I have opened the Zoom for my college composition student at 12:00 every week this semester.
Only problem is, it’s at 12:30. My student knows this. My calendar knows this. I know this. But at some point early in the semester, I locked it in at 12:00, and I can’t seem to get past that.
There’s nothing particularly wrong about this particular mistake – especially with it landing me in front of my desk, I find myself able to get an extra half-hour of work time in – time that I might have spent less productively.
But there are plenty of other situations when a concept gets locked into our minds, and then sits there, undermining our success. Locked in ideas could be a note learned wrong, an outdated teaching strategy, a way of communicating with a loved one, or an assumption about someone’s personality and perspective.
Whatever they are, they are hard to overcome once they’re locked in – because our brains tend to retread the same paths, over and over. If you’ve cleared the path, you’ll follow it next time.
For me, there isn’t much hope of fixing the lesson schedule lock in before the end of the semester. (I got it right last week, but now I’m writing my daily post during the 12:00-12:30 slot my locked-in brain has given me.)
But if it was of more consequence, or I had more time left, I would commit to unlocking that pathway, and relearning a better solution. To fix it takes recognizing the mistake, committing to fix it, and most importantly, repeatedly practicing the new path.