A Child Finds Freedom – NOT.

“Rafferty Rules” was the biggest day in my little 5 year old life.

It happened on Fridays, I don’t remember much more. All I remember is that Dad said I could do…

ANYTHING: Rafferty Rules = There Are No Rules (Wow)

To my magical baby mind, that was, like – incomprehensible. Anything? I can do anything? What will I do? I know, stay up late. Which was about all I could think of (since in those days no one was obsessed about sugar intakes).

I am not sure now if it was the best plan for a child, however I decided to try it out with my young 5 year old nephew Elliot when I had him on Friday nights.

When I announced Rafferty Rules to Elliot, we already had a well-established Friday night routine.

First, his favourite chicken nuggets, then back home. Eat, play, walk, a show…whatever. THEN Bath-Story-Bed. That was the routine. Bath-Story-Bed. The train line towards sleeping were those three steps: Bath-Story-Bed.

We did it the same, every Friday. Bath-Story-Bed.

Upon hearing about Rafferty Rules, Elliot immediately declared that he was NOT going to bed. (Just like me – does it run in the family?)

I said fine. We ate, we played and then, without mentioning anything to him, I put on the bath.

No reaction.

When it was full I just said:

“The bath is ready” and Elliot happily tottled off, jumped in and continued having fun.

“What story do you want tonight?”

I asked as he was in the bath. Having established a book, I fussed about finding it while he got into his pyjamas. Of course story was sitting in bed, next to Uncle Jerry.

Not a peep. No complaint, nothing.

And after story guess what he did? Yep. He slept. Next morning – wondering about his docile behaviour around Rafferty Rules – I asked him:

“How was Rafferty Rules Elliot? Do you want to do it again?”

Yes! He enthused, and went on and on. He was totally convinced that HE had ruled last night, not me.

***

Which goes to show two things:

1. The emerging view of neuro-scientists and social behavioural scientists that most of our behaviour is decided upon long before our conscious consent occurs. Which was also FM’s conclusion: we are all like Elliot : thinking we made decisions when habit was ruling us all along.
2. A habitual routine is a powerful way to imbed both constructive - and destructive – behaviour.

If all this is true – and I consider it to be so – then what exactly in FM speak is “conscious, constructive guidance and control”?

It comes down to this aphorism from FM, which for years mystified me, and still causes much reflective thought and speculation:

“When the time comes that you can trust your feeling, you won't want to use it.”

Whatever did FM mean by that?!

And the answer, as it turns out, comes from Norman Doidge, in his ground-breaking book The Brain that Changes Itself.

For those of you not on my daily diet of email messages, here’s one I wrote last week that makes the point for me:

***

Template Teaching – I was a big fan once. 10 years.

Actually, a lot of the Alexander community is, and so are our students. There is something reassuring about knowing what is going to happen. First the table, then the chair.

Or first the chair, and then the table.

One good friend in America – a great teacher in my opinion – put it to me like this:

“I think of it like their reward. We work at it in the chair for a certain time, then I give them a turn on the table. I don’t think they would keep coming back if I didn’t.”

And there’s the rub. Habit.

We get used to what we know, and slowly that’s all we know.

Doidge – it his stupendous book The Brain that Changes Itself – likens it to snowboarding down a mountain all day. The first time, there are no tracks. It’s up to you. It’s Disneyland all over again – who knows what will happen next?

It’s the second time down the hill when you are confronted with choice:

ONE à Follow the track you already made in the snow?

TWO à Made an entirely new track in the snow?

Me? I want TWO. Every time.

Why?

I love Disneyland.

I love learning, and being challenged. I want to keep making new marks in the snow. My life is about finding new terrain, exploring different pathways, creating my own Disneyland experience: who knows what will happen next!

Which one are you?

***

So? Which one?

And what does all this have to do with FM’s quote?

“When the time comes that you can trust your feeling, you won't want to use it.”

It’s simple – feeling is ONE. Feeling is what I already know about the world.

Feeling is a recording of past experience. Of what happened. Whether that moment was just a nano-second ago, or 50 years ago…

Feeling is always the past, never the future.

It was FM thesis that feeling works for all mammals, except humans.

Why?

Because we change too much. And we change too fast. Feeling is unable to synaptically create a new track in the snow. It only knows the old track. It biases us into a precedent-track-in-the-snow which may no longer lead us where we need to go.

“Conscious, constructive guidance and control” (what a mouthful! thanks FM) is all about choosing TWO.

Even when TWO is just like ONE. What does THAT mean?

Actors know what it means. So do musicians. All performers in fact.

An actor will play the same role every night, say the same words, die the same way – over and over, making a track in the snow.

That track in the snow is lethal to their art.

It’s a ONE phenonomen – doing what I already know. It kills art, because art is doing what I don’t know: inventing anew, creating.

So if you follow your past, and do what you did before, your performance will quickly become stale and mechanical. Your music will stink.

Alec Guinness was well known for refusing to sign a theatre contract longer than three months. Why? Because Alec knew that he had to choose TWO, every night. He couldn’t follow the same snow track – he had to reinvent his character, his responses, his actions EVERY NIGHT. And after 3 months, that just got harder and harder.

Musicians face an even bigger challenge: how to be fresh, original, new with a piece that has been wired into your brain for the last 20 years.

I tell my trainees in Japan that a mark of a great BodyChance lesson is when your singer student forgets the lines of a song she has performed hundreds of times. They are no longer rushing down the same snow track. They just discovered TWO.

At ATSuccess, we are all about TWO. Doing the new, finding the fresh, being conscious, constructive and in control! We follow FM’s advice:

“When the time comes that you can trust your feeling, you won't want to use it.”

To succeed in the ATSuccess world, you have to throw out most of what you already do. Not what you know, but how you implement what you know.

Interested?

Then go here and read up about our upcoming Foundations 60Day course. Come ride down the mountain with us in the fresh, unbroken snow.

Picture credit to Pixabay