In this collection of Francis Sopper’s earlier writings, patterns of reflex, resistance, and rhythm are explored to better understand how they shape thinking and behavior.
Reflexive Responses
A number of years ago now, I was in Hong Kong consulting with a design group, and was working with a group of young people in a chic modern office. It was mid-afternoon, and one guy walked over to share his snack. I recognized a potato chip bag, reached in, and put one in my mouth. All of a sudden, all the warning lights and buzzers in my brain went off. Just before my gastrointestinal system could reject the offering, I began to understand I was eating a dried fish skin, and managed not to lose my lunch.
One of the most profound realizations I have in my career, about myself and you other humans, is how driven we are by reflex. In a setting that would have been at home in Silicon Valley, my mouth encountered something out of place. It wasn’t that I’d never eaten crispy fish skin before: it arrived in a context where I was fully cognitively primed for something else. The cognitive dissonance initiated a reflexive response. Fortunately the dissonance started to resolve itself with recognition just in time.
What’s significant is we have much smaller reflexive rejections of the unfamiliar and unaccustomed all the time. And by contrast, the art of the con is to make the dangerous look safe and familiar. What we call free will, kicks in often after our reflexes have chosen for us.
I don’t consider myself a bad person because my body had a strongly negative response to a tasty and nutritious snack when it was presented in an unfamiliar context. It’s hardwired to protect itself. At the same time, it makes me wonder what other invisible biases may be keeping me away from good things. Most important, the negative bias I reflexively generated wasn’t either inherited nor permanent. I’d be delighted now to find a bag of those crispy treats in my local market. I learned my way out of it. Of course, that takes both awareness and free will.
I’ve quoted Isaac Bashivis Singer a number of times for something he said himself a number of times. It went mostly like this, “Of course, I believe in free will. What choice do I have?”
Make Yourself Uncomfortable
Stress is good. Many of the most important things I do require me to manage a stress response. I once told a colleague, “I have pre-traumatic stress disorder.”
“That’s called ‘anxiety,’ she said.
While I prefer more grandiose descriptions of my behaviors, anticipatory stress — okay, anxiety — and stress of engaging something difficult can make us better. Stress builds muscle, builds memory, builds resilience, expands awareness.
All last week, I walked around a task that raised my anxiety every time it entered my consciousness. The way to relieve it was to do it. I had the next actions identified. I had the competence to do it. There was space on my calendar. I would be better off when it was completed. At the same time, the closer I got to it, the more my anxiety went up.
Therefore, I kept doing good and important things that weren’t the thing that made me anxious.
I had to treat it like a cold-water plunge. I had to do the thing that would create the most discomfort. Even having made the decision to engage and having gathered all the necessary materials, I still thought I had to top off the coffee cup, respond to one more email, and let the cat out, as I was easing out of avoidance.
Got anything like this for you?
Here are a couple of things to explore. Sometimes, after I’ve done the thing, I realize I shouldn’t have done it in the first place — that’s a result of expanded awareness triggered by stress. I need to stop saying, yes, to these things.
Timing Is Everything
I just wrote the title to this set of thoughts and set a stopwatch. We apply our brains to different things all day. It turns out, we have different attention spans for each of those applications. Right now, I’m doing that kind of complicated thing we often call writing, but that underestimates the work of conceptualizing ideas, imagining an audience, and pushing words out in letter-by-letter, finger-by-finger sequence. For me, and for most of us, it’s what I call a cognitively heavy lift.
Writing: 4 mins 52 secs.
I got up; paced around; stretched my neck and shoulder muscles; got a drink of water. I forgot to time the break. Break times are predictable also.
Shimatta! I forgot to restart the timer.
It’s on now.
One of the most important things I do when I’m in person with a client is to time their various activities. For nearly all of us, there is a predictable arc to how much time we’ll spend thinking about something before our brain wanders off for a coffee, cigarette, and piece of pie.
Writing: 3 mins 28 secs.
Boris The Cat was scratching on the furniture so scooting him away was a natural break. Didn’t time that one either. I’ll try to get the next one.
As I was saying, when we set out to do something, our brains work on it, then pause to sit, listen to the birds, watch the clouds drift, then it gets back to work. And one of the important things I do is watch folks, and time those on and off periods. It’s different for different things, I have a short attention span for reading; a bit longer one for writing, longer for swimming and walking. This session alternated between writing, and reading and thinking about what I’d written. If I were just watching and not engaging in metacognition, that is, watching my own brain at work, I would have timed the activities separately. As I’m noting, I’m having some difficulty doing while being conscious to track my doing.
Reading and writing 10 mins 15 secs.
Stopped again, paced, snacked on a sweet pepper, paced, ate another pepper. I wasn’t hungry which was the reason for the low-density choice. The eating was just something to do: gastrointestinal fidgeting.
Break 2 mins 44 secs.
Remembered to reset the timer after I wrote the first sentence above. I’ve reread this to check the flow and sequence, made some additions to a paragraph above. At this moment, my brain feels restless. My legs are wanting to move and push the blood back up. My neck muscles are feeling stiff.
Reading and writing 9 mins 17 seconds.
Got up. paced, stretched, snacked on another veggie.
Break 1 min 44 sec.
The important thing is not how long or short your attention span is, or what your break and recovery period is. What’s important is you know you have one. You’ve got a natural rhythm. One interesting thing to watch for is stopping for a break and not cycling back to a task. The need for a break comes, and instead of being a support to the work flow, it becomes an interruption. What’s important is to feel the oscillation and ride it. Lift, rest, lift, rest.
Embrace your own wave cycle.
Reading and writing 11 mins 24 seconds.
I started this late in the day, so stopped around 6:30, had food, watched an episode of the Blacklist: James Spader is fun to watch.
Break 1 hour 49 mins 16 seconds
Forgot to restart the timer right away. I let the thoughts percolate on my cognitive back burner so I could stick the takeaway.
The takeaway: thinking is messy, but it’s not random. Quod erat demonstrandum.
8 mins 34 seconds plus a couple of untimed minutes.
The Blank Page
Just got this text: “Hi Frank, do you have an eta on that newsletter today”
Okay, this helps. Nicanor Parra, closes his advice to young writers, “You have to improve the blank page.”
I’m struggling with this page today. I also had a hard time getting out this morning. I swim laps at a local pool most mornings. It’s a good exercise for an aging body, and in particular for me, it improves my mental health. A challenge is I have to initiate in a low mood state to get to a better mood. A support to the effort is my colleagues know the difference if I haven’t started my day with some vigorous exercise. I’ll be a little to a lot off.
I got to the pool. Jen, Karin, and Danny’s affirmation at my arrival helped. During the week, a couple of people told me I improved on the blank page last week. My colleagues have implored me today to exert myself. I take it as a sign of their confidence in me.
And Nicanor Parra.
Sly Nicanor Parra woke up every day for 94 years, knowing we must make our presence worth more than our absence.
It’s not just getting things done. We have to make our presence improve on our absence.
Thank you all for your presence with me today.
Warmly,
CEO of GTD Focus
Francis Sopper