Don't stop me if you've heard this
The power of repetition in a sea of novelty
I used to cut a retired veteran’s lawn, and my pay was iced tea and fishing stories.
“Old Man” Wallace never paid me to cut his lawn, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t rewarded. After trimming his lawn, I’d sit down to iced tea he’d brewed on his porch in the Ohio sun, and he’d start telling me stories of his early days bass fishing in Tennessee. He’d describe using a hula popper “a jus about daylight.” How he’d cast it out onto a still dawn lake and let all the ripples fade. Then “bloop,” he’d tug the line, and the famous top water lure’s face would splash the water’s surface and drive bass crazy. Pointing to the seven-pound, faded, dusty mounted bass on his living room wall, he’d say, “he hit that thing, and my reel just sung!”. It was an expertly told story by a nearly octogenarian Appalachian man. And if I heard it once, I heard it twenty times.
In our age, novelty is king. The latest is supremely revered. When I speak to groups, I can feel a room’s attention fade and rise when topics arc from familiar to new. But let me advocate for repetition. It’s what got us where we are, and it will be what get’s us out.
Recently, I talked to someone about their tendency to ruin opportunities to use their gift for singing by getting overly nervous and then becoming excessively self-critical. Who knows exactly the origin, but this formula had been solidified through repetition. She’d repeated the practice of getting worked up and beating herself up so frequently it had become fused to the experience of using her gift.
Most things start with our self-protective tendency, and then our minds bond our ‘success’ with how we navigate the situation. Thereby solidifying the process as the way something gets done. It will take repetition to get free from what we’ve repeated.
Using her situation as an example, here’s how it might work: We see something that needs to be done, and we get nervous and worked up. We then successfully do the thing and thereby condition ourselves to presume to do anything will necessitate being nervous and worked up over it.
Dr. Judson Brewer describes this tendency as true, true, and unrelated. It’s true she gets anxious and upset. It’s also true she successfully navigated the situation. But the two are unrelated. She could do as well, and likely better if she left out the getting nervous part.
Some suggest the act of heightened nerves can facilitate or even help a performance. There is simply no support for this idea that nearly goes unchallenged. When we are nervous, our mind tends to narrow our field of perceived options, and we go into fight or flight. Meaning we are almost certainly underperforming when we get nervous.
We may never eliminate our nervousness; that’s not the goal. The goal is to detach from our developed need for nervousness to do what we do. Psychologically there is a terrible price to pay. When we get excessively nervous, we will emotionally try to escape, self-soothe in unhealthy or expensive ways, or worse yet, self-medicate.
The stories that have us in our habits are well-worn. So too, must our renewed stories that will heal us. For more on all this, check out Dr. Brewer’s stuff.
Rehearse the stories of your freedom until your reel sings.
Be well, Feral Souls.