Automaticity
As I set off down my latest research rabbit hole, I was confident that I would have my assumptions confirmed about the detrimental nature of the topic I had chosen to explore, in this case, automaticity. I figured that whatever I read would reflect my previously held convictions about the negative impact of automaticity on conscious engagement and interactions with others. It’s commonplace in my facilitated sessions, after all, for me to make reference to the concept in terms of the negative impact it can have on relationships. Those times when we’re not quite there, not quite tuned in to whoever is sitting across from us speaking. Nodding but not really listening.
And of course these issues do exist. They haven’t gone anywhere and I’ll reference some of those attendant costs in this blog. But I’m also quite happy to report that my research suggested some intriguing possibilities between automaticity and reaching a kind of flow state. The key, however, is being conscious about engaging autopilot. That’s the difference. Nevertheless, I’m going to dive in and will share my findings with you. Ultimately what I think might be most useful in this exploration is a nuanced approach that can be used to prime ourselves and foster the preconditions to stimulate valuable automatic responses. In English – we can teach our mind to become more automatic about the things that matter.
So that’s what today is about. Diving into this thing we call automaticity. It’s really just a fancy word for doing something without realizing you’re doing it or going through the motions when your mind is elsewhere. We spend all kinds of time in this state and depending on the context, we could be generating positive, neutral or negative results. It’s all about when and where you apply it. There are loads of examples of everyday automaticity that you will relate to. Just think about something that you do every day. Brushing your teeth, showering, driving your car (sometimes referred to as highway hypnosis) and even walking. Essentially we are able to perform the task without having to focus our awareness on every detail. When I’m brushing my teeth, for example, I’m not thinking, “now I’m going to brush the outside of my upper teeth, now I’m going to spit, now I’m going to rinse.” As I’m brushing my teeth, my mind is likely somewhere else, perhaps planning my day tomorrow.
To frame this topic, I’m going to look at it from both the experience of the person in autopilot, but also the people around the person in autopilot. In other words, how automaticity impacts relationships.
To start, I think it makes sense to lay a bit more of a foundational understanding because like everything, once you scratch the surface, there is a lot more than meets the eye and approaching any topic like this is essential for a more nuanced understanding. Because if you haven’t already heard me say this in previous podcasts, the world is grey. Sorry you binary folks. While black and white might be your preferred way of navigating life, it is a fairly hapless endeavour that usually leads to much frustration and exhaustion from holding your position and trying to prove you are right. But with nuance, we can actually hang around long enough to have an interesting conversation that might … well, change both our minds?
So …let’s start with a fairly simple distinction between unconscious and conscious automaticity that I am lifting from TM Wheatley and DM Wenger’s article Psychology of Automaticity in Action. All references can be found below.
Unconscious automaticity operates independently of conscious control. Okay, sure. That sounds pretty obvious. It is primed by an environmental stimulus that biases our response. In other words, the stimulus leads us to behave in a certain way. And remember, this is all outside of our conscious awareness. A stimulus could be anything from a facial expression (think furrowed brow) to Brussel sprouts (think stinky smell) to a horror movie (think guy standing behind babysitter). Our response to all of these situations is automatic. In the first scenario, we may automatically ask what’s wrong. With the Brussel sprouts, we may automatically wrinkle our nose or roll our eyes. And in the horror movie example, we may automatically flinch. Okay, pretty straightforward, right? Well sure. As long as the stimulus is something more … shall we say benign?
The challenges, however, start when the stimulus is a little more controversial in nature. Less politically correct or at the very least, considerate of difference. What if the stimulus is an elderly person, for instance, and your automatic response is to start speaking in a kind of high-pitched patronizing sounding voice? This could be problematic for obvious reasons. Or what if the stimulus is someone crying (this is a common stimulus, by the way) and you respond with anxiety and find yourself breaking the land speed record to get a box of Kleenexes, whether the other person wants them or not. And what if the stimulus is someone’s race or gender or sexual orientation or socio-economic status and your responses are not … how shall I say, edifying? Are you starting to see the inherent challenges with unconscious automaticity? Have you already thought of the word ‘stereotype’ yet? Because I have, and if you have too, you’d be on the right track. We’re certainly in the same unconscious neighbourhood anyway. Stereotyping is a form of automaticity that exists at an unconscious level, directing our behaviour according to however the stimulus was primed. In other words, the kind of messaging or experiences we received in early childhood about the particular stimulus in question. And of course stereotyping is just painting everyone in the group with the same brush.
Wheatley and Wenger argue, “Much of our behaviour in social life is unconsciously automatic. We respond automatically and unthinkingly to facial expressions, body gestures, etc.” When one steps back to consider the wide range of unconscious automatic responses that are present in any relationship, is it any wonder there is so much conflict? (or so much energy spent sweeping said conflict under the rug – take your pick).
But it turns out, Wheatley and Wenger offer some reassurance. Namely that if we have the time, inclination and ability, we can consciously correct these reactions, which is great news. Of course the opposite is also true, and I think there are probably legions of ‘blissfully ignorant’ folks wandering around unaware of the havoc they may be wrecking. But let’s put a pin in that for a moment and shift over to conscious automaticity.
When we’re consciously automatic, as I already covered in my opening gamut, we know what we’re doing as we’re doing it (driving, showering, etc.) There is no need to think about it after we have launched it. I turn the key in the ignition and off I go to work. I arrive and often have no recollection of the drive – that’s what I meant earlier when I used the phrase: highway hypnosis. No commentary needed throughout. Conscious automaticity forms from significant repetition (think driving lessons). But it goes beyond to a place of automatic activation of norms in the larger world around us – not that this isn’t the case with driving, it’s just less pronounced.
Just from living, we learn what is likely to happen in the situations we experience – from the grocery store to the airport security line up to a rock concert – and how we need to behave in order to uphold a pattern. Automatic norms are activated when we have learned the proper assumption of the situation. Imagine life without conscious automaticity for a second. Every situation would be like a wild west crap shoot. Imagine someone coming and standing right next to you at an ATM. Imagine deciding to hand your money to the check-out clerk at the grocery store when you first walk in the door. Imagine if everyone just left their cars in the middle of the road or on the curb or front lawn. Imagine climbing up on stage at a rock concert – wait, forget that last one. The point is that by engaging in willing automatic behaviour, we make the world a smoother place for everyone. The grocery carts are where we expect to find them, people stay politely back when we’re taking money from an ATM, we start undressing – well, taking our shoes off - before we walk through security scanners at the airport, and life is good. And Life is made up of a series of social contracts that we agree to in return for a level of predictability and security. I love Wheatley and Wenger’s description of this process. “A chunking together of former stray details into a fluid sequence that can be set off with only a brief conscious thought rather than a continuing commentary of them.”
In his book The Leader Habit: Master the Skills you need to lead (2018), Martin Lanik points out that 43-47% of behaviour is habitual and processed automatically. You see? I was right about the legions of automatons trudging through life in an episode of the Walking Dead. Okay too much? Anyway, Lanik describes the brain’s creation of automaticity this way, “The brain refines its mental model by cutting out unnecessary processes and eliminating energy waste.” The Marie Kondo of neurology.
And while we’re still in the realm of making distinctions between conscious and unconscious automaticity, let’s me just expand on something before we move on. Clearly past conditioning and trauma play a role in the development of unconscious automaticity as I’ve already alluded to with things like stereotypes. And even though we can be very intentional about seeking to uncover those reactions, which I’ll talk about in the section of the blog on managing or working with automaticity, it’s important to understand that unconscious automaticity can arise from our own internal experiences as well as our experiences of the external world. Things like overwhelm or being outside comfort zones can trigger automatic defense mechanisms that suddenly kick in to manage the level of anxiety we may feel. And we may be completely oblivious to them. So when it comes to the practice of tracking your unconscious automaticity, keep this in mind.
I’ve already talked about unconscious and conscious automaticity, but I also want to point to something a little more subtle that seems to inhabit the space between conscious and unconscious automaticity. From her book, Saying What’s Real, author Susan Campbell describes something called the unconscious intent to control. The reason I refer to it as living somewhere between conscious and unconscious is that it can be fairly easy to notice when you are engaging this way. And by virtue, once you notice it, the steps to shifting it become clear (unlike some of the deeper and resistant stimuli from our past conditioning). As well, the results can be extremely profound and very worth our efforts to change.
Campbell offers a few scenarios that reflect a level of relational automaticity that I think exacts a big toll on the degree of trust and connection we experience in our relationships and partnerships. As I list a few scenarios, ask yourself if you have experienced any of these examples and if so, what might be behind your willing (and somewhat unconscious) automaticity to do and say these things. What might be at stake for you?
Trying to appear more “together” than you really are
Lying to protect someone’s feelings
Being nice or agreeable to avoid a hassle
Keeping silent to avoid conflict
Making up stories / assumptions instead of living with the uncertainty of a situation.
It would be very strange if you didn’t relate to at least a few of these examples. And that’s because unfortunately these approaches are very common and even normalized within our western culture to greater or lesser degrees. They are all automatic patterns for feeling safer and in control. But, as you start to unpack the cost of engaging this way, it often becomes about discovering that the short-term gain of the moment winds up in a lot of long-term pain from a life with less trust.
While we’ve already covered some of the territory of pro’s and con’s somewhat implicitly in this episode, being more explicit can provide you with more motivation to tackle the shifts you may want to make. It’s probable that some of your conscious automaticity is actually costing you in ways that if you were more aware, would actually be somewhat disconcerting.
Starting with the pro’s first, what exactly does one get out of the many, many conscious automatic patterns we participate in? I’m talking about things like brushing our teeth or unloading the dishwasher or locking the doors at night. Some are obvious in that automaticity can be incredibly efficient from an energetic point of view. The tasks I’m referencing require minimal attention. Our mind is then freed up to focus elsewhere. And while it might sound like I’m encouraging you to multi-task, which if you listened to my earlier podcast on time management, you might be thinking, “hang on a second, didn’t she just debunk multi-tasking?” Yes I did, and while automaticity shares some territory with multi-tasking (or what is more accurately referred to as task-shifting) there are some key differences that are worth unpacking.
Conscious automaticity is like starting a washing machine cycle. Once you push ‘start’ you can walk away and the machine just does it’s thing. You can look at emails or vacuum or whatever and there’s no degradation to the quality of the wash cycle without you there watching socks and underwear go round and round in their bubbly universe beyond the little glass window. It must be like looking out portholes on the ISS. Sorry. I’m back. But … and this is a very important but, if driving, or other higher risk activities, is the conscious automaticity we’re talking about, by its very nature, there are simply greater risks if any of your mental capacity is busy being tied up elsewhere. It’s not like you’re risking your life if you try to write an email in your head while brushing your teeth. But with driving, there is a real methodology behind something like the campaign to decrease distracted driving. We already know that the more you split your focus across multiple activities, the greater the likelihood of errors. All I’m saying is think about what those actual errors might mean in terms of real-world impact. It is true that your washing machine could overflow and if you weren’t there watching, you’d have more water to clean up, but the actuarial tables barely note a risk because it’s not that likely.
Okay, back to a few more pro’s of automaticity. While engaging in automatic functions, we don’t need to consciously guide or monitor ourselves which allows us to get things done fast. In some cases, we can actually increase our accuracy through conscious automaticity. This probably sounds a bit counter-intuitive, but have you ever had an experience where too much thinking actually throws you off? This is a bit of a foreshadow to the potential relationship between automaticity and flow, which I’m excited to expand on later in this episode. And finally, we may experience a useful kind of immunity to environmental stressors when we’re in automaticity. This just means that I may be kind of blissfully unaware of the angst everyone around me is experiencing over the recent announcement of a high profile termination because I’m in autopilot cleaning up digital files on my computer. I’m “lost” in my task/
What about the con’s? There are several. Not all that surprising to me because I’ve seen many of these in action. It’s why I was so certain at the outset of this episode that the research would confirm my earlier convictions about the negative impact of automaticity. I just wasn’t prepared for the aforementioned pro’s.
When we learn things well enough to do them automatically, it’s such a slippery slope to inflexible positionality. These automatic habits can and do make us more rigid and less able to pivot if people or situations require it. If we learned to drive in a truck and now own an 8-cylinder Ford F150, we may be reticent to abandon our preferred vehicle even though the gas prices mean we’re paying three times as much a month. Or if we’ve been a disciplined Keto eater for so long that we don’t know what to do with ourselves when our cholesterol test is off the charts. This is when we start leaning into the territory of routines for their own sake. A comfort zone.
A LinkedIn article entitled “The Thinking Trap,” points out that “automaticity means thinking about things the same way, which then becomes our default.” By extension, it’s pretty easy to see how this bottlenecks innovation. Maybe this is when the phrase, “but this is always the way we’ve done it,” shows up – the perfect poster child for the negative aspects of automaticity. By far, one of the most detrimental effects of going through the motions happens in relationships. You’d think that would be super obvious, wouldn’t you, but I have encountered this more times than I can count. I really should try and calculate how much money I’ve charged organizations over the years to come in and help untangle this harmful dynamic. You know how organizations are always so concerned with the bottom line, well maybe just maybe, if I show them all my past invoices, the powers that be would sink more dollars upstream to actually empower leaders to side step traps like these before they get stuck in them. Anyway, I digress, though it is relevant. In automatic partnerships, nothing new is ever really learned about one another, which usually translates to not really listening to one another and then it's just a slip and slide to not really respecting one another. Trust, of course languishes by the sidelines and the partnership dies of (yawn yawn) boredom.
Overall, we risk living more by default than by design. When the waiter asks how our meal is, we say “fine” mindlessly without realizing I was just complaining to my dinner partner a second ago about how bland my salad is.
So this seems like a good place to pivot and start focusing on how we work with and manage automaticity because there will be times when we want to intentionally pause or disconnect our autopilot and times when we may want to amp it up. It all depends on what result we’re going for.
To start, let’s say that at this point in the episode, you may be starting to realize that perhaps you are going through the motions a little more than you’d like in your relationships and work partnerships. Perhaps you’re even coming to the conclusion that even though automaticity feels like the easiest thing in the moment - because who has time, after all - when you look at the longer game you’re playing, you can’t ignore some of the same concerns that I talked about during the con’s section of the episode – namely, that your workplace partnerships are yawn, yawn, boring and uninspired. And maybe, you’re receptive to the notion that you can actually do something to shake things up in a more positive direction. Well if any of that is true, this next part is for you! And this isn’t the start of a little rhyming poem.
Awareness is, of course, the first order of business in this process because what we can’t see, we certainly can’t change. So then how does one pause automaticity when one discovers they are in the middle of it? The temptation here is to look for an effortless answer, you know, the ones that are easily digestible in this moment, leaving a nice flavour in your mouth, but the second you try to replicate them in the real world, they wither and die because they lack real life substance. I’m NOT going to give you an over-simplified process. You don’t need another 5-steps for anything! Which brings up an interesting insight that is going to cause me to become tangential for a moment. How many of us are really serious about putting effort into anything to do with enlightening ourselves these days. How many of us are just listening for the entertainment value or the distraction from something we should do, but would rather not do? How many of us are actually reading on automaticity, while inhabiting automaticity! Alert the newspapers! I think I may have uncovered a story! “Conspiracy theory uncovered. Think self-help is on the rise? Think again. According to one witness, “When people see you reading books, listening to podcasts and attending seminars, they think ‘oh, look at this guy improving himself.’ They respect you for it, which feels nice. But I’m not actually working at any of it, which is nice too. I’d call that a win-win. Wouldn’t you?” Hmmm.
Try something with me. In this moment, take a look around your life. Your work, your home, all of it. From this vantage point, where are the places you are more likely to apply automaticity? With very few exceptions, most people don’t even think of themselves as applying anything. They’re just doing something they’ve done countless times before without thinking about it and for the most part, that’s fine. What we’re after here are the places where doing something automatically could be problematic. If you’re sitting there racking your brains, consider what you might think of as routines. You’re going to discover very quickly that a LOT of your life falls into this category – and that, in and of itself, can be a bit depressing – after all, we’re not robots - but don’t panic just yet. Because as I’ve already mentioned, a certain amount of automaticity really does make life smoother and there are a lot of repetitive tasks to being alive. I’m certainly not going to suggest you imbue all of those with conscious awareness, with the caveat that if you were at a Buddhist retreat center, this is precisely what I’d be asking you to do. But that’s another story. Let’s not bite off more than we can chew here. Sift quickly through those teeth-brushing, driving to work, chopping wood, and carrying water kinds of tasks. We’re after something different.
Look more closely at the people you work with. Picture the faces of the people you interact with most on a daily basis. The types of interactions and conversations that are most quote/unquote normal. Does automaticity live here? Do you see any ‘going through the motions’? If you answer ‘no,’ I don’t believe you. But again, don’t panic, because at least now we know where you need to direct your efforts to pause automaticity and I suspect we’re in the vicinity.
Okay, now for this practice, you need to narrow your focus down even further to one key partnership that you rely heavily on to be successful in your work or life. Either or. Try to study the partnership objectively for a moment. Not them but the combination of both of you. What’s going on here? What do others see? Is this one of those partnerships that falls in the category I referenced earlier as in - nothing new is ever really learned about one another, no one is really listening deeply to one another and maybe it’s worse? No one is really respecting one another. Okay, perhaps your example is nowhere near this … automatic. But if it is, this is much less a partnership than just two people who are thrown together, in much the same way a group of people does not make a team. But the good news is that no matter where you would rate your partnership, helping it to thrive again doesn’t actually take that much effort. It’s just that the effort it does take may seem … strange? I’m working with a couple of different workplace partnerships right now and in both cases, I see a mutual foundation of respect. And that, in itself, is a real treat. And, both partnerships will benefit exponentially just by becoming more explicit about HOW they interact, which is different from the content of their conversations. And that’s where we’re off to next.
Pausing your automaticity in partnerships like the ones I’ve just referenced is a powerful first step in fostering conditions for a more robust partnership. And by the way, while we’re on the subject of partnership, I’m going to borrow Barry Oshrey’s definition of partnership because I’ve been working with it for many years now, and I think it deftly sidesteps the common conflation that some leaders make about the importance of friendship and liking the other person. I’m not saying those aren’t nice things to have, but does a successful partnership rest on that? Here’s the definition of partnership – two or more people jointly committed to the success of whatever endeavour they are engaged in. The critical focus is on - joint commitment to the success of the endeavour and you don’t need to like one another to work that way. In this definition, both parties share a common vision. They are striving for the same outcome. And when that is the case, it is often easier to overlook some of the peskier frustrations we may experience around different styles. In fact, it is quite possible we may come to appreciate those differences precisely because of how useful a well-rounded approach can be to succeeding at whatever endeavour we’re focused on.
So … million dollar question. How in the world do you pause your automaticity in partnership? Ready? Simply wake up and be present. Start with a connection conversation first. One that allows you to relax and actually feel your toes (remember those things on the end of your feet?) Talk about something that jazzes you – values, successes, whatever it is. Find the present moment and try having a meeting from this place. Doing this will give you fresh eyes and new ideas. Go one step further. Create an agreement with your partner to hold one another accountable to staying present and grounded so they can help you notice if/when you start sliding into autopilot and vice versa. And simultaneously, don’t put a lot of pressure on yourself to STAY PRESENT because of course, it’s not always that easy to withstand those old patterned responses. Pay attention to the quality of your discussions and meetings from this place. I think you’re going to find that it becomes very difficult to do things like nod when you’re not really listening or going along with their cockamamie idea just to be agreeable. That kind of automaticity will hang around for awhile until you have built a new habit of presence with one another.
But just for a moment, let’s expand the topic of pausing automaticity to life beyond this one partnership because you may discover that a certain type of work that you do will hugely benefit from greater presence and less autopilot. You may also interact with staff or other employees on a regular basis, and you may be met with a lot of automaticity from their end. This may be evident through the amount you are spending course correcting or babysitting. Automaticity from their end may indicate a serious lack of engagement. A “going along to get along,” instead of telling you how they really feel. A few simple strategies here will help you individually pause your own automaticity, but also help them to pause theirs. I’m talking about developing something I call ‘alarm clocks’ or ‘speed bumps.’ These are metaphors for something that is designed to jar people off autopilot into a more wakeful state. For yourself personally, there are apps you can download onto your computer that will randomly turn your screen black, which could actually make your heart stop for a second – which isn’t maybe the best thing, but it could also serve as a reminder to you that it’s time to stand up and stretch and feel your toes or whatever practice works for you. Even a posted sticky note on your monitor that asks – “what are you doing right now, and why?” You could put on a piece of beautiful music, go for a walk, read something funny or look at family photos. It’s pretty hard to do any of these things from automaticity.
When it comes to leveraging alarm clocks for the folks you supervise, Kendra Cherry, in her article What is Automaticity, suggests mindfulness to bring awareness to the present moment.
This could mean any number of activities from asking people to report out on their high’s and low’s or sharing something that inspired them that day, which usually connects them to their internal value system. She goes on to suggest introducing novelty and varying routines and that shifting attention between tasks breaks up the repetition and helps draw workers out of autopilot mode. For employees that need to be very attentive to their environment, Cherry references the double-check systems that airline pilots use. This approach engages multiple biological systems such as reading an item out loud (auditory), visually checking each item (sight) and physically touching each control or sensor (touch). This might sound odd until you couch it in a context more relevant to your environment or industry. For employees who are responsible for workplace safety, for instance, this double-check system could be adapted for relevant safety equipment. The point here is to minimize risk by helping people disconnect their autopilot.
One last technique I will share for disconnecting your autopilot comes from The 5-second Rule, a book published in 2017. Author Mel Robbins argues that the moment you have an instinct to act on a goal, you must push yourself to move within 5 seconds or your brain will kill it. In other words, if an idea occurs to you through the fog of autopilot, act on it within 5 seconds or your brain will simply yank you back into autopilot and the opportunity will be gone for good. I’d like to report that I’ve tried this technique multiple times and in multiple situations, and by jove, I think she’s really onto something! If you have a hard time getting out of bed in the morning, just test-drive this once and let me know how it works.
All of what I’ve just covered has been about pausing autopilot or dampening it down. But are there any situations where you may want to amplify it? This is where it gets interesting and this was referenced at the beginning of the episode when I discussed the potential connection between automaticity and the peak performance of a flow state. Flow, by the way, is defined in the literature as, a state of optimal performance denoted by smooth and accurate performance with an acute absorption in the task to the point time dissociation and dissociative tendencies.” One study demonstrated that people were 500% more productive in flow state, which makes flow a very interesting topic for people interested in high performance. A researcher by the name of Csikszentmihalyi, developed a Flow State Model where the the x axis = skill level and the y axis = challenge level. If someone has more skill than the challenge they are facing, relaxation, boredom and eventually apathy occur. When the challenge exceeds the skill level, anxiety and worry occur. However, when there is a high level of challenge and a high level of skill, the flow state is more likely to occur. Of course this is only a part of the story. So what does automaticity have to do with any of this?
In the US Army Research Institute for Behavioural and Social Sciences paper entitled ‘An overview of Automaticity and implications for training the thinking process,’ authors Hold and Rainey quote a research study by Masters who writes, “we found that experts who fail under pressure would often report that they are too aware of what they are doing.” To my ears, this sure sounds like self-consciousness? Is this a case of too much thinking about HOW to swing the club instead of just swinging the club? This makes me think of a funny little story called the ‘centipedes dilemma.’ In it, a toad immobilizes a centipede simply by asking it how it walks. The centipedes normally unconscious locomotion is thoroughly interrupted by trying to consciously reflect on that fact and through doing so, is unable to move. Can you relate?
The researchers go on to describe how high awareness can actually get in the way. “Many rules that the performer has accumulated in becoming an expert will be ‘reinvested’ in the skill, disrupting its automaticity.” Those rules the researcher is referring to are all the bits and pieces of information absorbed during time spent in the initial learning curve of whatever it is we’re trying to learn. Of course all of those bits and pieces are necessary as we’re developing the skill, but assuming we’ve now learned that skill to a some level of mastery (and this is key), being conscious of said rules while engaging in the skill becomes problematic.
The researchers noted this exact thing in reverse, “efficient movement patterns developed despite the fact that learners were unable to comprehend any conscious knowledge or rules about what they were doing.” Essentially, you’re able to swing the club (and this assumes we’re referring to a masterful swing because of course anyone can swing a club) even when you’re not consciously thinking about what you’re doing. They go on, “Performance of implicit learning groups improved under stress.” This means that even though there was a stress element in play – and this could be fans watching the match or cameras, people who were engaged in the skill (the efficient movement patterns of a golf swing) without conscious knowledge about the rules as they were carrying it out, actually got better in spite of the stress. The positive impact of automaticity on their performance in this case, seems to act like a cocoon, filtering out all the external noise. Reminds me of the older movie entitled, The Legend of Baggar Vance. This was Will Smith before hitting people became his thing. D’oh. Sorry.
Stepping away from golf for a second, do you like to read? If so, then you probably already intuitively sense how automaticity reduces attentional demands to allow you to enjoy the experience of the story in a kind of flow state (I suppose this also depends on the book?) We’ve probably all had that experience of being utterly lost in the pages of a novel, racing towards the finish, while simultaneously resisting the end. That kind of experience relies on expert level performance that has no conscious knowledge of all the bits and pieces of your original reading learning curve. You’re not thinking about the letters of the alphabet, you’re not sounding words out in your head, you’re not pausing to look up the meaning of words you don’t understand (okay, in some cases you might be, depending upon what you’re reading). The whole ‘flow’ state of reading wouldn’t be possible without automaticity. Automaticity allows you to experience what you are reading and not to get stuck in the mechanics of how you’re reading.
Okay, what started out as a shorter bonus episode has quickly morphed into something much larger. So let’s do a quick recap here. In this episode I’ve taken on automaticity – what it is, how it works (consciously and unconsciously) and explored some of the costs and benefits. The really big costs of automaticity are, of course, felt in relationship and conversely, this is where you can make the biggest difference just by pausing or disconnecting your autopilot – and I share some techniques for how to do that. If we don’t wake up to how much our life is spent in automaticity (by some estimates, 43-47%), we risk living by default, not design. And if that’s working for you, hey, knock yourself out. But for most of us, this is a far cry from the level of aliveness and connection that we actually crave. So do something about that, will ya!
Lastly and kind of as a bonus, I dipped my big toe in the pool of the proverbial flow state searching for answers about how amplified automaticity in certain situations can have a startlingly positive effect on performance. Admittedly, there is much more here to unpack and perhaps I’ll do a full episode on this down the road, who knows.
In any case, I’ll leave you with a few quotes about automaticity. The first is directed at the process of learning itself: “The importance of repetition until automaticity can not be overstated. Repetition is the key to everything.” John Wooden. Hmmm. Really important that you clarify the context before using this quote! Can you imagine handing this to a newly married couple.
How about this one, “The automaticity of everything is the beauty of life.” Sri Amma Bhagavan. When you think of these words, imagine a bird perched on a tree branch in the forest. Automaticity in nature. And this is a nice one to end on, “It’s only when you wake up that you notice you were sleeping.” I hope that this blog has acted as something of a wake up for you – not in a shrill alarm clock kind of way. But more like you fell asleep in the hammock on a summer afternoon and a little ripple of a breeze stirs a stray hair on your face and you open your eyes and look around at all the beauty that surrounds you.
Kendra Cherry ‘What is Automaticity?
https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-automaticity-2795018
US Army Research Institute for the Behavioural and Social Sciences. An overview of Automaticity and implications for training the thinking process. Brian J Holt, Shawn J. Rainey
chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA402420.pdf
The Unbearable Automaticity of Being – American Psychologist (1999)
