Blog - Page 17 of 23 - Activate You

Does Working Harder Really Work?

According to the BBC, Greece is being asked by its Eurozone creditors to increase the working week to six days. Musicians routinely play a kind of workaholic one-upmanship about how many hours they practice each day. Children seem to be given increasingly large amounts of homework to do.

The world seems to believe that the way to achieve more is to work harder. By which they mean: work for longer. But does this really work? If you increase the number of hours you spend at a task, will you really be more effective?

Of course, it depends on what you are actually doing in all those extra hours. FM Alexander was once confronted by a pupil who insisted that, even if the activity was wrong, it was better to exert oneself and try hard than not to try at all. Alexander countered by suggesting that ‘trying hard’ in the wrong direction was still going in the wrong direction. He said that

It is not the degree of “willing” or “trying,” but the way in which the energy is directed, that is going to make the “willing” or “trying” effective.*

In other words, it really doesn’t matter how fast you are driving if you are on the wrong road. It doesn’t matter how many times a musician plays a semi quaver passage if they’re getting it wrong every time. It doesn’t matter how many hours you spend at your desk if you don’t have a clear idea of what work you should be doing.

This is the strategy I’m using in my recorder practice sessions, and I think it could be useful in other places too.

Decide what it is you want to achieve.
Decide on the easiest way to achieve it.
Do what you’ve decided is best.
Stop.

Once you’ve become proficient at setting goals and achieving them, you can increase the number of tasks and the number of hours worked. But in the beginning, go for quality instead of quantity. And don’t forget to let me know how you get on!

* FM Alexander, The Use of the Self, IRDEAT edition, p.440.
Image by ddpavumba from FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Communication breakdown: why what you say (and how) matters

I’ve started lately to be (even more) picky with the language my students use. My student will say “Of course, the computer makes me slump,” and I will counter by saying “That naughty computer! It must be very clever to make you do anything. Are you sure it was the computer?” At which point they will relent and agree that they chose to slump at the computer.

Or my student might say, “my shoulders like to come forward.” After some gentle ribbing from me, the student will eventually change their statement to “I like to bring my shoulders forward.”

You see? Picky.

So why does it matter how my students talk about their issues?

It’s a question of responsibility.

If the computer is doing it to you, the only way you can fix it is to change the computer. But that involves time and expense, and if it’s a work computer, it may simply not be possible. And what if the next computer is just as bad?

If your kids make you cross and that causes your headache, then you will have to wait for the kids to change. Again, that could be a long time coming!

The first and most vital step on FM Alexander’s journey was that issue of self-responsibility, when after he had ruled out all medical causes for his throat trouble, he asked if it was something he was doing while using his voice that was the cause of the trouble.*

It’s not the computer, it’s how you use it.

It’s not the kids, it’s how you decide to react to them.

It’s not your shoulders, it’s how you choose to use them in activity.

An experiment.

This week, try this experiment for me. See how many times you can catch yourself handing away your responsibility for yourself with the way you frame your speech. Can you change the way you talk? Can you change the way you think?

* FM Alexander, The Use of the Self in the Irdeat Complete Edition, p.412.
Image by renjith krishnan from FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Tennis lessons – why being rubbish at something is all-important

When I decided to take my Youngster out to buy him something as a reward for a really good school report, I didn’t expect him to choose a tennis racquet. But he did.

And then I didn’t expect his enthusiasm for it to last beyond a couple of days.

But it did.

So a trip to a charity shop later, we have two racquets, and have been out to our local park every day to hit a tennis ball around. Every day. For at least an hour.

I was terrible at tennis at school – couldn’t even get the ball and racquet to connect – so was a bit apprehensive about playing, especially when the Youngster demonstrated that he was able to hit the ball very effectively from the off.

But the outcome of nearly two weeks of going to the park has led me to a surprising discovery. Tennis is fun, even if you’re terrible at it. Why is this a surprise? Well, it all comes down to rules.

Rules, rules, rules

The rules we make about an activity materially affect the way we will approach it, and will determine how much fun we have. Like a lot of people, as a young person I took on board the view that being good at an activity was all-important, and that if I couldn’t be good at it immediately, I should give it up.* FM Alexander comments that students will have had this attitude instilled into them by teachers from their earliest days, and that

He will have been told that, if he is conscientious, he will always try to be right, not wrong, so that this desire to “be right” will have become an obsession in which, as in so many other matters, his conscience must be satisfied.**

I gave up a lot of stuff, and didn’t even try a whole load of things, because of this belief that I needed to be perfect immediately. But no one can expect to be immediately proficient at something new. This is too high a standard for success. More importantly, it is just a belief, or a rule, about what is correct and allowable. And beliefs and rules are changeable.

I am still a terrible tennis player. Put bluntly, I stink. But I’m still having fun, and that’s what counts.

What activity would you try if you would just allow yourself to be joyfully, gleefully bad at it?

* Incidentally, all teachers need to remember this point. Your students’ sense of self belief is a delicate thing. Criticise too much at an early stage at your peril.

** FM Alexander, Constructive Conscious Control of the Individual in the Irdeat Complete Edition, p.295.

Image by Suat Eman, freedigitalphotos.net

Not in Kansas any more: Why the new feels WRONG!

It’s a common thing for Alexander Technique students, whether novice or old hand, to have the experience that doing an activity in a new way feels better, but also somehow… wrong.

The old way of sitting wasn’t comfortable. The new way is. But it just doesn’t feel right, a student might say to me.

FM Alexander wrote about this in my all-time favourite chapter from his books, called ‘Incorrect Conception’. His example was a teacher asking a student to bend at the knees. The student does it in their old habitual way. The teacher helps them to bend their knees in a new, more mechanically efficient way. At this point, FM says, for the student bending the knees becomes

…to all intents and purposes, a new act, bringing with it a new feeling. This time the act is not what he is accustomed to, and so it feels wrong to him.*

In a lesson today I likened this to that moment in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy looks around at the technicolor world of Oz and says “I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas any more.” Dorothy was a bit unhappy in Kansas – it was grey, life was hard, and people were giving he ra tough time. But at least it was familiar.

Our bodies are a bit like that. We move in certain ways, ways that are familiar and normal. We may not always be comfortable, but at least everything feels normal and where it should be and, well, somehow right.

It is only when the joy of the feeling right becomes outweighed by the discomfort that people typically come to an Alexander teacher. They are taught how to conceive of and carry out activities in new ways. But no matter how comfortable the new way is, it isn’t going to have the same sense of familiarity as the old way. It isn’t going to feel right. Not at first, anyway.

The challenge for any Alexander Technique student is to recognise that they’re not in Kansas any more. There’s a new world, and it’s brightly coloured. There’s no map, and sometimes it might not seem the safest or most enjoyable place in the world. But it isn’t the same old same old. It has the thrill of adventure.

Are you willing to step out into the new? Are you ready to risk feeling wrong?

* FM Alexander, Constructive Conscious Control of the Individual in the Irdeat Complete Edition, p.297.
Image by Matthew Mackerras

Self Delusion and the Martian Test

Have you ever been asked by a novice to explain something that you know or have done for so many years that it has become second nature? How did you do? Did the novice understand your explanation?

Sometimes we can become blinded to the complexity of an activity because we are so familiar with it. The classic example is driving a car. This is a complex task when you are learning, but the complexity quickly fades into the background as you notch up the hours behind the wheel. And as a fairly experienced driver, I know how easy it is to become not just deluded about the difficulty of the task, but more dangerously, about my own skill and prowess on the road.

But it isn’t just complex activities like driving that suffer from the ‘familiarity breeds contempt’ syndrome. We can be deluded about even the simplest of activities. Most of us get to the point where we are pretty much deluded (and this is FM’s word) about what we are doing with our bodies, and how we are doing it. We think we are doing the bicep curl like the instructor; we are actually throwing our chest forward and raising our shoulders. We think we are sitting upright; we are actually rotating our pelvis backwards and hunching our shoulders. We think we are flexing at the hips; in reality our hips are little troubled and our spines do the work.

It sounds like a problem of lack of awareness, doesn’t it? But it isn’t. If anatomy authors Depopoulos and Ibernagl are right, there’s no point trying to work on our awareness (improving our sensitivity). Our bodies are brilliant at picking up information from nerves and sending it to the brain. The difficulty comes in how the information is prioritised. So FM was remarkably accurate when he said in 1910

We must admit not only that there is a failure to register accurately in the sensory appreciation, but also that the fault is unrecorded in the conscious mind. And it is for this reason that the pupil must be given a new and correct guiding and controlling centre.*

Talk to a Martian

FM sees the solution to this whole sorry mess as being to improve our ability to conceive of an activity and carry it out as we conceived it. So here are my tips for beginning along this road.

Don’t assume. We think that because we have walked or sat or stood since toddlerhood, we know how it is done. What if we really don’t know exactly how to do these simplest of activities?
Get some knowledge. Look at anatomy books. Watch other people and see how they do things. Look at yourself in the mirror. Arm yourself with knowledge and observation.
The Martian test. Try to explain the act of sitting as if you were teaching the activity to a Martian who had never done it before. What would the Martian need to know?

Our deluded sense of ourselves feeds on our assumptions, our lack of knowledge, and our belief that we ‘know’ how to do an activity. Fight these beliefs, and you’re a long way down the path to FM’s new “guiding and controlling centre.”

What will you say to the Martian?

* FM Alexander, Man’s Supreme Inheritance in the Irdeat Complete Edition, p.59.
** Photo from stock.xchng

Why you shouldn’t try to fix problems

Most of the world seems to work on the following basis:

Person x has a problem.
They go to see expert y.
Expert y tells them that they can see the problem, and tells them to do z to fix it.
Person x goes away and does z. Or not, depending on their commitment to solving their problem.

The Alexander Technique does not work in this way.

FM Alexander’s big problem with this way of working is that it deals with effects.

… it is assumed that the defective action on the part of the pupil can be put right by “doing something else.” … He forgets that in “doing something else” the pupil just use the same mechanism which …is working imperfectly, and…be guided in his action by the same erroneous conceptions regarding right or wrong doing.”*

Here’s an example of how this works in practice. A student of mine was told by a pilates teacher that their sore back was caused by not using their core muscles enough, so they should work on keeping their core muscles held firm.

But what if strengthening the ‘wobbly core’ isn’t dealing with the root cause of the problem, but only with a visible effect of it? Then my student would be piling a lot of muscular tension on top of an already existing problem. This is potentially bad because:

They have no way of knowing what knock-on effects that may have
They are masking the real problem
They probably feel rather virtuous in following the teacher’s advice so carefully.And a sense of virtue tends to cause people to be less willing to give up the behaviour they’ve cultivated.

Look for causes.

FM wants us not to jump to fixes, but to look for causes.

Is the problem caused by some influence outside of the person? Or is it inside?
If inside, is it structural (a medical problem) or functional (something we are doing to ourselves)?
If it is functional, can we stop doing the thing that is causing the problem? Can we prevent it from happening?

If we follow a clear line of reasoning, we are empowering ourselves. We aren’t fruitlessly thrashing around trying to fix things on a trial and error basis. Instead we are moving thoughtfully and efficiently towards a solution.

Can you take on the challenge of not looking for the fix?

*FM Alexander, Man’s Supreme Inheritance in the Irdeat Complete Edition, p.122.
Image by David Castillo Dominici FreeDigitalPhotos.net

3 Tips to spot and avoid self-deception with Alexander Technique

Have you ever had the experience of looking in a mirror, and being slightly shocked by what you see? Are your shoulders more rounded than you thought? Or perhaps you thought you were standing straight, but now you have caught yourself unawares, and can see the funny things you do with your neck or hips?

If so, you have direct experience of something that Alexander Technique teachers often talk about – our ‘unreliable sensory appreciation’. Or, to put it simply, sometimes we aren’t really doing what we think we are doing.

And there are sound physiological reasons why this happens. According to anatomy authors Depopoulos and Ibernagl, one billion bits of information enters our brain’s ‘switchboard’, the thalamus, every second. But of these billion bits of information, only about 100 will be passed on to the higher brain centres.*

That’s a pretty big data loss. So the brain has to prioritise what it junks. Obviously, it is going to keep information necessary for survival – food, water, breath. So what will it junk?

The big category is anything that is constant or unchanging. If it doesn’t change much, the brain is less likely to notice it.
Similarly, if we have set up beliefs or mental filters against certain information (or favouring certain information), we will change what we notice. Psychologist Richard Wiseman played on this with his writing and videos based on the famous’gorilla’ experiment.

This means that in a sense you are looking for shadows – you are looking out of the corner of your eye for the danger of the unchanging, the lure of the unchallenged assumption. It is here, in the activities and beliefs that lie uncontested, that we are more likely to be harbouring unhelpful beliefs leading to unhelpful muscular tension.

FM Alexander gives a brilliant example of this in his second book, where a student who has come to him for help with stuttering has improved to such an extent that FM asks the student to take the protocols used in the lessons and apply them to speaking outside of class. The student immediately said in his old stutter, “Oh! I couldn’t do that; everyone would notice me!” FM says that the student had reached

such a stage of defective sensory appreciation and self-hypnotic indulgence that his whole outlook was topsy-turvy. He no longer saw things as they were, and was out of communication with his reasoning, where his consciousness of his defects was concerned.**

Three ways to bring about change

Watch. Keep an eye out for reflections in shop windows, or photos taken of you unawares. These give valuable information that you can use to reason your way out of the unhelpful stuff you are doing,
Look. At anatomy websites, apps or books. I think everyone should have some basic understanding of how the body is put together, so that they have the information to use it better if they wish. There are some great iPad apps out there, and great books. Contact me if you want some recommendations.
Listen. To friends, giving you feedback. To your Alexander Technique teacher. To Alexander Technique podcasts. Gain information. Challenge your assumptions.

Have you ever found you weren’t doing what you thought you were? How did you solve the disconnect? Tell me in the comments.

* quoted in Donald Weed, Human Movement: Structure and Function, 2004, p.56.
** FM Alexander, Constructive Conscious Control of the Individual in the Irdeat Complete Edition, pp.302-3.

Your amazing brain: 3 Alexander Technique tips to use it well

This is a post about the power of your brain, and how it can get you in – and out – of trouble.

I have played recorder since I was six, but it wasn’t until I was in my twenties that I started getting RSI-like wrist pain. I did all the usual obvious routes: doctor, physio, specialist, osteopath… Nothing really helped. In fact, it got so bad that I stopped playing.

Even after I started experiencing improvement in my arms after studying the Alexander Technique, it took years for me to pluck up courage to start playing recorder again. And when I did, I got some help from an experienced and very wise teacher friend, Jill Tappin.

Jill quickly became fascinated with the way I was using my hands. We discovered together that I had a very odd idea about the way my fingers moved. I believed that they should bend where the crease line is at the bottom of my fingers, here:

Of course, that isn’t right at all. They flex much lower, at the knuckle. That’s where the joint is:

But even though it wasn’t anatomically possible to flex my fingers higher up, I had managed to create a set of complex and exhausting muscular contractions that had the net effect of moving my finger where I believed it was correct.

My brain power overrode my anatomy.

And this is what most students do (though not often with fingers!). FM Alexander says that a student’s “misdirected activities are the result of incorrect conception and of imperfect sensory appreciation.” * That is to say, they have beliefs about the way their head should move, the way their back should curve, where their legs should start – even if these have no basis in anatomic fact. And then they use the power of their amazing brains to make their beliefs a reality, often at the expense of their wellbeing.

The moral of this story? Don’t assume you know how your body works! If you are having a problem in a specific area, discomfort in your hips when walking for example, you’ve probably tried all sorts of things to fix it. But what assumptions have you missed?

Learn the anatomy. Check online or in a book, and find out how that part of the body is built
Don’t go by surfaces. I got fooled by my skin into thinking I moved where I didn’t. Try to develop a kind of x-ray vision, and think under the skin.
Experiment. Test out your new ideas of how things work. You can do this by yourself, or you can get an Alexander Technique teacher to help you. If there isn’t a teacher nearby, a bunch of us now do Skype consultations and can give advice via webcam.

* FM Alexander, Constructive Conscious Control of the Individual in the Irdeat Complete Edition, p.293.
Photos by Jennifer Mackerras

On ‘fixing’ your posture – a polemic

Want to fix the poor posture you’re convinced is making you tired and sore?

Great! There are loads of different things you can buy that can fix that for you (they say).

Buy that fancy new chair.
Get those wobbly sole trainers. Heck, get the knee boots too – you’re worth it.
Spend a fortune on a new mattress. Buy a new pillow, too.
New mouse. New mousemat. New monitor platform. New keyboard.
Ladies, junk your gorgeous handbags for sensible backpacks. And don’t even think about high heels.
And now you can even buy a phone app and cover yourself with sensors so the phone can tell you off for slouching.

Go off and spend money on all those things. Because we all of us have an unlimited supply of money and can use it to do stuff for us so we don’t need to think, right?

Um… Well, no, actually. In the first place, most of us don’t have an unlimited supply of cash. So we need to use our resources wisely.

Which leads me to the second point.

What if throwing money at a problem doesn’t always solve it?

What if it’s not the chair, but the way you sit in it?
What if it’s not the shoes, it’s the way you walk in them?
What if it’s not the bed, it’s the way you lie down?
What if it’s not the computer, it’s the way that you use it?

Because if that’s true, you can throw any amount of your hard-earned cash at your difficulties and end up with a house full of cool stuff, but the real problem will lie untouched.

FM Alexander believed that it was the way we use ourselves (mind and body) as we go about our daily activities that can get in our way. He believed that it was possible for us to use our brains to improve our lives rather than the opposite.

In fact, FM said that in the human mind “lies the secret of [our] ability to resist, to conquer and finally to govern the circumstance of [our] life.” * Spend a little time learning a toolkit of ideas and principles, and we can think our way out of our difficulties, by ourselves, for ourselves, any time we choose.

Now wouldn’t that be worth paying for?

* FM Alexander, Man’s Supreme Inheritance in the Irdeat Complete Edition, p.17.
Image by dan from FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Losing “I can’t” – the importance of mental attitude in performance

When I teach Alexander Technique, I typically encourage students to come in with a activity they’d like to work on. It could be anything from sitting, to running, to juggling, or to using the pedal on a sewing machine. When I ask them why they want to look at their activity in class, they typically use one of the phrases:

I’m having trouble with x.[insert activity here]
I can’t play this passage.
It could have been better.
I’m okay up to this point, but then it all goes wrong.
I don’t breathe properly.
I always run out of air before the end.
I can’t hit that note.
I’m not doing as well as I’d like.

And when my students say their variation on these phrases, a line or two by FM Alexander runs through my mind: “when…we are seeking to give a patient conscious control, the consideration of mental attitude must precede the performance of the act prescribed … He often finds an enormous difficulty in altering some trifling habit of thought that stands between him and the benefit he clearly expects.” *

FM is pointing us towards an important truth. So often, the way we think about a problem is not only a part of the problem, but actually stands between us and the change of attitude and perspective necessary to find a solution. Or, to quote Stephen Covey, the way we see the problem is the problem.”

So next time you find yourself saying a variant on the above statements, try to find a new and more positive way of articulating the same thing:

I want to achieve x, but haven’t yet worked out how to do it.
I don’t yet play this passage the way I envisage it.
It hasn’t reached my highest standard, but there was improvement.
I haven’t managed to continue my thinking into this part [of the piece/action] yet.
I’m not sure how the breathing mechanism works.
There’s a reason why I run out of air, but I haven’t worked it out yet.
I don’t know why that note doesn’t come out right yet.
My current standard of performance hasn’t yet achieved the high standard I’ve set myself.

Can you see how these are more open? They either acknowledge the progress already made, or provide openings that will help us to question why things aren’t working out yet.

And the key word is YET. Alter those trifling habits of thought, follow the process of questioning and exploring, and good things will happen.

Let me know how you are going to restate your difficulties in the comments. Or if you’re adept at doing this already, let me know what benefits you’ve experienced. The more evidence that it works, the more people will want to give it a go!

*FM Alexander, Man’s Supreme Inheritance in the Irdeat edition, p.52.
Photo by Gordon Plant.