Settling for ‘good enough’ as an enemy of improvement

Last week I wrote about the dangers of perfectionism, and how trying an attitude of ‘good enough’ might be the thing that helps break through the fixed thinking that creates it. This week, just to be contrary, I’m going to warn you about the dangers of relying upon ‘good enough’ as a standard. Do you rely upon things being ‘good enough’ and risk losing out on improvement?

Fixed ideas and conceptions

I paraphrased FM Alexander’s statement about fixed ideas last week, but this week I thought I should quote it in full:

A teaching experience of over twenty-five years in a psycho-physical sphere has given me a very real knowledge of the psycho-physical difficulties which stand in the way of many adults who need re-education and co-ordination, and, as the result of this experience, I have no hesitation in stating that the pupil’s fixed ideas and conceptions are the cause of the major part of his difficulties.[1]

Alexander firmly believes that a student’s fixed ideas are their stumbling block: their ideas about “doing it right;” about doing things “their way;” their ideas about what they can’t and can’t do. Frankly, from my own experience, even something as apparently simple as a student’s belief about the location of their hip joints can prove a stumbling block to their improvement!

Not settling for ‘good enough’ cake

Believing in stopping searching for something better is just such another idea. I have a friend who laughs at me because I am always trying out new recipes. For example, I have two or three classic chocolate cake recipes that I use frequently, but that doesn’t stop me trying out new ones. After all, how do I know that the recipes that I have are the best? By choosing to settle for them (they are, after all, very good), I might miss out on a recipe that is truly amazing.

Similarly, when trying to solve his vocal problems FM Alexander found that preventing the pulling back of his head also stopped the depression of his larynx and the sucking in of breath – and his vocal condition improved. This improvement was even confirmed by medical friends. But if FM had settled for preventing the pulling back of his head he would never have thought about the relationship between his thinking and the direction of his movement, and we wouldn’t have the Alexander Technique. He would have had a nice acting career in Australia, and I’d be teaching something else.

So I think we should be grateful that FM didn’t own the conception ‘good enough for the bush’ (yes, that’s an Aussie expression). We would have missed out on a tool that stresses (almost?) unlimited potential and continual improvement!

So next time you settle for ‘good enough’, just take a moment to check back in your mind, and see if you can count up how often you take that option. Maybe it’s time to try a new recipe.

[1] Alexander, F.M., Constructive Conscious Control of the Individual, Irdeat 1997, p.294.

Change and Alexander Technique: confronting self perception

People come to Alexander Technique because they aren’t happy with the way they are currently using their minds and bodies, and they want to change. But the change they are asking for tends to be a very particular and specialised kind of change: they want to be better, and yet FEEL exactly the same! In other words, they want the improvements without any change in their self perception.

Happy by Derren Brown includes a great section on self perception

I was reminded of this during the week while reading Happy by Derren Brown. Brown recounts how his physical trainer suggested that he work on changing his stance while walking so that he didn’t round his shoulders forward. Brown noticed that when he walked in the way his trainer suggested he felt a sense of authority and connection to others that he hadn’t previously experienced.[1]

Changes feel different.

Brown’s experience chimes neatly with FM Alexander’s concept of psycho-physical unity. Because we are an interconnected mind-body organism, we shouldn’t really be surprised that making a change in the way we stand or walk is going to make a change in the way others perceive us, and in the way we perceive ourselves. Amy Cuddy’s work on power poses highlights a similar fact: if we change one part of our psycho-physical organism, we should expect those changes to create a cascade effect throughout the rest of the organism.

But we so often don’t expect this. We think that we can make a specific change (like walking without hunching our shoulders) and it not affect anything else. This is very human, but it’s still a logical fallacy. And so often the change that is most noticeable is one of self-perception; we feel different. As Brown says in Happy,

Perhaps between a preference for not drawing attention to myself in public and the physical placement of my hunched shoulders, I had come to feel rather invisible on the street. The sudden shift in my mood engendered by this point of correction was startling to me, and a little unsettling, as I felt far more conspicuous. [2]

Feeling right as a means of guidance

When trying to remedy his own vocal problems, Alexander realised that feelings (including self-perception) were very significant in his difficulties.

I had to admit that I had never thought out how I difrected the use of myself, but that I used myself habitually in the way that felt natural to me. In other words, I like everyone else depended upon ‘feeling’ for the direction of my use.[3]

This becomes very important indeed, though, when one tries to make a change to one’s manner of use. For as Alexander came to realise through his own experiences, the way we use ourselves habitually, no matter how inefficient or downright painful, feels right. We feel like ourselves. So when we start to make changes, there is a strong likelihood that we will cause a cascade effect that causes us to feel different. As as Derren Brown experienced, that change in the way we feel ourselves to be in the world can be unsettling.

At this point every student of the Alexander Technique has a choice. Will they stick with the new way of doing things and make an effort to deal with the change in self perception, or will they go back to feeling ‘normal’?

Derren Brown chose to return to his slouch. FM Alexander decided to ride his way through the sense of feeling wrong. Which will you choose today?

[1] Brown, D., Happy, London, Corgi, 2017, p.297.

[2] ibid.

[3] Alexander, FM., The Use of the Self, London, Orion, 1985, p.35.

Stick or quit? Resilience vs knowing when to quit

Stickability – resilience – is considered a virtue. We all love stories about people not quitting in the face of adversity. But are there times when our love of ‘not quitting’ stops us from taking care of ourselves?

Resilience vs not quitting: two stories

For example, one of my students recently told me about how they spent years learning a musical instrument that they came to loathe. But they didn’t quit – they kept playing even after the joy had gone because they didn’t want the instrument to win. The student wanted to prove mastery; they wanted to prove they were a person who didn’t quit.

I did a similar thing with my PhD. Some time into my research, I came to realise that I hated what I was doing. Worse, I came to realise that I no longer wanted to follow the career in academia that I’d initially desired, which made the degree much less relevant to my future and the struggle far less meaningful. But I valued not being someone who quits things, and so I kept going in spite of the physical and psychological harm I was experiencing.

Resilience and not quitting are not the same

I’m never going to knock resilience as a high positive value. We know from the field of positive psychology that resilience – grit – is a key predictor of success.[1] Choosing not to quit when the going gets tough, but to keep with a challenging process in order to achieve a desired goal is a great skill. But that isn’t what we are talking about here.

When my student didn’t quit music lessons, and when I didn’t quit my degree, we were indulging in a behaviour that isn’t really resilience. We were blindly adhering to a value or belief structure even in the face of compelling evidence that we were hurting ourselves while working for a goal we no longer valued. This is what FM Alexander referred to as a ‘rigid habit of mind’ and said was the cause of many demonstrable evils.[2] In my case, it led to a real struggle with my mental health that took a long time to heal.

Borrowing FM’s idea of travel analogies, refusing to quit in the face of evidence that you’re engaged in the wrong activity is a bit like this. Imagine you’re in the car, driving along the M4. You want to go to London, but you’re heading west (international readers: this is a bad move!). You drive past Bristol, past Cardiff. You realise that you’re heading the wrong way, but you don’t turn around. Instead, you keep driving all the way to St David’s (on the west coast of Wales) just to punish the road. And the further you go, the angrier you get at the road for not taking you where you want to go.

In this story not quitting in spite of compelling evidence sounds like a form of madness, and something to be laughed at. But isn’t this a form of madness that we all indulge in sometimes? It’s not for nothing that at the beginning of the chapter where FM talks about rigidity of mind, he quotes Allen Upward as saying:

“The man who has so far made up his mind about anything that he can no longer reckon freely with that thing, is mad where that thing is concerned.”[3]

So when do you stick, and when do you quit?

That’s a tough question, and there’s no single right answer. But a clear-sighted analysis of the costs and the benefits of what you’re doing, carried out regularly, is going to help you avoid the rigid thinking that is so dangerous. You can try asking yourself these questions:

  • How much am I suffering?
  • Is the short-term cost worth the long term gain? In other words, is the goal I’m heading for one that I truly desire?
  • Is it possible to stop temporarily to give myself a break? (This is what I should have done with my PhD)
  • Do I love what I’m doing, in spite of the suffering?
  • Is there anything that I haven’t considered – an alternative that I haven’t seen yet?

Only you can decide if you’re following the right path; just don’t let yourself fall into rigid thinking and find yourself going to a place you don’t want.

[1] See Duckworth, A., Grit, London, Vermilion, 2016, for a discussion on the experimental findings around resilience and success.

[2] Alexander, FM., Man’s Supreme Inheritance, Irdeat complete ed., p.52.

[3] ibid., p.51.

Conquer stage fright by changing point of view

alchemist2

Can you conquer stage fright by changing point of view? Or are the physical sensations of nervousness always going to get to you in the end? This is my story of how I came to realise that between physical sensations and thought patterns, thought patterns are the more destructive agent when it comes to performance anxiety.

When I was young, everyone was certain I was going to be a musician. I played flute and recorder. Recorder was my true love of the two instruments (and still is). I played in the school recorder ensembles and bands. I was always off to some rehearsal or another. I was pretty good – in spite of the fact that I never learned how to practice effectively – and was keen to go to a music school in the Netherlands to further my recorder career.*

So why didn’t I go? How did I end up where I am today?

I couldn’t cope with the nerves. Particularly before solos, my heart would race, my hands and knees would shake, my blood would pump so loudly in my ears that I could barely hear. But worse than that were the fears of getting things wrong, of disappointing people. I spent much of my time before every performance in the grip of a forecast of doom. I was convinced that my performance had to be note perfect, and that anything less was a failure.

I quit. There’s only so long that anyone can take that sort of pressure. At that time, in that place, I couldn’t conquer stage fright. It conquered me.

When I say I quit, I need to be more precise. I quit music. I didn’t quit performing. When I went to university, in addition to all the sensible courses, I enrolled in Theatre Studies for a bit of fun. It became my passion.

I loved the academic approach to theatre, but if I’m honest, I loved the acting and directing the most. And I never suffered stage fright. In fact, I didn’t really experience negative nervousness at all. Not once.

Did I feel my heart go faster before I went onstage? Yup. If anything, it went even faster. I can remember waiting backstage before one performance and wondering what the fastest heartrate recorded might be, as I thought mine at that moment probably rivalled it!

Did my hands and my knees shake? Yes. Definitely yes. When I was in Samuel Beckett’s Play, in which the three actors are encased in urns, mine could be seen vibrating!

But it never bothered me. I was having too much fun.

Now I look back and I can see that, logically, there is little difference between standing in front of an audience wearing a fake beard and carrying a sword, to standing in front of an audience with a recorder mouthpiece between my lips. But at the time, the rules and stories I told myself about each activity were very different.

Music = getting it right, being perfect, being in control, trying to block out the audience (who were ‘against’ me and judging me), getting things wrong and beating myself up for failing

Theatre = experimenting, having fun, having a sort of conversation/interplay with the audience, getting stuff wrong and trying to find a nifty way out of trouble

 

Some of the ideas within these categories may have been picked up from other people and places, but I was the one who held them together and believed them. I created paradigms that made one activity (music) a kind of living hell, and the other (theatre) a paradise of playtime. If FM Alexander had been around to see me, he would have said that he had “no hesitation in stating that the pupil’s fixed ideas and conceptions are a major part of [her] difficulties.” **

One of the unexpected joys of studying the Alexander Technique for me was that the “mental rigidity” (FM’s words) that had fossilised my ideas about music was broken up, and my fear of playing or singing in front of audiences conquered.***

So if you want to conquer stage fright, have you considered whether your ideas and attitudes about the activity of performing might be a significant part of your difficulties? Is there a similar activity that causes you no problems at all? What is the rule that makes the difference?

And it isn’t just stage fright that can be helped by looking at hidden rules and preconceptions. Go hunting, and you may be surprised what ideas you have that rule the way you operate/behave in everyday activities.

Yes, we can conquer stage fright. And sometimes looking at how we think is the first step on the path.

* The Netherlands is one of the major centres of recorder teaching, and early music in general.
** FM Alexander, Constructive Conscious Control of the Individual in the IRDEAT complete edition, p.294.
*** FM Alexander, Man’s Supreme Inheritance in the IRDEAT edition, p.123.
Photo of Jen in a fake beard as Face in Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist, 1993. Photo by Rex Bunn.

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

sunrise

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