Creatures of habit

Habits are interesting things. In one sense, they serve us - everyday life is full of repetitive tasks and if we had to think about how to do each and every thing we need to do each day, life would soon be exhausting. Instead, routine tasks become habitual, and taken together, all our habits make up how we do things and also how we think about things.

There is an interesting psychological model relating to the acquisition of any physical skill, that I’ve found helpful as a teacher of kobudo. It states that we move through four states of learning on the way to competence. These stages are:

Unconscious incompetence
The individual neither understands or knows how to do something, nor recognizes the deficit or has a desire to address it. “We don’t know that we don’t know how to do something.”

Conscious incompetence
Though the individual does not understand or know how to do something, he or she does recognize the deficit, without yet addressing it. “We know that we don’t know how to do something.”

Conscious competence
The individual understands or knows how to do something. However, demonstrating the skill or knowledge requires a great deal of consciousness or concentration. “We know how to do something, but we have to think about it.”

Unconscious competence
The individual has had so much practice with a skill that it becomes "second nature" and can be performed easily (often without concentrating too deeply). He or she can also teach it to others. “We can do something so well, we no longer have to think about it.”

At one stage we had to think deeply and concentrate hard to complete extremely simple tasks which we now take completely for granted. Putting one foot in front of the other and learning to walk once occupied every waking moment of our lives, but as adults the only time we are ever aware of how we walk is if we acquire an injury that draws our attention to it.

Many life skills acquired since childhood required similar thought at one point, but once we learn fully how to do something, we no longer need to think quite so deeply about it and soon we do it as a matter of course, we do it habitually.

We settle into a preferred way of doing things, and usually think no more about it. It becomes a matter of convenience to find this path that suits us and then keep doing whatever it allows us to do in the way we have always done it.. But soon, the path we tread becomes a trench, and the trench a canyon, the walls on either side of us rise out of sight and it can seem impossible to break free of the path we’ve fallen into the habitual practice of using. It can imprison us.

But there is something enormously liberating to be found in original thought and movement. I believe it’s important to challenge habits, and in a similar vein, assumptions we make about how the world works. It’s painfully obvious when you meet or see people engaging in habitual behaviour, that often it doesn’t actually serve them anymore, if in fact it ever did. Obviously, I’m speaking obliquely and without the use of examples, but I’m sure people can probably think of situations and examples that illustrate the point from their point of view.

So, go do something today you’ve never done before. Preferably something that terrifies you.