Humans are great at spotting patterns, but we also have blind spots. I recently took up playing online chess and this is a great example of this paradox. My father taught me to play chess as a child and I played in the chess club at school, but apart from one time when I played my then-girlfriend while at university (she had played for England and made short work of my naïve attacks!) I don’t think I have played in more than 40 years.
So I am not quite a complete noob, but not far off it. I am gradually improving but still pretty woeful and make some really bad moves at times. A big part of chess is pattern recognition and sometimes I will see a pattern and exploit it, but other times I will completely miss a pattern and blunder a piece, leaving my poor bishops and knights in peril.
Before I was a life coach, I coached senior leaders in global companies and witnessed this phenomenon all the time. There were some very obvious patterns that I would see that the leadership of the business would be oblivious to. This is not because I have some pattern-recognition superpower, but because I was used to seeing the patterns repeat themselves in different business contexts. Many of these patterns were caused by fundamental assumptions about the design and management of work that the leadership made, but that led to poor performance and unnecessary costs.
These were assumptions such as ‘we need targets to motivate our people’. In almost every case, this assumption led to people gaming the system and delivering poor customer service at a higher cost than was necessary.
What I would teach the leadership was that the way to understand and challenge these assumptions was through something Chris Argyris called double-loop learning[i]. Single-loop learning is where you look at a process and make it better, while double-loop learning is when you challenge the fundamental assumptions about the process by asking questions like, ‘Do we need to do this at all?’ or ‘Is there a completely different way of doing this that would work better for our customers?’.
When I trained to become a This Naked Mind Certified Coach, I found that there was a striking parallel between organisations and individuals. We all navigate life according to some assumptions beliefs and judgments about the world that are, very often, invisible to us. Just as the way to improve a business is to expose and challenge its assumptions and beliefs, the same holds for us if we want change in our personal lives.
When it comes to alcohol, some of those beliefs might be, for example, ‘I need alcohol to relax at the end of the day’ or ‘I need alcohol to have fun with friends’. What I encourage my clients to do is to get curious about those beliefs and see if they are true in every way.
So, to take the belief about relaxation, you might ask yourself if alcohol has relaxed you the following day when you wake up with a thumping headache and regret drunk-texting your ex, or any other of the shenanigans that drinking typically leads to! You might also look at the science and understand that regular alcohol use increases the production of cortisol, which creates a permanent low level of stress, or that the brain releases dynorphin as a response to alcohol, which creates feelings of dysphoria, which is anything but relaxing.
When you see the whole picture about alcohol and stress, you understand that there is a short-term benefit but a medium and long-term cost and you can change your belief about alcohol and stress to reflect that.
Part of the value of coaching is that we can help our clients spot these patterns and blind spots. We are not telling our clients what to think, but rather creating the space for them to work things out for themselves. Of course, this does not just apply to thoughts and beliefs about alcohol—we all have blind spots about many of the patterns and beliefs in our lives and helping to create awareness of these opens the door for a more fulfilling, peaceful and happy life. Just as a professional sportsperson relies on their coach to identify their blind spots, we can all benefit from an outside perspective to help us see our own and recognise patterns in our behaviour that don’t serve us.
Now you might think that just thinking a new thought or looking at something in a different way is only a temporary shift in perspective. However, the cool thing about the human brain is that it adapts to new thoughts by making new physical structures. This process, known as neuroplasticity, means that when you have been seeing things from a new perspective for as little as a few days, new neural connections are formed and the new way of thinking becomes the default. So you can create a virtuous circle of changing your perspective, which re-wires your brain, which in turn makes it more likely that the perspective will shift permanently, or at least until you make a conscious effort to change it again.
So, if I keep at it, my chess game will continue to improve just as my perspective on alcohol has shifted. This has to be good news for my blood pressure!
[i] Argyris, Chris (1977) Double Loop Learning in Organisations. Harvard Business Review, Sept. 1977
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