Mastering Soft Skills
Habits are automatic, recurring and often unconscious behaviors. They are woven into the fabric of our being: they enable us to perform complex routines automatically, while our thoughts, attention and deliberate actions are directed towards other tasks.
Learning to program and re-program automatic habits and behaviors is a major challenge that can be voluntarily accomplished. Advances in brain plasticity research have far-reaching implications, not least for the health sciences aimed at overcoming harmful behaviors such as addictions and obsessive-compulsive behaviors. They may also enable considerable innovations in training programs aimed at improving automatic behaviors, including the skills involved in communication, sports activities, cello, piano, the arts and the professional and social environment…
At times, we all need to “format” certain habits, a bit like formatting a hard disk to record new elements. Changing habitual behavior is necessary in our verbal and non-verbal communication when we move from one social environment to another, such as moving from a big city to a small town, from a higher education to a work environment, from one work or social environment to another. In these situations, reshaping our automatic behavior is necessary to adapt to a new or altered environment.
Reshaping behaviors that have become automatic
What can be done? There are, of course, the neuroscientists and all their arsenal of psychotherapeutic, pharmacological and hypnotic techniques for overcoming old habits and re-formatting undesirable behaviours that have become automatic. Well, that’s all very well for the seriously ill, but for most people who simply want to improve their lives by changing their habits, it’s useless and, above all, very expensive.
There are PNL (Programmation Neuro Linguistique) and Process Communications… but even there, we often lack precision because we don’t know exactly what is disturbing and expected in the professional and social environment. Without being able to specify “what” and “how much”, a great deal of time and success will be lost!