines.’ And train driving on both sides of the road early, don’t wait 10+ years.  

What is your strategy to make change happen? 

Take care, 
Katia