"It's like riding a bike." I've heard that phrase most of my life in relation to an action I've done many times before. The premise is that once you've learned to do something, you'll always know how. What you gain is something called muscle memory that can be triggered in the right situation to help you use skills your mind and body remember.
This is a transferable principle to other areas of our life even though it may not always be positive. If our learned response to stressful circumstances is a negative one, we will tend to fall back into those patterns. When we don’t have time to think about how we want to react our learned instincts take over.
Much like a poorly executed athletic movement, this doesn’t have to be a permanent reaction. We have the ability to learn something new, but need to be willing to invest the time and energy into developing a new skill set. This means we have to recognize our poorly formed habits, commit to learning a better method, and then continuing to practice it until it becomes our new reality. The increase in eventual positive response will make it worth our efforts.
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