CHANGE TOOLS SITE
Personal Best Academy is focused on the improvement of human performance.
We have developed a fresh approach to improving learning and transfer of training, eradicating bad or unsafe habits, accelerating transition and conversion training and correcting technique faults, misconceptions and other persistent errors.
We maintain that the main reason why motivated people have difficulty changing their skilled performance, behaviour, thoughts and beliefs is because they are the prisoners of habit.
Emerging research in cognitive psychology indicates that learned habit patterns influence and direct what we think and do every day of our lives. This includes our performance in sport or at work, our conceptual framework including any misconceptions; how we interact with others; and the thoughts and beliefs that guide our daily lives. All these learned behaviours, whether right or wrong, safe or unsafe, suitable or unsuitable, effective or ineffective, well adjusted or maladjusted, are under the powerful influence of habit forces.
As we all know from bitter experience, habit patterns are notoriously hard to change. Anyone who tries to change their established routines soon comes up against a powerful mental resistance which interferes, slows down, and sometimes even disables the desired change and improvement in performance and behaviour. The better someone has practiced, learned and therefore habituated the performance or behaviour; the harder it is to change.
Personal Best Academy uses and teaches Old Way/New Way® to help free people from the chains of habit and empower them to achieve their personal best.
From the description below, we can see that Old Way/New Way® is a powerful, cost- and time-effective yet very user friendly learning method that can change habit patterns quickly and permanently. Old Way/New Way® greatly reduces the typically extended and often risky adaptation period during which people try to adjust to change.
Since its inception in 1986, Personal Best Academy has provided training courses in Old Way/New Way® Learning to individuals, groups, organisations and corporations striving to achieve their personal best.
Recipients of Old Way/New Way® training include Olympic athletes and coaches; players and coaches of elite and recreational sports; pilots and flight instructors; drivers and driving instructors; firearms trainees and instructors; police departments; mining machinery operators and instructors; workplace operators and supervisors; employees and managers; musicians and music teachers; dancers and teachers of dance; school, college and university students and teachers; and children and parents.
The Academy offers training modules which are delivered as interactive self-paced online courses, courses on CD or face-to-face training workshops for small groups.
Personal Best Academy operates from Brisbane, Australia. Our customers are mostly from English speaking countries but include individuals, groups and organisations from many other nations across the globe.
Old Way/New Way® relies on well known learning principles. It is officially endorsed and gazetted by the South Australian Department of Education as a recognised and approved learning method (The Education Gazette, 1983, Vol. 11, No. 11, week ending 29 April, p. 289. Department of Education, South Australia.)
Basically, Old Way/New Way® Learning is a special way of practicing that greatly reduces the mental interference from established habit patterns and consequently accelerates learning and improves performance.
Old Way/New Way® is a novel synthesis and interpretation of existing and newly emerging cognitive science concepts and principles, including automaticity in behaviour (Bargh & Chartrand, 1999); learned errors (Reason, 1990); the influence of prior learning (Ausubel, 1968); metacognition (Flavell, 1987); and proactive inhibition and accelerated forgetting (Underwood, 1957; 1966).
Developed by Dr Harry Lyndon in the 1970's and later trademarked, Old Way/New Way® consists of a protocol or set of instructions. Much more than just a remedial method, this protocol accelerates cognitive and behavioural change within individuals and greatly reduces the typically prolonged adaptation period to the adoption of change.
Experienced Old Way/New Way® practitioners have adapted the original Old Way/New Way® protocol to a wide variety of learning and training situations, environments and individuals.
Current teaching, training, coaching and behaviour change methods can be quite effective when learning something new but are much less effective when changing something that is already established. Examples are an established work routine that is unsafe or has become inefficient; changing your faulty golf swing; or having to undergo type conversion training to change to a new aircraft. In such change situations Old Way/New Way® comes into its own and gets better results than other learning, training, coaching and behaviour change methods.
Whenever we want or have to change our beliefs, understanding and performance this presents special learning and training problems because old habits of thought and deed die hard. As an old flight instructor once said,
"The problem is not learning the new, it's forgetting [unlearning] the old."
Conventional learning, training and behaviour change methods typically come up against force of habit. This conflict between the old and the new produces a typically extended adaptation period. Even highly skilled and motivated people who diligently practice their new way despair when they find themselves repeatedly falling back to old ways and struggling to adapt.
During this adaptation period, their performance slows, concentration demands rise, errors increase, risk exposure increases and frustration levels rise. These are all signs of a brain in conflict; an all too familiar but completely unnecessary conflict.
For an in-depth discussion of the adaptation period in response to change; its effects on transfer of learning and training; and what kind of practice does make perfect, go here.
Old Way/New Way® bypasses the brain mechanisms that preserve old learning and that make old habits die hard. This learning method greatly accelerates change and improvement.
So, conventional learning, training and behaviour change methods should be used when learning something new and unfamiliar. Old Way/New Way® should be used when changing over to something that conflicts, or is likely to conflict, with what we already know and do, as in the correction of errors (technique/skill correction, poor or unsafe work habits, misconconceptions, behaviour change) and in conversion/transition training.
Published research, workplace trials and case studies over the last thirty years indicate that an individual who undergoes Old Way/New Way® training when trying to learn something new or change something already established, is able to make the change change after one or two brief learning sessions, provided that the problem was correctly diagnosed prior to the intervention and he or she follows the prescribed post-intervention self-correction routine.
Typically, after one successful correction session with Old Way/New Way®, an individual, group or team has an 80% or higher probability of performing in the new way; a 20% or lower probability of still performing in the old way; and a 90% probability of self-detecting an old way if and when it occurs and then self-correcting it.
The success of this change method and subsequent performance improvement or behaviour change depend very much on a correct diagnosis or identification of the "old" and "new" ways, i.e., what is the person doing now that has to change and what should they be doing instead?
Although the Old Way/New Way® protocol itself is not complicated to administer or follow, what comes before the intervention (i.e., the identification of the old and new ways) and what comes after (i.e., self-correction and follow-up) both require experience and expert knowledge of the change area concerned.
An example of habit pattern error correction. Correcting poor technique in the javelin throw requires expert input from both the athlete and his or her experienced coach. Athlete and coach have to identify exactly what things are wrong with the athlete's technique. They then have to identify the optimal technique for that particular athlete at his or her stage of development. These preliminary tasks precede the application of the change protocol and require sufficient knowledge and time.
Although the athlete will be enabled by the Old Way/New Way® protocol to change over to the "new" way, failure to correctly identify the "old" and "new" ways can compromise the entire change session and result in no improvement or, even worse, a drop in performance as measured by accuracy and length of the throw.
Another example, this time of transition training. An experienced aircraft pilot has to transition from an aircraft with analogue instrumentation to one with digital instrumentation. This is known as glass cockpit transition training.
Both examples illustrate the two situations where Old Way/New Way® can produce rapid and permanent change, namely when correcting established, habitual errors (habit pattern errors) and when changing over to a "new" way where
The "error" can be a performance error or misconception. These two are typically related because many performance errors start with a "wrong" idea or a faulty or incomplete mental model. In some situations, correcting the misconception is enough to also correct the associated performance error. In other situations, both the performance or action and its underlying wrong idea have to be corrected. This again illustrates the wide usefulness of Old Way/New Way® but also explains why practitioners need to be experienced interventionists and be mindful of all the possible complications. There are many traps for young players.
Old Way/New Way® is not only effective but also a flexible change tool because it can be used with individuals, groups or teams. There are important differences in the protocols when working with more than one individual at a time but the results are the same.
Another useful feature of Old Way/New Way® is that change and improvement can be achieved incrementally. Sometimes, an individual or group cannot make a big change all at once. For example, a young athlete may not have the physical capability or lack the readiness to adopt the "ideal" technique for his or her sport, so smaller, incremental improvements in technique can be made sequentially over several Old Way/New Way® sessions.
All this makes Old Way/New Way® a very useful and effective tool for change in all areas of human performance and behaviour.
"The problem is not learning the new; it's forgetting the old." Flight Instructor
"Old habits die hard." Proverb
"Practice makes permanent, not perfect." Warren Buffett
"Practising differences makes perfect." Harry Lyndon
Trainers, teachers, instructors and sports coaches try to get it right the first time with their students, trainees and athletes but invariably end up spending a lot of time trying to correct errors, misconceptions, non-compliance, technique faults and bad habits that somehow develop.
Because these errors were not corrected early, and were inadvertently repeated over and over (i.e., practised), many error patterns are actually learned, habitual and automatic and therefore much harder to eradicate.
For example, John always writes "recieve" instead of "receive"; Mike always has to be reminded to wear his safety goggles; Mary always slices her golf swing; Susan always follow cars too closely when driving; and Geoff is mentally still following the previous aircraft’s pre-flight checklist even though he's converted to another aircraft.
We all know that old habits die hard and many habit patterns are resistant to conventional change methods.
These limitations of traditional teaching and training programs are apparent in all settings including sport, workplace training, education, therapy and personal development.
Re-training or re-education, the typical solution to these problems, improves things only slowly, if at all.
Although learners may appear to pay attention during instruction and practice their new, correct, skills and knowledge over and over, the next day when placed under pressure or when unsupervised and left to their own devices, they seem to have forgotten what they’ve learned and the same habit pattern errors (old entrenched attitudes, beliefs, misunderstandings, work practices and routines, faulty procedures, poor techniques and unsafe behaviours) resurface.
A prolonged adjustment period and poor transfer of learning are the two most typical outcomes of education, training and coaching efforts worldwide.
All this wastes talent and resources and makes change and transition programs so much less cost-effective. There’s got to be a better way.
Fortunately, a cognitive science discovery called Old Way/New Way Learning offers:
1. A new perspective on the transfer of training problem.
2. A fast and practical method of transition training.
3. A cost-effective and user-friendly method for rapid skill and technique correction, and habit eradication.
This website introduces Old Way/New Way® Learning, including the basic theory underpinning the method, and available training programs in this unique approach to behaviour change and continuous improvement.
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Personal Best Academy. P.O. Box 197, Mt. Ommaney, Queensland, Australia 4074. ABN 59 613 458 509.
Learning Tools for rapidly improving transfer of learning and skilled performance in sport, workplace safety, work habits, nail biting and other personal habits, manual handling, driving, flight training, music performance, mental maps, spelling and reading.
KEYWORDS: habit patterns | error patterns | habit pattern errors | errors | misconceptions | mental maps | skill transfer | knowledge transfer | skill transitions | conversion training
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Updated Thursday 1 July, 2010