When you feel like you're not getting anywhere
Imagine the circuitry of your brain as a network of roads in a city.
The well-worn paths eventually become major highways, whereas the seldom-used ones don’t even rate a yellow line down the middle.
When you are trying to learn something new — when you are trying to change — it’s like trying to get somewhere that the main roads won’t take you.
Maybe your new route isn’t even paved — it’s covered with vegetation and you have to use a machete to hack through.
This is why changing our habits can be so challenging. Why take the difficult, less proven path when the old one is clearly marked and well-lit?
Well, when it’s not going where you want it to go, the quality of the road is irrelevant. But this metaphorical framework can help us make dramatic shifts. Learning is less frustrating when we we know what to expect and how to work around our natural tendencies if they are no longer serving us.
I worked with a fourteen-year-old, Sonia, who struggled in math despite her enthusiasm for hard work. We soon discovered that the problem went all the way back to place value concepts that were not well established. In other words, she didn’t fully grasp how ones bundled together to make tens, tens bundled together to make a hundred, and so on.
We rebuilt this idea together from scratch, and Sonia soon became proficient at mental addition and subtraction for the first time in her life. She was thrilled. However, a few times during each session, she would give answers that were not only wrong, they were nonsensical.
We hypothesized that sometimes, a question would trigger Sonia’s old way of thinking instead of the new concept we had built. After all, she had spent eight years doing it a different way! It was as though she was taking the well-established roads to her old house (her old way of doing math) instead of taking a new route to her “new house.” This would happen automatically, and Sonia would get frustrated. Together, we visualized going back down the road and taking the path to the new house. Then, she would immediately relax and confidently give the correct answer.
Building upon these new roads, Sonia created a whole new “math neighborhood” in her mind. She advanced through about four years’ worth of math in one semester.
If a student is used to failure in a particular area, they will continue to expect failure — and even continue to fail repeatedly until they are used to their new path and remember to take it. It can be uncomfortable and discouraging, sometimes feeling as though gains aren’t being made despite hard work.
The feeling isn’t reality, though. Many times, a student complains that something is too hard and they don’t know how to do it, only to realize, upon taking a closer look, that they know exactly what they are doing and can even explain it. They are just so accustomed to not knowing that they assume that they don’t!
Our best tactic for dealing with this is to talk about it. If a student realizes what’s happening and observes themselves metaphorically wandering down the road to a burned-out house, they can consciously turn around and take the new road to the brand-new house with state-of-the-art electrical and plumbing.
Changing the way we think can be difficult. But if we consciously understand that we are building new pathways in our brain, we can be more patient and compassionate with ourselves and replace our frustration with acceptance. Wherever we are going, we will get there. We may just need to take the time to blaze the trail ourselves.