Losing Your Conditioning

I fell in love with France when I was on a family holiday, aged about 8. I loved everything about it, especially the croissants, still warm out of the bakers van that would arrive on our campsite. My Dad taught me how to ask for them which meant I got a smile as well as the croissant. This put me on a track to a lifelong love affair with learning languages and it was no surprise to anyone that I went on to study them at Uni.

I still remember the first time I dreamt in another language, and when I realised I’d stopped translating everything from English into French and back the other way. It was game-changing because my English had been getting in the way of my ability to communicate. It didn’t mean my French was actually any better, or that I always had the right word, but instead of having to go through all my English words before I got to a French one, the French ones came up first, so I could select my best possible option, even if it wasn’t as eloquent as my English would be.

How does that relate to Naturally High Performance? We have a lot of conversations with people about how they are limited by their conditioning; how their habits, training, preferences or personality type are getting in the way of moving forward and creating the future they want. My experience of living in France shows me that even our deep-rooted conditioning, like language, isn’t as fixed as it seems.

I'd obviously eaten my croissant by the time this pic was taken

Look at it another way, English is a bit of software that had been installed in me almost from birth, my maternal language, I don’t even think about using it. In fact it’s pretty hard for me to not. However, when it got in the way of me doing what I needed to when I lived in France, my internal system eventually stopped running the software because it wasn’t helping me. Instead it switched to a more useful, if less ‘formed’, bit of software, French. I know I didn’t decide to dream in French, it just happened. I know I didn’t reach a certain level or verb conjugation and it all changed, because it wasn’t about how good at French I was, it was about how much of a barrier English was. All my friends had similar experiences at different points. The key wasn’t how ‘good’ at French we wanted to be, it was how much we engaged in the world around us.

And the brilliance of the system is that I didn’t lose my ability to speak English in the process, it just got de-prioritised. When I called my Mum from a payphone it was all there!

Our conditioning, habits, and personality traits can feel ingrained and intransigent, but you’d be surprised about how flexible they really are. When we are in the flow we use the bits that are useful and don’t run the programmes that get in the way. It’s when we are out of balance, seeing the world outside-in, forgetting we have an inner design for success that does the hard work for us, that we hold on to our habitual programming. It feels like it helps us but is actually hindering. You could swap the language analogy for career path, just because you have ‘engineering software’ installed doesn’t mean you always have to run it.

Another great example of this is a client of ours who shied away from putting their self and her business out in the world. Innocently believing that some past experiences had left a part of them vulnerable, a lot of their behaviour was subconsciously trying to protect the bit that felt fragile. When they realised that they had a design for success that had kept them going even through the toughest times of life, the need to protect or defend fell away. What then emerged was a freeness to promotes their business and services more freely, to make the speculative calls that before would have seemed risky and as a consequence they are landing business and opportunities they couldn’t have imagined.

The key is realising that when you allow the system to run naturally you don’t need to hold on to your programming. Everything you have learned, experienced, valued over the years will be available, but so will the possibility of running some different, more useful, software in the moment.