The Winding Path

A little discussion has been going on over at two blogs that I recently came across, on the topic of “thinking outside the box”. Dawud Miracle prompted the discussion by asking "Are You Thinking Outside The Box?" Alex Shalman responded by considering a slightly different question, "Can You Handle Yourself Outside The Box?"

As if that weren’t enough, it became even more interesting when Dawud responded by re-framing the topic with this explanation of why you’ll never get out of the box.

I started to reply to both Dawud and Alex in their comments, but I quickly saw that each reply would become too lengthy and repetitive, so I’ve combined them here.

In Dawud’s first post he wrote about being outside the box himself, and about seeing the box “not as a prison, but as a container”.

…once I was outside the box, I was free. I could run, dance, play all I wanted. There were no boundaries, only wide-open spaces. No responsibilities, no deadlines, and no structure. Just unabated freedom.

…

After a short time, however, I got board [sic]. I started looking back at the box. I moved slowly toward it. And when I got near, I peered inside. I realized the box wasn’t that bad. It provided structure and boundaries that made me productive. It also gave me sense of purpose since I was responsible for my clients, my family, myself.

Dawud seems to be referring to the boundaries to experience set up by our self- and society-imposed limitations. The message he seemed to try to convey was that those limitations can be good, helping us in our daily activities and relationships.

Alex took that a step further. By asking “What philosophy could we adopt in order to remain as out of the box thinkers?” he was effectively asking how to continue to think in ways which didn’t consider those limits to be static.

However, I do think Alex may have been a little off the track Dawud was following by referring to the box as a comfort zone:

We’ll define the box as a structured, confined, habitual environment that offers security and comfort. Within this realm of thought, you live each day as the day before, you work towards an established goal, by doing what you did before. Besides for the confinement aspect, this doesn’t seem to be too bad of a deal. Well, maybe not.

One way of thinking will lead you to the conclusion that staying within your box, and your comfort zone will not only prevent you from growing, but prevent you from discovering new ideas. Dawud gets that “you have to think outside your norms to find change.� However, he still takes comfort in being within the box.

Dawud’s depiction of the box was as something which provided structure, but also guidance and purpose. Not necessarily comfort. However, I can understand why Alex would define the box that way. That’s how many people treat their regular patterns of thought; as a way of ensuring their own self-protection. They stay in the comfortable familiar realm of routine because it’s easy. Thinking outside the box requires effort.

Nonetheless it seems Alex and Dawud both used the box metaphor as an abstraction of our approach to our common attitude towards life and growth. Alex acknowledged and then moved beyond inside-the-box thinking, instead focusing on growth (remaining as “outside the box” thinkers). Dawud did exactly the same by acknowledging that growth requires noting our limits and striving to stretch them (expanding the walls of the box).

In Dawud’s second post, commenter Quint said Dawud was making too much of the “outside the box” metaphor, which I agree with. If you’ve read my previous post you may see the parallels between what I wrote, and the concept of acknowledging our limits and striving to stretch them. That’s what personal growth is about.

So in summary, there are limits, they are self-imposed (whether they come from within or from society or our environment, as long as we maintain them they’re self-imposed) and if we want to grow we must (and can) stretch them.

Related entries:

• How to achieve maximum personal growth
• Changing Beliefs: Instantaneous or Gradual?
• The Science Behind Change: A Beginner’s Guide

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Recently Jenny and Erin, in their ongoing quest for understanding, announced a contest aimed at growing the personal development community. I think that growth will happen in at least two ways, both by increasing our awareness of just who is in the community (and encouraging discussion), but also by helping each of us to grow individually. And I suspect the questions they posed were designed to do exactly that. Here are my responses:

“How big of a role do habits play in your daily life?”

Some people may think of habits as simply something like smoking, or drinking; those bad habits which we want to change but don’t seem to be able to.

But as Bill mentioned, habits are a massive part of our daily lives. As I sit here typing these are the habits I’ve identified in the last five minutes or so:

1. My typing. The actions of my fingers are habitual.
2. My posture. I sit in my seat as I always do without much thought to what I’m doing.
3. Shifting my posture slightly once in a while
4. Gazing briefly out the window. I do this whenever I stop to think, mainly for the sake of my eyes’ health.
5. Clasping my hands when I pause to think for a longer period.
6. My gaze following the cursor as I type.
7. My slow, restful breathing.
8. Tuning out the conversation around me. I habitually don’t pay much attention to conversation that doesn’t include me, but I habitually do remain alert to any mention of my name.
9. Taking a sip of tea (green tea with vanilla. Delicious!)

Nine easily identified habits. Five minutes. You do the math.

And that’s without going into the habits involved in actually doing the work, which, if it were paid work that I had trouble with, I have no doubt I’d find aid in Michelle’s steps, or in some of the tools Jean mentioned.

“Do your habits typically form intentionally or unconsciously?”

On the surface it seems a simple question with a simple answer. Both. We do some things repeatedly by choice or because we have to (which, in effect, is a choice to abide by the rules). We might choose to smoke cigarettes and eventually it becomes a habit. Or we might have to answer emails every day as part of our job, and over time they also become habitual.

But we might also have some habits which seem unconscious, and which we don’t really think of as forming intentionally either. This is most obvious with activities which seem instinctive. Take catching a ball as an example. Most people wouldn’t have to think about what to do if they see a ball flying towards their head. They get out of the way (or if you’re a sportsperson involved in ball games you might catch the ball instead. Or if you’re a martial arts expert you might pull off a spinning backflip, with your foot connecting with the ball right at the apex of your flip, sending the ball flying right back from whence it came).

But as we’re forming that habit we do need to make a conscious decision to act. When you’re a child if you were at all like me you probably got hit by a ball many times before you learnt to either catch it or get out of the way.

In other words, even if we’re unaware that our actions are forming habits, through our repeated, conscious choices that’s exactly what we’re doing.

“What approaches have you found successful in shaping them?”

My greatest successes in shaping habits have been through motivated repetition. This is similar to what John said about having power behind your efforts at making a change. Quite simply this involves doing whatever I can to make a repeated action enjoyable. This could even include disrupting part of the routine, such as varying the specific exercises during a daily yoga set. This means it takes longer for specific exercises/postures to becoming habitual, but it also means the habit of actually doing yoga on a daily basis is formed more easily, because the variety keeps it interesting (incidentally, going back to uni has caused the big changes in my daily routine, and that has still managed to disrupt that particular habit, much to my annoyance. Thankfully with my major assignments out of the way I can allow the habit to re-establish itself).

Motivated repetition is also helpful in changing a habit. I’m not much of a chef so I used to eat whatever was easiest. It got to the point where I’d stop trying to decide what to eat, I’d simply choose the same thing again and again. This would invariably mean pasta and a jar of pre-made sauce. Good quality sauce, but nonetheless pre-made and full of preservatives and nothing fresh.

Eventually I decided, for a variety of reasons, that this just wasn’t good enough. Yet since I didn’t have any interest in cooking it was difficult to make myself learn about what was good and what wasn’t, even though I was already aware of the impact poor diet could have. I used variety again to try to help motivate myself a little, and it did help, but I stumbled upon a greater motivating factor when I started cooking with a couple of housemates after moving into their house a couple of years ago. Cooking with others, and seeing them enjoy eating it, really made the whole thing fun. (incidentally I still like pasta, just with many more fresh ingredients)

Unfortunately now that I’m on my own again I don’t care so much, but I still prefer cooking for others, and I still like to try new recipes, and I still buy healthful foods.

As Jason pointed out, removing a habit is hard because whatever prompts us to perform a habit will continue to prompt us despite our efforts to stop it. It’s far more effective to redirect the stimulus towards a more desirable behaviour. Jason covers this fantastically, so I’ll leave it that after mentioning that neuroscience, particularly the work of Ann Graybiel, is showing what’s happening within the brain when we form habits, and why those neural changes make it so difficult to change those habits.