Never mind who moved my Cheese, where are my teaspoons?

How many times today do you think that you will go to your cutlery drawer? Yesterday, I took six trips  (I counted them).  Going to the cutlery drawer is not the level of granularity in my life that I would typically pay attention to, or even think for a moment that you would be remotely interested in. I mean going to the cutlery drawer is in itself, a pretty dull and absent-minded task. Its significance is in the fact that it is usually attached to a much bigger and more interesting task, like making a cup of tea or preparing or eating a meal. The reason I am paying attention to it at the moment because at least once maybe even twice a day, I go to the wrong place to get a teaspoon.  I do this because eight months ago I moved everything out of the drawer to a new place and then keep forgetting that I have done so. When I am busying myself with a task of say, making a cup of tea, I just automatically open the wrong drawer to get the teaspoon because that was part of the old ritual. It also tells me that my mind is not present, and I am not fully in that moment.

I had to move them because the drawer was beginning to buckle under the sheer weight of the two, 24 piece and the one 42 piece cutlery sets that I have accumulated. The largest set is nearly impossible to use as it was designed to be aesthetically pleasing above being functional. To ensure that the knife could stand on its blade edge (which it does, and it looks stunning on the dining table) they needed a heavy bottomed oval shaped handle to balance them. It is this very design which makes it is nearly impossible to handle them without some form of training. When guests would come round to dinner, we would, like air stewards, start each night by giving cutlery talks and encouraging the use of napkins while silently praying for them to have a natural bent towards dexterity and circus type skills.

Food would fly from the plate of anyone who dared to try and cut anything, and heavy ‘spinning in your hand’ forks and spoons would either crash down onto the plates or the guests. They saved their best quality to last, though. Full and exhausted from their struggles, our guests would politely place their cutlery on the plate and then try to pass the plates along to us. The heavy bottomed handles meant that should the plate be inclined, even ever so slightly, the instruments would slip off and having picked up the leftover veg or gravy, proceed to splatter food and sauces wherever they landed. At the conclusion of the meal, both our guests and carpets looked like the set for a stain removal advertisement. We gave up in the end and no longer use them, passing them over instead in favour of the ones that don’t ‘fight back’.  So why do I keep them? Simply because they cost £145, and this was the sale price, they were £320.

The entire cutlery collection now lives in a French farmhouse style canteen. It is wedge shaped with narrow compartments, each which has a hinged lid. The wooden box sits in plain sight, so why then I asked myself when I need a teaspoon, do I still aim for the sticky old drawer after all this time! I managed to remember to go to the box when I first changed them over, but after the novelty wore off I slowly begun to forget. My husband’s relationship with the cutlery box differs and for his part he forgets what’s in which compartment, and so stands in front of the box, opening and shutting the lids like someone who had been told to play Silent Night on a set of hand bells, as a task for a game show.

Quite simply, your brain looks at a routine task like cooking, driving, and yes working, and it uses two different types of processes in tandem to run the full system: One an automatic process and the other more cognitively driven.  Take driving for instance, when you first get into a car you have to think about absolutely everything; the inside of the car, actually moving the car, and paying attention to everything going on outside and around the car. Yet, when you become experienced and competent at driving, your brain then automates the mechanical side of the process, leaving you the ‘paying attention to the road’ bit as a singular focus.  Where it possibly can, your brain looks to automate any part of a processes or routine to leave you with just the higher cognitive functions to deal with.  This automation of process was explored by J. Ridley Stroop in the 1930s. He developed an experiment where the colour of ink used to write the colour of a word differed (see image below). When people try this test, no matter how hard they concentrate, they will often say the colour the word spells and not the colour of the ink it is written in, as the guidelines of task demands.

Try it for yourself. Do the easier test if you have never done it before and the harder one if you are more familiar with the test:https://www.math.unt.edu/~tam/SelfTests/StroopEffects.html

How did you get on?

Stoops theory suggested that there is a lag in the brain’s ability to recognise the colour of ink as quickly as it can process the words because the brain has long since automated reading. It recognises words far faster than it recognises the colour of ink used to write them (automated processing being significantly faster than cognitive processing). The information about the word itself arrives at the decision-making stage before the colour information, and this conflict presents processing confusion which this test highlights. The Stroop test is simple but very clever because it provides the perfect conflict for our minds.

When you first start to drive a model of car other than that which you are used to, once more your attention focus widens. As when you learned to drive, you again think about the mechanics of moving the car and can often feel a degree of nervousness taking it onto the roads for the first couple of times. When I swapped from a Nissan to Ford, for the first few weeks I washed the windscreen every time I wanted to turn left.  This widening of the attention focus is true of all change because with change comes uncertainty and with uncertainty the widening of what we pay attention to, and when fearful, some of what we choose to pay attention to is of little or no help. Change is stressful for people because it takes more energy and brainpower to control even the normalised stuff, never mind dealing with the new as well as worrying about the unknown. The general acknowledgement that people feel uncertain during change is why all well-managed change programmes have workstreams whose objectives are to build certainty and resilience back into the workforce.

Now I could spend time reflecting back on my upbringing and the values that my family instilled in me of ‘waste nothing’, but this might only help me with my over subscription of cutlery. So Instead, I am going to explore my creative approaches and methodologies to discover if there is anything I am sticking with just because I invested so much into it or it has become an automated train of thought. It might be that it is no longer of any real use to me and has reached its limits in terms of its usefulness and capabilities.  I need to look at the areas where my thinking or knowledge has grown or evolved to ensure that the solutions and strategies I’m applying are fresh and relevant.   I am also going to spend more time with Naked Training’s mindfulness consultant Jacque, to learn about how I can make the most of the time that I do spend being creative and innovative. I want to focus on the present and not automatically kick into unproductive activities or thoughts.

I do use ‘being present’ when I meet with clients in the mediation and coaching arena.  I remember to press the reset button and tell myself, ‘I have not heard this story before’ and “I will not predict the outcomes” and this keeps me ‘present’ throughout the whole process.  I want to be able to apply that skill across the piece, and also gain an understanding of how staying more mindful and in the moment can help me to keep a healthy stress management level. I want a mind-space where I get the true driving forces that create energy and purpose, and I want to avoid creating spaces where thoughts deplete energy and drive. Who knows, I may even be able to find a teaspoon when I need one.

Get a tip from Jacque on Mindfulness, by emailingenquiries@nakedtraining.org.uk and put ‘Mindfulness’ is the subject header.