Use It or Lose It

(click for podcast) (8:02 min.)

“Knowledge is of no value unless you put it into practice.”  – Anton Chekov

Use it or lose it. We’ve heard this phrase all our lives, and yet do we really take it in and act accordingly? Physical fitness, mental acuity, acquired skills, and even relationships deteriorate when not practiced or maintained. Muscles atrophy and lose strength and mass when not regularly challenged. Things are just harder to do when we’re out of practice.

Anyone who plays a musical instrument is very aware of “losing chops” when we aren’t practicing regularly. We can learn a new language, but if we don’t practice it regularly, we lose fluency. How many of us took a language in high school, but haven’t spoken it with anyone since then, and lost most of what we learned?

From a standpoint of maintaining “best practices,” this deterioration affects relationships and organizations as well. These things require effort and attention to keep them relevant in our minds. We need to keep up our “chops” around communication, listening, and empathy, or they atrophy with negative results. We can’t rely on things just “sticking” with us, as our brains will fill those spaces with new information for better or worse. We’ll forget what we learned, as it gets pushed aside to make room for new, incoming information.

I’ve been seeing this dynamic playing out with former clients, which was the inspiration for this exploration. In my work there’s a ton of information that builds upon itself, using foundational aspects that support more complex ones.

When we aren’t actively using these skills, they fade away like anything else. Since we’re talking about unique information and skills, there’s a higher probability of not remembering them right when we need them most.

Additionally, stress itself robs the brain of resources, so we have even more reason to forget what we learned. Stress neurochemicals send resources away from our brain and into our limbs to better run or fight. If we haven’t been practicing and maintaining our skills, they’re not embodied. If they’re not embodied, we’re not going to have access to them. We need those skills embodied to where they’ve become habit.

Having done this work for decades with hundreds of people, the pattern shows up again and again. Those who regularly use the tools keep them sharp, and are able to function at a higher, more understanding, relaxed level. Those who’ve “moved on” and not practiced, fall back into the gravitational pull of reacting. We know that responding in a conscious, even strategic way, is going to yield better results than reacting, but in the moment, can we insert the space to respond consciously instead?

Whenever we want to refresh our skills, it always helps to start back at the fundamentals. It’s almost like waking up muscle memory. Once we get rolling again, it takes almost no time to get back to our more proficient state. We have that “oh, yeah!” moment, where it comes back to us. This is really important, because we can invent a narrative saying that we have to start all over again, and it will take forever to get it back. This is just not true. It won’t take anywhere near as long as learning the first time.

When we go back to our practice, our brain has that procedural memory stored, and we just need to remind ourselves. That takes much less time and energy than the initial learning phase.

You’ve probably heard the expression, “it’s just like riding a bike.” This is because procedural memory sticks much more, and more accurately than declarative memory. Procedural memory, often called implicit memory is generally stored in the basal ganglia and cerebellum. This is where so much of our unconscious know-how lives. We don’t really have to think too hard about how to walk anymore, once we figured that out.

Declarative or explicit memory involves facts, events, and personal experiences, and is stored in the hippocampus, thalamus, and related areas. This is like a rewritable CD in your head, so new information can push out old information. One of my favorite ways of looking at this is: why you lose your keys, but don’t forget how to drive.

This is where practice comes in. The more we practice skills or learned information, the more it “finds its way” into procedural memory from that repetition. This is what we call embodied knowledge. It’s in the part of your brain that’s in constant communication with your body, so gets stored similarly to things like riding a bike or tying your shoelaces. If I haven’t played a song for a long time, I might forget how it goes until I put my fingers on the fretboard, and they seem to remember for me.

We can do this with all kinds of information, so if we’ve learned, for example, how our internal lenses perceive, interpret, are motivated, and how they defend, we can be far more effective in everything we do, and with every relationship and communication. If we don’t practice (thinking through this) we tend to slide back into a singular viewpoint, losing all those advantages.

One of the most powerful practice I’ve developed over the years is probably what I call “Turn the Dial.” This is where we don’t react or say anything until we’ve taken in the situation from each of our internal lenses, one at a time. How would this lens perceive it? How would that lens perceive it? This is the basis of Multi-Perspective Consciousness, which multiplies our skills, our level of empathy and understanding, and our problem solving capabilities.

If we’ve worked together, you know what I’m talking about, and if not, I invite you to get in touch, and let’s chat about it. This work (not really work, because it’s fun) is incredibly powerful and life enhancing.