Toggling: The Practice of Looking Back, Down, Around, And Forward

What you believed yesterday might not be what you believe today and that’s a great thing!

Our brains are prediction machines, wired to learn from experience and predict the future.  Especially true when a sensation or emotion is involved. Touch a hot stove? You learn not to touch it again. Stub your toe on the coffee table corner?  Your brain makes a fast note: walk wider next time. Pain is a great teacher! These kinds of learnings are important, even protective. They help us survive.

An important thing here is, not every lesson needs to be permanently engraved in our brains like the stove example. Sometimes what we learn in one moment becomes outdated in the next.  A belief that felt absolutely true last week might not serve us today. This isn’t an inconsistency, it’s growth. There’s a psychological skill known as cognitive flexibility: our ability to shift thinking, update beliefs, and adapt when new information or context arises.  When we use this flexibility mixed with a growth mindset, we stay grounded in the ability to learn with sails open to newness, not anchored to any old unusable assumption.  Blackberry’s stayed anchored to the assumption that people didn’t want the internet on their phones. Apple was flexible and adapted. Flexibility matters to companies and individuals.

If we anchor around every past experience or learning, we limit ourselves. We may put or keep ourselves in a rut when we react today as if it were yesterday.  Think driving down an interstate with your eyes glued to the rearview mirror.

Thankfully our brains allow for other options. We can do both – learn from past experiences and stay flexible to how we’ve changed since that learning.  When we toggle…move between past, present & future, between where we are and where we want to go, we expand ourselves. We become more aware, more adaptable, and more capable of making better choices. You can glance back to learn, but you can’t drive forward staring only at what’s behind. Likewise, if you’re hyper-focused only on the next yellow line in the road, you’ll miss the bigger picture and probably slow down or burn out in the process.

Toggling is choosing to be flexible:

• Reflect, but don’t attach.
• Focus in when needed, then zoom out to get the big picture.
• Scan the trail ahead, and don’t forget to laser in when it gets technical.

This shows up in real time when I’m coaching mountain bikers. On a bike, one of the hardest skills to develop is toggling your vision: knowing when to look down at the technical features right in front of you, and when to look up at the trail ahead to know where you’re going…to feel safe, our brains need to have have both: macro & micro visualization.  Having a ‘vision’ is important for us all.  In all realms.  How you lead yourself depends on what you value and where you want to go in the future.  If you’re only focused on what you’ve done, you’ll miss out on what you still can do.  If you’ve laser focused on what you’re doing for too long, you might miss your turn ahead.  In our Community Circle conversations, we discuss concepts like this at length.

We have to toggle.  We have to have the destination in mind.  We have to reflect on how we’ve gotten here, and we have to take the next step to get down the road.  We have to do all three with the flexibility of knowing everything is always changing.  

Questions for you on this Monday:

• What are you working towards in the future?
• What is an old belief you need to rethink?
• When is the last time you did a system update?
• What are you doing right now that might be keeping you in a rut?

If this is interesting to you and you want train to toggle, you can sign up to join a Community Circle or ask me about what kind of Coaching Programs exist for this work.

Upcoming Events:

VVMTA Ladies Trail Crew Wilderness Hike with Ellen Miller July 9th
VVMTA Trail Crew Overnight July 12/13 (weekend day optional) Salt Creek
VVMTA Ladies Trail Crew July 16th: Location TBD
Community Circle July 21, Aug 27, Sept 22