Behavioural Patterns
By Bronwyn Bowery-Ireland
On the 29th December 2007 my family and I embarked on a new journey. We packed up all our worldly goods and moved to Shanghai. We spent the first few weeks travelling and staying in serviced apartments. The time came when we all strongly felt the need to find a place of our own to call ‘home’.
So the hunt for an apartment began and eventually we found the ‘perfect’ place for us to live. We have all settled into it remarkably well, enjoying exploring the new space and designing the layout of each room. It was at this point of our journey that I started to notice that being in a new space and a new country gave me some distance to observe myself. This may sound like a rather unusual thing to say. The reason why I say it is because we live so close to our behaviours and patterns of life that we are inseparable from them and therefore cannot always ’see’ what we do.
Moving to a new place is a little like placing your life under the microscope or magnifying it. When you place your patterns of behaviour into a new context they automatically change. The context in and of itself creates the change.
But let me give you an example of what I mean and it is not an example based on a business activity but an everyday domestic activity.
I have always enjoyed giving dinner parties and I would always pride myself on having an extremely well stocked pantry. My guests only just had to mention something they like and I could provide it. Or if guests dropped in unexpectedly I could whip up a feast within minutes. To be able to provide such a service required well thought through planning and an extensive shopping list of goods. I would shop once a week and stock up so as to always be prepared.
Now place my life in China. I don’t have a car so I have to rethink my shopping trips. Also the cuisine in China is built around shopping daily for fresh produce. Stocking up would require me to turn myself into a pack horse and carry all the shopping home. So I had to rethink my whole concept of shopping. What I realised was that instead of planning for the coming week or even two weeks I had to just plan for the day. Shopping for the day reduces the amount you carry and ensures you are eating fresh produce as opposed to processed foods. This concept, of not eating processed foods, had followed me from Australia and so I immediately saw the benefit in living this way. And then here is where I noticed a significant shift in my behaviour. I started to think only of today. To get in touch with what I felt like on that day and what my family felt like. We started to respond to our bodies in what they needed.
This may not sound like a significant change in behaviour but for me it felt quite large. First I actually felt the pressure of not having to plan ahead as really freeing. Then the feeling grew to a feeling of simplifying my life. Making it less complex, making it more about living in the moment.
And of course you can see from this very small example that it made me begin to look at other behaviours or habits in my life. It placed me in a position to decide whether I wanted to keep certain behaviours or to change them. At ICA we call these behaviours Underlying Automatic Commitments (UAC’s). They are the habits that we have held for so long and they are so close to us that we don’t recognise them, we can’t see them anymore.
For me coming to China has given me some space to see my UACs’ and to decide what I do or don’t like about them. How they do or don’t support me. The next challenge for me is to not miss this opportunity, to not be afraid of change, to embrace the chance of getting to know myself better. It feels a little too easy to just continue in the ‘old way’ of doing things. Certainly at times it would feel safer but this is just a veneer, a chance to feel okay in that moment rather than for a life time.