How Are You Wired? - Grasshopper

I was watching a TV show the other night, and one of the characters said to his brother, “I’m not built that way.” And I thought, yeah . . . my version of that is, “I’m not wired that way.”

And of course, that sent me down the rabbit hole of thinking about my own wiring. What I realized is that “wiring” is really just another word for “conditioning.” Same thing. Just a different label. So instead of saying, “I’m not wired that way,” you could just as easily say, “I’m not conditioned that way.”

And conditioning has a whole lot to do with how we react to life. We don’t sit down and design those reactions. We pick them up along the way. In fact, most of that conditioning happened long before we even knew what the word “conditioning” meant.

Most of it comes from our early caregivers – parents, family, teachers, role models. They didn’t hand us a syllabus called “How I’m Going to Shape Your Personality.” We just soaked it up. And we walked away thinking, “Well, that’s just who I am. That’s just me.” Almost like we were predestined to be that way.

The truth is, we were molded into that person.

Now, a lot of that molding is helpful. Some of it isn’t.

And it’s that “isn’t” we need to pay attention to – the part that gets in the way of connecting better with people or getting what we really want out of life.

So how do you change it? How do you recondition or rewire yourself?

Step one is simply noticing it. Catch yourself in the act. Realize, “Oh . . . this is just a conditioned reaction. I’ve been running this script for years.”

Step two is interrupting it while it’s happening. You see the reaction starting to roll, and instead of letting it run the show, you tap the brakes. Just that little interruption puts a wedge between stimulus and reaction, and maked room for a response.

And in that little space – that gap – is where creativity lives. That’s the place where you can choose something different. Instead of reacting the same old way that’s kept you stuck, you give a new response a chance to show up – one that might actually move you forward.

And who knows . . . you may even find you’ve just had a loose wire all along – something that simply needed to be reattached.

And when you reconnect it, you plug into a rewired version of you.