When you take a sip of your long black that they made way too hot, you might see a reflex arc kick in.
A “reflex arc” is a neural pathway that controls a reflex. A lot of times, sensory neurons don’t actually go into the brain for processing, they just synapse in the spinal cord.
This means that we can have a stimulus (the boiling coffee) and then a reflex (throw the cup, spit the coffee etc, while also trying to hide the whole act) all before the brain sees it.
The event happens, we react, then we learn about it.
While the reflex arc can be a life saver with the physical body, today, similar mechanism can hold us back in our everyday environment.
Public speaking, sales, taking a driving test, launching a new product can create a similar reflex – we can react: avoid, or recoil from this kind of exposure.
Fortunately, relative to the burning coffee, these social events are slow. We have a choice here to learn to process the situation differently.
The question really is, do we want to cultivate the ability to bypass these everyday “reflexes?”
How might this change our work?
