Paul Baxter: Why Old Habits Return Under Pressure (And What to Do About It)

Paul BAXTER: [00:00:00] This is one of the reasons that old habits die hard. The habit pattern interference will stop you learning the new thing because it conflicts with what you already know. Proactive inhibition causes a phenomenon called accelerated forgetting, which means within minutes or hours, you forget what you've been taught and you revert back to your old incorrect way of doing things.

Noa KAGEYAMA: So I think every musician has struggled at some point or another with trying to unlearn a bad habit that's held them back in their playing somehow, whether it's related to tension or stiffness in a particular part of your body, or something related to breathing perhaps, or embouchure or even something like an old fingering.

The way most of us approach this, just to [00:01:00] try to be really diligent about doing it the correct way or the new way as consistently as we can, and hope that eventually with enough repetitions of the correct way, the old habit will eventually sort of disappear. Which of course takes a long time and often frustratingly it's like the old habit doesn't actually go away. It just sort of lays in wait or hides, and then comes back at the worst possible time when we're in a performance situation or the nerves and the pressure kick in.

So this is why I was really intrigued to come across this case study of an Olympic level swimmer way back when I was in grad school. You might remember the one, this is in 2004 with Yuri Hanin, where the swimmer went from about, I think it was like a 50% success rate of the correct start technique in competition to somewhere between like 83 and a hundred percent of correct start techniques in national and international level competitions over the next eight months. All after just a single 90 minute coaching session.

So the [00:02:00] idea that there could be a way for us to accelerate the process of unlearning bad habits and adopting new habits almost immediately and and seemingly permanently, and especially under pressure, seemed almost too good to be true. But there are other studies, of course, that have looked at this and found similar things, and it turns out this protocol uh, known as the Old Way New Way protocol has been used in all sorts of performance domains with similar levels of success, uh, for decades it seems, yet it's something that I don't think a lot of folks have ever encountered.

Before we look at what this protocol actually looks like and how it came to be, I wonder if the best place to start might be if you could explain why these bad habits keep coming back in the first place, and especially why they still appear under pressure, even if you've been really diligent about trying to do things correctly in our daily practice.

Paul BAXTER: Yeah, it, it certainly is a very common problem for people to find out that, say you have a student, and [00:03:00] during the teaching session or the coaching, they seem to catch on to what you want them to do, and their technique seems to improve. And then afterwards, next time you see them or if they get into a performance situation those old habits seem to resurface, and this is a very common sort of occurrence.

Uh, it is not a fault of the teaching. It's not a fault even of the student, although sometimes you tend to think, oh, maybe they haven't practiced enough. Uh, no wonder they're having troubles. But in cases where students have practiced, the problem doesn't seem to go away very easily.

So we have a problem here that, with traditional teaching and coaching and in other workplace training and driver training and all sorts of other settings, although it looks, seems to work all right at the time, during the, the session, afterwards, the bad habits resurface.

Now [00:04:00] there's a mechanism involved, which was discovered by a chap, American psychologist, called Benton Underwood quite a few years ago and he'd, he called it proactive inhibition, which is really a kind of habit pattern interference with learning.

So you get the student in a situation, you say, look, you're doing it this wrong way. I'm gonna show you a better way. So you demonstrate for them, you explain what the problem is. You might even video them and give them all sorts of useful feedback about what they're doing wrong, and then they seem to catch on and then they do it all right while you are with them. But the problem returns.

This proactive inhibition, this habit pattern interference is at the root of it all. Uh, and this is one of the reasons that old habits die hard. The [00:05:00] interference that's caused is an inbuilt mechanism in the brain that protects all your knowledge. In other words, it stops you having to relearn how to play this violin every time you pick it up.

But the trouble is the mechanism, the proactive inhibition, the habit pattern interference doesn't distinguish between what's you've learned that's good and what's not so good. It protects everything.

So it's a brain maintenance mechanism, which is really quite useful in situations where you have good performance habits and good technique.

But in situations where you have these errors, even though the best teaching has tried to correct them, the habit pattern interference will stop you learning the new thing because it conflicts with what you already know.

The proactive inhibition causes a phenomenon [00:06:00] called accelerated forgetting, which means within minutes or hours, unlike other forgetting, which can take weeks, years, within minutes or hours, you forget what you've been taught and you revert back to your old incorrect way of doing things.

This applies the same to do is not just with, performance, it's also to do with mental attitude, with beliefs, with misinformation. That's one of the reasons it's so hard to correct. Everything comes back to the habit pattern interference, but proactive inhibition and what good old Benton Underwood discovered so many years ago.

Noa KAGEYAMA: I wonder if it might be helpful at this point to take a closer look at what the protocol looks like and how it came to be.

Paul BAXTER: the protocol was developed by a chap called, uh Dr. Harry Linden, who he lives in, in Adelaide, [00:07:00] in, uh, South Australia. He first developed this particular method for correcting and changing behavior, in the seventies, right? And then he did his PhD, uh, in this particular topic.

I met Harry, when I became a, uh, educational psychologist in the seventies. And I walked into his office on the very first day and I saw on the wall he had a, a chart.

A chart which demonstrates the method for correcting spelling errors. And it doesn't sound very, you know, wonderful discovery, but to me it opened up a whole new world where I could see something that I'd never seen before and it just clicked at that particular moment.

We took the method out of the educational context and expanded it and put it into all [00:08:00] sorts of other areas where habit pattern errors, are well known. Industrial safety training, uh, driver education, uh, aviation, uh, flight training. We've worked in all those areas, um, a lot of which has been published.

And from there we, we took it to enter the sports area. So there was, that's where you mentioned Yuri Hanin from Finland and his Olympic athletes, and we worked with those.

My goal, I guess, is to circulate, to spread this information, this method so people can improve their performance. It's all about performance improvement, about changing things that you want to change, and thereby you can have a better life. Uh, things work better, things are safer things people are happier about it and it's, it's a wonderful [00:09:00] way of changing behavior and performance.

Noa KAGEYAMA: I wonder if you could share like a, a prototypical example of what an old habit might look like and what the new habit might look like. With as much detail as you could perhaps, and, and I'm totally fine if it's something in sports or something that's pretty general that most folks can relate to.

Paul BAXTER: I can give you an example with a, a, a pianist. He was a young chap and whenever he got to a difficult passage, he would tense up. And his teacher told him, he said, uh, you really mustn't do that you should relax, you know, just, uh, play easily and not worry too much about what's happening or what's coming up.

But if you don't manage to control this tension that is created, you're never gonna be very good at it. So the parents asked me. Can you help him?

You don't really have to know the [00:10:00] background of the problem in order to help and fix it. In some treatment, uh, scenarios, you really have to go back and find out where it's from and how it developed and so on. But you don't have to do that with the Old Way New Way process.

So all I wanted to do was first improve his awareness of what he was doing, that he was tensing up. So we got him at the piano and he started to play. And then I said, tell me when you're approaching this difficult passage that gives you problems.

So he got to that point and then I put my hands on his, on his shoulders and his, uh, trapezius muscle and you could feel the tension there. He was really tightening up like anything. Which was his, his error, and he had no control over this because these things happen inadvertently, as, as performers know. Suddenly you find, oh dear, I [00:11:00] shouldn't be doing this, but I'm doing it.

So, and then I would tell him, I said, look, can you feel this? Can you feel the tension in your shoulders? And so touching it helped, uh, to, to give that sensation, that feedback. To make him more aware of what he was doing 'cause he wasn't aware until it happened, and then it was too late, the whole performance was, uh, affected.

So we repeated this several times because the important step in the process is to make the person aware of their wrong way or their problem. And until you do that, you can't go any further with the correction. So we spent some time doing that.

And I got him to talk about how it feels. You know, can you feel this? Can you feel that? What's happening with your shoulders and your hands and your, your posture and so on. And when he was able to talk freely about it, then I knew that he had improved his awareness. So that was the first step. Make them aware [00:12:00] what, what they're doing incorrectly.

And then the next point is to show them what the correct method should be. So basically we had the music teacher there as well because we, this is the expert input that you have to have when you're doing this sort of thing. So she basically said, you know, um, this is what you should be doing and you should be relaxed and relaxed here and relaxed and all these sorts of things that were relevant to his performance.

So we got him to become aware of that and he would talk about that and say, oh yes, I, I feel much more relaxed about it and my, I'm not as tense about it, and so on. So that was the second stage.

And once you've done that, you can then proceed with the actual correction or the process which involves a comparison of the old way and the new way, and there's all sorts of labeling involved as well, where you don't talk [00:13:00] about you're doing it wrong, you know, don't do it that way, which is often the conventional approach where you simply say, no, no, no, no, that's, that's not it. You shouldn't be doing that. I don't wanna see you doing that anymore.

And yet, in Old Way New Way, we do start off getting 'em to do it wrong. Because we need them to develop that awareness because it's an unconscious thing that's afflicted them and they're not aware that these things are happening.

So that was the process with the young lad. And we went through another part of the, the steps, which are, which are contained in the ebook, and then, we left him alone and he went, uh, and did some performance, and he got a prize.

His parents were very happy. They wrote a nice letter and said, you, you've changed everything for him, he's, he's doing well. He's happy. So on. But this was after one session. And people say, how can you do all that after [00:14:00] just one session?

Now, with some difficult problems, it might take more than one session because if the technique fault is difficult to analyze and figure out exactly what's going on, and the new way is a bit of a guess, or the person may not be able to produce a new way because of, uh, physical limitations, or they're too young, or other reasons why they can't perform in the ideal way, in that situation, you would simply do a suboptimal, uh, an approximation to the really, really good way of doing this fingering, for instance. And then next time you take that and move it up to the proper, ideal way.

So you can do it in stages. It's a beauty of the, of the approach where you can get continuous improvement step by step over, uh, [00:15:00] successive sessions, when the person's ready.

Uh, again, there's a lot of judgment involved here. The steps in the method are clear, they're simple to apply. It's just a conversation. You say, do this for me. Tell me how this feels. Now do this. What's the difference? Those sorts of questions, which are easy to answer, it's all non-threatening.

It's not as if someone's dangling a carrot in front of you and trying to get you to do the right thing, because we're gonna give you this reward, uh, as in classical conditioning.

So the method is friendly, it's easy to follow, but it requires expert input to do with analyzing the error. Figuring out what it, what the person's doing wrong, what they should be doing, and what the differences are, the important differences.

Those are the three key questions in the Old Way New Way, [00:16:00] uh, protocol

Noa KAGEYAMA: It sounds like a very simple, straightforward sort of method, but my impression, having read your book and some of the studies on it that there's some important nuances involved that can be easy to miss or easy to kind of overlook. And, and I kind of wanna pick your brain a little bit on some of these.

I mean, because it sounds like the awareness piece is really huge, right? Awareness of the, the bad habit, if you will, or the old way, but also awareness of the new, more desirable way they're trying to learn to do.

And it also seems like it's not just like a cognitive understanding or awareness, it's not, this is maybe a silly example, but you know, if I have the habit of chewing with my mouth open, it's not just knowing that I'm chewing with my mouth open, but if I'm understanding it correctly, it's understanding or appreciating or having an awareness of how it feels to chew with my mouth open versus how it feels to chew with my mouth closed.

Paul BAXTER: You have to improve the awareness in order to bring it out of the unconscious because these habits are unconscious, right, until you're aware that you're [00:17:00] doing it.

Once you bring that unconscious level to a conscious awareness, then you can work on it and change it. One of the things is with, with the, pianist example we talked about, at one point I also said, now play with your eyes closed. Uh, don't worry about the notes, just play with your eyes closed so you can pay more attention to the tension that's building up in your shoulders and in your neck and in your arms. We found a useful approach in situations where it's often difficult for a person to figure out exactly how it feels, what they're doing wrong.

The eyes closed allows you to, to concentrate much more easily on what's happening physically.

The point is to get 'em to talk about what's happening. You know, how's it feel? This, this, what you are doing. And then you get into the labeling stage where you don't just say you're doing it wrong, or do it to me the wrong [00:18:00] way.

Do it in your own way. That's how we often begin.

One problem with that is they don't wanna do it wrong?

We had a famous case of a cricketer called Jason Gillespie. He had a problem with bowling. If you've ever seen cricket, there's a, you know, run up and you throw the ball and you, you do this twisting system, you throw it overhead. You don't throw it like a baseball pitch, you actually overhear.

And this, makes your back flex quite a bit. It's quite a heavy and sudden jerk.

Problem with Jason was, he was getting terrible back pains and these were threatening his career. So Harry worked with Jason out on the, on the cricket pitch and got him to, to correct this method, which, which worked very well. It was documented, written in the newspapers and everything.

But Jason didn't want to do it wrong, [00:19:00] and he said, I don't wanna do that, it hurts. Right? So the challenge for Harry was to get him to do it because you have to get him to do it wrong before you can take it any further and develop his awareness.

Harry basically explained what the problem was. And in the book we talk about that, what do you actually say to people when they say, oh no, I, I don't wanna do it that way. My teacher tells me, never do it that way again. It's wrong. You just do it this way, the correct way.

So Harry managed to persuade Jason that he had to simulate, but he did it at a slower pace, where it wasn't as painful. And that's the challenge for the teacher, for the coach, to figure out a way to get the person to do it when they are reluctant, which they often are, to do it wrong. It's your own knowledge and your experience as a professional that allows you to come up with an [00:20:00] idea of how do I make this person do it wrong when they really don't want to.

Noa KAGEYAMA: And the reason for being able to do it wrong is you wanna be able to do it wrong on purpose, so then you can do it correctly or the new way on purpose as well. And without it, without the ability to do it wrong on purpose, often it just kind of sneaks its way in?

I don't know if this is related to skill level or age, perhaps maybe there's a relationship, but do you ever run into problems where people have difficulty gaining that awareness of their old habit or the old way? I know you mentioned closing the eyes, but is sometimes, this is maybe the opposite of closing your eyes, but is sometimes showing them video of themselves helpful or maybe having them exaggerate the error to enhance, are those sorts of things helpful or are there other ways maybe of enhancing awareness?

Paul BAXTER: I think the video feedback is useful. It's a matter of appealing to all the senses, uh, to develop the awareness [00:21:00] in the touch, taste, feel, sound, uh, whatever seems relevant at the time, and the talk and the improved awareness with eyes closed and so on.

Don't think we've had cases where we couldn't make people aware of things.

It was even a, a situation when we had a potentially professional golfer, young fellow, who was uh, doing very well. He'd achieved a lot of things and he had, uh, potentially a great career ahead of him.

But his problem was anger management.

I'm going to this example because we're, we're talking not just about physical performance, but also what goes on in your head. And so he was angry when he mis hit and whenever he lost his temper, he would throw the, throw the clubs and all sorts of things, and then the game was finished, right?

So his dad was his coach and his best friend. Had no luck at all. Other coaches had no luck at all changing this. So dad came along and, he [00:22:00] said, can you come and see him?

So we spent time with him and we, the first thing was to get him to realize what made him angry. And so we got into a practice nets and he would hit a ball and I'd say hit it badly. Hit it incorrectly, hit it off target, uh, just do something wrong with it. And again, he was skeptical. He said, what do you, why do you want me to do it wrong? And I thought you were here to tell me how to do it right.

I said, yes, but we need to go through this process. And I explained to him why, gave him the background to the method. So he mis hit.

And then I said, well, when you mis hit, you get angry. I want you to get angry. I want you to do whatever you do when you get angry. And he was very good at that. And he, he would shout and rave and throw his club and so on.

And I said, now I want you this time to mis-hit, but I want you to think about, that it's [00:23:00] all right. Uh, I'm starting off. I'm young. It's all right to make a mistake, right?

So we went through these mental setups, these, these, um, mood questions. You, you're not angry anymore. It's all right. I'm allowed to make mistakes and talk like that, as if to diffuse the anger involved with the mistake.

So we spent time first getting him angry, and then we got him getting not so angry. And then we went through the rest of the process. I went away and, and father rang me up and he said, oh, I've got some news for you, Paul. It's actually a lot better. And I said, well, how much better do you think it is?

And he said, oh, well, it's almost a hundred percent, but I think you need to come back. So we came back, we repeated the process with him. I went through the same steps again, and [00:24:00] then next time he won a championship.

The mental aspects I think, are more challenging in some ways than just the physical awareness part of it, although that does come into it as well. So we tied the physical awareness with the emotions and the thinking that was going on in his head that was affecting his performance.

You, you can have a situation, an unhappy situation where the thing doesn't work. And then you have to say to yourself, okay, let's go back to the beginning.

Did I spend enough time developing the awareness of what he was doing wrong? If not, maybe that was it.

Uh, did I show him the new way of doing things, but he wasn't really capable, perhaps not ready, for physical or, or, uh, mental reasons. So you can revisit things and you might have to repeat the process.

Noa KAGEYAMA: So to see if I can [00:25:00] recap this, uh, thus far. So it sounds like developing an awareness of the old way is critical. Developing an awareness of the new way, also critical. And you mentioned, something about comparison of the two, which I want to ask you about in a second, but it also sounds like it's really important that the person be able to do the new way.

And if not, it sounds like a more doable version of the New Way is maybe the intermediate step before eventually adding the complexity of full complexity to that skill, which is perfect because the last podcast episode I did with a, a trumpet player and researcher named Micah Killian, that was the gist of the whole episode.

How to make things more doable, you know, for the time being so that you can build up to the more, uh, kind of complex version. So I like how these two things intersect.

The comparison of differences. I wonder if you can say a little bit about that 'cause it sounds like that's a key component of the protocol as [00:26:00] well.

Paul BAXTER: There are a number of steps involved where you compare the old way, with the new way. So again, it's a process of of having them do the old way.

You don't just discard it, ignore it. Because it's there and you can't teach a new way over the top of the old way. When you've got this habit pattern interference working against you and accelerated forgetting, it can take up to research indicates up to 2000 repetitions before you overcome an old way. I mean, that's a long, long process and it's a lot of frustration and it's, it's this adaptation period, isn't it?

And that person has to practice and practice and practice before they have any chance of the, the old habit going away and being replaced by the, the proper.

And to get into competition or have to perform for somebody and the problem's there. Uh, I can't think of anything more devastating, you know, to find that you're [00:27:00] making these mistakes, despite excellent teaching. So what we're offering, teachers, coaches, trainers, we're saying this is a, a way of dealing just with established habits.

It's not for teaching anything new. We're not into using Old Way New Way to teach you a new way. We're just saying it's only when you're going to a persistent, established habit that's interfering with your progress that you need to change. That's when Old Way New Way steps in.

It's a tool, it's a process, it's a method, but it's for particular situations where you've got a stubborn fault. It's persistent. It's not going away. Okay, let's use Old Way New Way.

Then you get into another interesting situation where if you have a person who's, uh, [00:28:00] come from another teacher, right? And maybe you think to yourself, hmm, well, okay, you are doing it this way, but i'm not sure if that's the best way for you. You need to change what they've been taught and that's a, a situation for Old Way New Way as well, where you can take the old skill, the old way of performing and then change it to the way that you prefer them to do it.

That's where the insight of the teacher, the expertise comes in. I think it's critical to the whole thing.

We've had the, the method where even in the hands of some experienced people they talk to me and they say, I, I did this and did that, and I wasn't happy with the result. We talk about what happened, and it turns out they didn't spend enough time developing awareness of the person's own way. Simple, but easy to forget so if people are using the method, [00:29:00] we say, look, when you are ready to use it, have the protocol steps beside you, right? So you follow them carefully.

Now, why do I need to be so strict with this? Well, because we find there's a human tendency to make the unfamiliar familiar. In other words, you change something here. You miss out something there. And you add something over there. And suddenly you find you haven't got the same process and then you, what do you do?

Oh, method's no good. The brain is designed to look at things and interpret. You interpret in a light of your own experience, and your own knowledge. And that's when, these changes happen automatically without you even [00:30:00] realizing it, and you're not looking at the same thing anymore.

So the advice then is to be strict with following the protocol. And be careful not to change anything or miss anything or add anything. And then you'll be able to judge that it can work for you effectively.

Noa KAGEYAMA: It sounds like a lot of the details end up being quite important, uh, in terms of getting that 80% success rate. You know, there's one last thing that I wanted to ask, before maybe we, we call it a day.

Do you ever run into issues where the, the teacher or the coach and the athlete or the musician or the student can't agree on what the problem is, or maybe the athlete or the student disagrees with what the problem is despite maybe the coach or the expert being correct as it were?

Paul BAXTER: Yes. Yes. That can happen. I probably would [00:31:00] prefer a situation where you have the student or the learner, and the teacher, and together they decide perhaps what the problem is.

I mean, in the end, I think it should be that the teacher's prerogative to say, no, I think that's not it. Maybe it should be this. Because we assume they have more experience.

The other thing that can hit you, is you come up with a new way and the change is wonderful. Everyone's happy. You've done 80%, you've maybe done a hundred percent after one session or two, and it still doesn't sound right.

So you're thinking, oh heck, we did all that, but it's, it's still not what it should be.

Now that's a, a signal that perhaps, ruling out lack of practice, after you come back two weeks, it's still not right, it could be that the new way wasn't right. In which case you might have to revisit the new way, or start again from the [00:32:00] beginning.

And people then say, oh, isn't this an awful lot of work? I mean, I'm just working on one little problem here and my student has so many problems. This can take forever, isn't it?

And I say to them, look, the other way is 2000 reputations with a new way. Take your choice!

At least, After one 10, 20 minute, half an hour session, perhaps at the most, you fix a problem, one of the problems.

That's not bad, you know, compared to the alternative. There's no adaptation period to worry about where you keep making mistakes and you're frustrated and you revert to your old way. Which is very much unlike traditional teaching and coaching and training.

So on, on that basis, it's user friendly. It works very quickly, you get at least 80% after one successful session, following all those steps, et cetera. [00:33:00] So what's not to love?

Noa KAGEYAMA: One last thing. Is there anything that I should have asked that I didn't ask that, uh, I missed?

Paul BAXTER: Oh gee. I suppose we should tell them where to get the ebook. And the way to do that is to go to a website called personalbest.au. It's all there for you.

There's also a troubleshooting section in case things don't go quite according to what you hoped.

And there's also the important sections that, apart from setting out the method, that say what the person should do after you finish with them, and when to review and what to do after the review. Also there's support. That's right. People say to me, do you offer support?

And yes we do. All I need to know if, if people want help with trying this out with, with someone or with themselves, which you can do [00:34:00] also, is, we need to know what's the person doing wrong? What should they be doing, and what are the key differences between those two? The more detail, the better.

So if you can talk about the fingering that's involved and what the instrument is and stuff like that, then I'll be happy to provide feedback by email. And I'll give whatever help people ask for. There's no limit on this, like with some software.

As long as I'm around, I'll be able to try and help out if I can.