Optimising learning and directing learning in positive directions is incredibly empowering.
This is the essence of the 6 Wheels Co-parenting programme - coaching you to apply positive interventions in your co-parenting relationship and maximise the effect them for enduring change.
The key to learning is that it’s fundamentally an emotional process, driven by threat and reward circuits that reside in the limbic system. The principle underlying learning is an evolutionary one - minimize danger and maximise reward. Your brain’s limbic system is constantly scanning your surroundings for things - or people - that have the potential to hurt or help you. When it finds them it makes mental notes that become our long term learning and memories.
Neuroplasticity and the fluidity of identity
Neuroplasticity is the big buzzword right now for good reason - it’s incredibly exciting! Through the use of modern functional MRI (fMRI) scans it’s now proven that we can direct change and rewire our brains. These fMRI scans show oxygen levels that correlate with activity in different parts of the brain, proving that the brain is a dynamic collection of systems and networks, cross-brain connections and complex lateral firing.
There is no “fixed self”, rather we are creative beings and we can choose to orient ourselves in new ways. In terms of neuroscience and co-parenting change, you have the freedom to become the co-parent you want to be, completely independent from the identity and behaviours of your co-parent.
“When we break away from fixed ideas about ourselves, everything becomes possible"
Skye Cleary
Neuroplasticity is the brain's ability to modify existing synapses, build new connections between neurons, and even generate entirely new neurons and neural networks through a process called neurogenesis. Neuroplasticity, at it’s most positive, is the key to self-empowerment. It allows you to overcome deeply entrenched behaviours and ways of thinking, and unhelpful relationship patterns.
How to maximise neuroplasticity for learning in the 6 Wheels interventions
If you want to actively change your brain and therefore your experience of life, passively experiencing things won't suffice. You can’t just go through the motions, thinking you’re “trying”, your mind wandering elsewhere, and expect your brain to learn anything.
Transformative co-parenting is also about the ‘unlearning’ of unhelpful, automatic responses. Fortunately unlearning and weakening connections is just as plastic a process as learning.
Raising awareness about what you want
Raised awareness is about consciously turning off your autopilot. It’s about moving beyond “this is how my life is” and being curious about what the life you really want could be like. It requires intentional thinking, visualising goals and the steps to get there, and the courage to let go of the fears that may be holding you back from taking the lead to go after your goal
2. Having a small beneficial experience
Beneficial experiences are enjoyable and/or useful. They’re also often novel and about having some fun, or finding a humorous perspective. Importantly, in these types of experiences dopamine is released in the brain, an essential ingredient in creating the conditions for neuroplasticity to occur.
In the 6 Wheels programme there are 18 evidence-based interventions or experiences designed to create a learning response and drive positive change in your co-parenting relationship. The interventions are also designed to be small. This is because small things are fun! Being asked to make big changes or take big actions often trigger our brain into a threat response, which shifts it into fight or flight, rather than a curious, open-minded position.
3. Focusing attention on beneficial experiences
The brain is dynamic, flexible and capable of rebuilding its pathways with dedicated effort. The essence of adaptive plasticity lies in the intentional redirection of focus and attention.
Enriching an experience is all about deliberately prolonging, intensifying or exploring an experience. This will strengthen its effect on the nervous system.
We need to learn how to learn from positive experiences because evolutionarily we’re already geared up to learn well (and fast!) from negative experiences. Stressful or emotionally negative experiences tend to sensitise us to these sorts of experiences through cortisol-related alterations in the hippocampus and amygdala.
4. Stepping into just-manageable challenges
The 6 Wheels interventions are designed to be largely just-manageable challenges, steering you off a known path to go down a slightly more demanding one. These challenges are growth-promoting stress - activities that take you out of your comfort zone. Importantly, stretching beyond your comfort zone triggers the release of noradrenalin and acetylcholine in the brain, the neurochemicals that feel like a “rush”, and stimulates high attention and awareness.
5. Deliberate practice - spinning those wheels!
Repetition is the crucial component here. 6 Wheels is a metaphor for repetition, setting something in motion that goes round and round, again and again, until it becomes automatic behaviour.
Neuroplasticity is directed by repetition so it's worth remembering that negative thinking can also become self perpetuating, for example, further embedding anxiety, obsessive thinking, etc.
6. Reframing failure
Often when we try new things we report back that we either succeeded or failed. I had a client who would repeatedly talk of trying things and seeing them as “an epic fail”. Here is a new perspective. There is no failure, only feedback. All results are achievements of some kind, it's just a question of whether it’s your desired outcome. And every action is part of an ongoing process of moving onwards and upwards.
For example, if a light switch doesn’t turn on a light, then use it as feedback not failure. Perhaps the bulb is blown, perhaps the power is out, perhaps the wiring is damaged. If you view every undesired result as a failure you’re going to spend a lot of time in the dark. Instead of “epic fail”, pivot yourself back to a curious approach and ask yourself “what did or didn’t change? In what way specifically didn’t it work? Is there something different I could do or learn?”
In neuroscience, feeling frustration at unexpected results is a good thing as it invokes a highly alert and focused state in the brain, and releases epinephrine and acetylcholine. However it’s essential to follow frustration with a positive emotion to trigger dopamine, eg simply saying to yourself, “ok what can I learn from this?” If you move from frustration to thoughts of “epic fail”, all your brain is learning is to avoid doing this sort of activity again. Really unhelpful if you’re wanting to become a leader of change!
7. Positively internalising the experiences
We have a human tendency to dwell and ruminate on the things that go “wrong” and often gloss over the things that go well. However, by fostering a feeling of reward and positive emotion from an experience, the learning from the experience tends to rise as well.
By spending time reflecting on the beneficial effects of the 6 Wheels interventions (or simply finding humour in the experience), this also triggers a feeling of novelty in the brain. Novel experiences trigger dopamine to be released in the brain, an essential component of neuroplasticity.
...............
The goal is to lean into the conditions of neuroplasticity to maximise the learning benefits from the 6 Wheels interventions.
New positive behaviours will stick when they become habits, automatic, triggered by a cue to your unconscious that tells it to activate a particular routine. Sustainable habits depend on triggers.
If you're the type of person who describes your co-parent as "triggering", then great! In a 180 degree pivot, embrace it as a new positive. The 6 Wheels programme is about positive new behaviours you're going to choose as part of the co-parenting identity you want. And these behaviours are effectively going to be triggered by your co-parent.