Research Paper By Josh Hersh
(Transformational Coach, UNITED STATES)
Introduction
Which came first, the chicken or the egg? This is a philosophical question thinkers have been asking as far back as Aristotle in 384 BC. Taken at face value, this dilemma can simply be about a chicken and an egg. But widening this question, one may begin to ponder the beginnings of the universe and how life started in the first place.
For now, I’ll reel this dilemma in just a little bit. We’ll set aside questions about the origins of the universe. Instead, I want to turn you attention to the art of coaching and how clients go about changing their own behavior. How they go from doing one sets of tasks and actions to shifting their behavior so that their tangible actions support their overall goals.
It sounds really simple on the surface. If someone wants to get in shape, they need to exercise. If a person wants to eat healthier food, they need to consume more nutritious food. Yet, when we look across the cultural landscape today, especially in the United States, multi-billion dollar industries are sustained by people desiring to get in shape and to eat healthier. While there are certainly success stories of people transforming their bodies and eating habits, even more find themselves stuck, unsure of why they are unable to enact the change they desire.
One of the most standard beliefs in the personal growth space is that thoughts lead to emotion, which lead to actions. Now, I’m not disagreeing with this, but I am beginning to discover that there may be a way to short-circuit this traditional route. A sort of “life hack” or work-around, where we flip this notion on its head. Instead of beginning with thought, which many people get mired in like a muddy swamp, what if we encouraged our clients, instead, to begin with physical action and let the mind follow?
What is Embodied Cognition?
First, this topic caught my attention after coaching person after person who wanted to make a change in their life. These clients would continue to ask the big “why” question. Such as, “Why haven’t I been able to workout? Why can’t I eat healthier?” Why, why, why. I’ll be honest, I got a little frustrated, at times, hearing this same thing over and over again. After some time, I realized this was a question I often asked myself.
What if we threw this “why” out the window? Do we even need to really know why we aren’t doing an action that we say we want to do? This is where I believe embodied cognition comes into the picture.
Put simply, embodied cognition is “the idea that the mind is not only connected to the body, but that the body influences the mind”.[i]
When I first stumbled upon this definition, it ignited a flame within me; a familiarity that was already on the tip of my tongue. See, as a coach, and as someone who hired coaches in the past, there seems to be this underlying belief that the mind (or the brain) is the one entirely running the show.
That if we only think hard enough or long enough or “figure it out”, we can trick our mind into convincing our body to do what we want it to do. It seems like a one way street, where our mind is constantly telling our body what to do.
Research, however, is telling us another story.
We’ll start with this quote from Shaun Gallagher, the director of cognitive science program at the University of central Florida: “It (embodied cognition) is a revolutionary idea. In the embodied view, if you’re going to explain cognition it’s not enough just to look inside the brain. In any particular instance, what’s going on inside the brain in large part may depend on what’s going on in the body as a whole, and how that body is situated in its environment.”[ii]
This is an enticing flipping of the traditional view of how the mind and brain work together or, in the minds of many people, against one another. Gallagher, through his research, has found that what goes in our brain and mind is likely influenced by the state of our body, as well as the physical environment around us.
Think about it. When we’re in a hot, desert-like environment, sweltering from the heat and sweating, we’re going to feel different than if we were in a cool, comfortable place. Now, environment doesn’t have to determine how we feel, but we must acknowledge that our bodies have an impact on how we think.
Linguists, such as George Lakoff, of the University of California Berkeley, posits that “if we had wheels, or moved along the ground on our bellies like snakes”[iii], cognition and how we view the world might be very different. The metaphors we use, such as “up” is “good” and “down” is “bad” makes sense to us because of our embodied nature as humans.
Psychologist Esther Thelen adds, “To say that cognition is embodied means that it arises from bodily interactions with the world. From this point of view, cognition depends on the kinds of experiences that come from having a body with particular perceptual and motor capacities that are inseparably linked and that together form the matrix within which memory, emotion, language, and all other aspects of life are meshed.”[iv]
From Philosophical To Practical
All of this business about embodied cognition might sound a little lofty and far fetched, so let’s bring it back to everyday reality. Let’s ground these ideas in the real world of coaching.
As I mentioned above, what I’ve found from coaching is that clients often get caught up in their minds. They go around and around about why they aren’t taking a specific action, which ends up depleting even more of their energy. Since I kept seeing this pattern from my own clients, I decided to do a little experiment in my own life.
Throughout winter, I rarely exercised. One of the perks of living in Chicago is being able to wear as many layers as we need in order to stay warm. What does that mean? Being able to eat and drink as you like, without worrying about getting into a bathing suit anytime soon. Well, as spring draws near, the temperatures start to rise and this experiment of mine seemed like the perfect time to test it out.
Instead of worrying about or thinking through why I didn’t workout up until this point, I just started doing it. I made a whole-hearted, firm decision that I would act different. I would move. In the first week, I decided to workout for 10 minutes, without any judgment about that being a short amount of time. I reasoned that it’s okay to begin where I’m at, as opposed to working out for 50 minutes or more and burning myself out within a few days.
So each day, I let go of the why questions and just started moving my body. There wasn’t a whole lot of thinking about or meaning-making about why I was going to workout, I just decided to do so and wanted to see what would come of it. Each morning, I wasn’t wasting mental energy asking, “Will I workout today?” It became a known fact that I would.
Within the first few days, I could already tell it was making a difference. I walked with a little more intensity, wasn’t winded after walking up a flight of stairs, and my clothes even fit the tiniest bit better.
In the past, I would have re-worked in my head, over and over, about why I wasn’t working out. It was mentally exhausting and left me at the same place that I was when I started the mental games: not moving.
As Lakoff mentioned above, movement is foundational to who we are as humans. We weren’t designed to be sedentary. If we look at the history of mankind (and womankind), we see tens of thousands of years of movement. Whether that was cultivating grains, killing prey, or building cities, our DNA as humans has embedded within this urge for physical movement.
From a coaches perspective, what if we asked our clients to set aside the “why” questions around why they aren’t creating habits they say they want to live into? Here is an opportunity to shift our client’s energy and focus from why to what. What will they now do with the why question out of the picture?
What Is Physically Stopping Us?
Having listened to many of my clients have angst about why they weren’t doing a specific action, I started to ask them (and myself) this question: What is physically stopping you from working out or cooking healthier meals?
All of them said, “Nothing”. A few said they weren’t sure what to cook or a workout they would enjoy. Even this acknowledgment opened an opportunity for me, as the coach, to ask questions so they could explore and gain that needed knowledge.
But every client agreed that there wasn’t a person in their home, holding them to their couch. There weren’t chains wrapped around their ankles, tying them to their desk. All of my clients were physically well and able to take a physical step toward their goals.
If there is nothing physically stopping us, then what is?
This seems to be different for every person. Sometimes it’s perfection, while other times it’s judgment. Some of my clients are really hard on themselves, while others are afraid of failure. All of these different reasons can be useful in giving our clients more awareness and learnings about themselves, but even these realizations can leave them in a state of physical idleness.
What I have taken from my clients, as well as myself, is that we tend to easily block ourselves physically when we allow our self to be directed almost solely by our brains.
We may spend hours, days, weeks, or even years, wondering why we aren’t doing a specific action. Again, this takes tremendous amounts of energy. While all along, we could have simply decided to take a single action and be that much closer to our larger goal.
The Importance and Power of Decisions
As I continued to meander along this path, poking at these questions of how the mind stops us and the power of physical movement, I kept coming back to decisions.
From my own little experiment of exercising, there is a great deal of power in decisions.
What I hear in the answers of many of my clients is that, on some level, they are uncertain about making a physical movement toward their goal. They go back and forth within this middle, gray area of “maybes”, shoulds, or “coulds”.
Instead of putting a stake in the ground, deciding their intention, they remain non-committed to the action they truly desire.
What I found to be the case in my own experiment is that when I decided to exercise five days a week, something started to shift. There needed to be a moment of absolute yes or absolute no. Was I going to workout five times per week or not? No more of this in-between pondering and pandering. I was either all in or not in at all.
Prior to making a decision, I would wake up each morning, asking myself whether I was going to workout or not. A part of me would want to, a part of me didn’t really feel like it, and nine times out of ten, I ended up not working out. There was this constant negotiation going on within my mind. Making a decision in advance saved me from more mental anguish and decision making, which takes time and makes the act of working out feel even harder. Because not only did I need to physically move my body, but prior to that, my mental gymnastics left me feeling physically and emotionally tired. And I hadn’t moved at all!
Imagine a world in which we did the opposite of the convention, “think before you act”. When it comes to the goals and what we really desire in life, what if we began to act before we thought everything through? This might not be the most ideal strategy in every case, but in my experiment, there is something to it.
Physical Movement Improving the Mental Game
Lawrence Barsalou, and Emory psychologist and a leading researcher of grounded cognition, emphasizes that “all states of your body affect how you think”.[v]
All of us find this to be true, but we normally think of examples of when we’re in pain. Breaking a limb or having chronic pain can really wear on a person’s psyche. Day after day, the physical pain has the ability to eat away at our emotional and mental states.
The good news is that it isn’t one or the other. Mind and body can and do work together in a mysterious way. What I want to challenge myself as a human and my clients, is to lean into the physicality of their body.
There is plenty of science that suggests have a strong body leads to a strong mind, which in turn can impact every area of our lives. What if putting nutritious food in your mouth (a physical movement) leads to more clear thinking and more energy throughout the day?
Conclusion
As I move forward with my own coaching practice, my hope is to continue to explore the ways in which the body can impact the mind. Experimenting by leading with the body instead of the mind. This method seems particularly effective for those, like myself, who tend to overthink any and every situation. Instead of overthinking, take some sort of physical action and see what happens. I am encouraged that through this research, I will be able to further serve my own clients.
End Notes
[i] McNerney, S. (2011, November 11). A Brief Guide to Embodied Cognition: Why You Are Not Your Brain. Retrieved from http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2011/11/04/a-brief-guide-to-embodied-cognition-why-you-are-not-your-brain/
[ii] Bennett, D. (2008, January 13). Don't just stand there, think. The Boston Globe. Retrieved from http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/01/13/dont_just_stand_there_think/?page=full
[iii] Bennett, D. (2008, January 13). Don't just stand there, think. The Boston Globe. Retrieved from http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/01/13/dont_just_stand_there_think/?page=full
[iv] Cowart, M. (n.d.). Embodied Cognition. Retrieved March 18, 2015, from http://www.iep.utm.edu/embodcog/
[v] Clark, C. (Ed.). (2010, February 4). Grounded cognition gives your mind a hand. Retrieved from http://esciencecommons.blogspot.com/2010/02/give-your-mind-hand.html
[1] McNerney, S. (2011, November 11). A Brief Guide to Embodied Cognition: Why You Are Not Your Brain. Retrieved from http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2011/11/04/a-brief-guide-to-embodied-cognition-why-you-are-not-your-brain/
[1] Bennett, D. (2008, January 13). Don't just stand there, think. The Boston Globe. Retrieved from http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/01/13/dont_just_stand_there_think/?page=full
[1] Bennett, D. (2008, January 13). Don't just stand there, think. The Boston Globe. Retrieved from http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/01/13/dont_just_stand_there_think/?page=full
[1] Cowart, M. (n.d.). Embodied Cognition. Retrieved March 18, 2015, from http://www.iep.utm.edu/embodcog/
[1] Clark, C. (Ed.). (2010, February 4). Grounded cognition gives your mind a hand. Retrieved from http://esciencecommons.blogspot.com/2010/02/give-your-mind-hand.html