Traditions, Conservation and Innovation: the Role of Tradition in Skill Building and Self-Regulation

Ep 68. Explore the significance of tradition in skill preservation and self-regulation. Understand how deeply embedded behaviors affect reactions and learn to evaluate their relevance in modern contexts for improved self-awareness and growth.

Tradition often evokes images of family gatherings and preservation of valuable skills across generations. In skill development, traditions play a crucial role in conserving knowledge that withstands time, ensuring its relevance beyond passing trends or obsolete practices.

When it comes to self-regulation skills, our behaviors and reactions can be deeply rooted in tradition, sometimes leading to overreactions in situations that might otherwise be inconsequential. It's essential to introspect and question whether these 'traditions' of behavior still serve us well in today's context.

Reflect deeply, evaluate the relevance of these traditions, and pave the way for personal growth. Start your journey towards better self-regulation today. Walk Well. 

Transcript

Welcome back folks to episode 68 of the Running Man Self-Regulation Skills Project with me, your host, Dr. Armando Dominguez, PhD in Health Psychology, licensed professional counselor and an adjunct professor at our local community college. And what we're going to be discussing today that is particularly relevant to self-regulatory skills generally, and very specifically to those that are more skill-oriented as in requiring practice.

versus thought process where we're training and condition our body to learn a new way of doing things. There are three aspects of self-regulation principle that I'd like to add and I will give credit where credit is due listening to a podcast by Mr. Wiley, Dr. Mark Wiley, I'm not mistaken, martial artist, but he was interviewing Mr. Russ Smith and both of them high level.

artists but the principles that they brought about were things that I thought would be very useful in the realm of self-regulatory skill and these are the ideas that we're going to be working with today. The first one is tradition, the second is innovation, and the third is conservation. Now let's start the discussion with what is a tradition? What is something that we would consider traditional? And this isn't just family

ways and mores and village practices, this sort of thing, and it can be. But we'll start with that. What are some things that we would consider a tradition that maybe has been passed on within a family, within a group, maybe even within a certain town or country? Well, if you roll around and travel a bit, you realize that there are some things that Dr. Morris, someone whom I followed his work for a long time, called colloquial differences.

We're discussing colloquium, that means what's going on commonly amongst people. Not only the way we act, but the way we speak. Everyday things that we don't so much as give a second thought to, but we just kind of do. And we assume those. And from the social influence perspective, by observational learning along the lines of what Van Durer called vicarious learning, by watching. We don't even have to be taught, we kind of assume these things. Now, the colloquial differences

armando (02:49.443)
that we will call tradition are things that often, whenever elevated to the point of remembering something and doing something, tradition is often aligned with memory, remembrance, and sometimes with things that are very important. Sometimes things that are very emotionally heavy or intense, such as the passing of a loved one, an anniversary, and the tradition of remembering things such as a holiday, not unlike Thanksgiving.

Christmas and Fourth of July here in the United States that we participate in generally. But there are things that we bring about that often are memories more than anything. And one thing about tradition is that there can also be a darker aspect to it and not in the evil sense, but rather one where there is an occulted knowledge or a loss of knowledge or understanding. When traditions are empty or they're just practice, but nobody remembers why they started them,

Those are no longer living traditions. That means that those things aren't necessarily adding to the knowledge base, practical knowledge base, and it may not be practical anymore because we've lost our understanding. It may have started with a good thing to start with and from the perspective of martial arts, of which I was very blessed to have learned from real teachers that actually taught me what the meanings of the movements were such that whenever I would do a form or a kata or a kun or set of movements, a juru for the Indonesian methodologies.

where you're doing something somewhat from the outside, not knowing, say that it's a dance. Well, if you're only doing it in the sense of doing the motion and not understanding why, then it becomes quite empty and it could be lowered to a level of just mere repetition of movements and loss of meaning and understanding means that there's a loss of applicability and power. But for now, that's kind of the beginnings of what we're going to understand as tradition from personal

individual to actual practical skill things that involve not only a bit of knowledge, maybe a lot, but an understanding of that, an application thereof if there is something to be applied, and then also the aspect of the loss of understanding of that tradition of why we do that. Now the next term that we're going to use is going to be closely tied to the aforementioned tradition is innovation. What is it that we are doing with knowledge, for instance, that is innovative?

armando (05:13.064)
And you can innovate and not necessarily change the foundation or base of the knowledge. And that's a cool thing. But also with innovation, there comes an understanding that if we are a teacher of said skill, knowledge or tradition, that we're making the learning clearer, making it easier, easier to understand, also easier to learn. We're not necessarily making the knowledge easier to bear or to acquire in the sense of the effort, but rather

having the outcome more effectively be arrived at by the students so to speak because we know how to teach it better. Science has done much of this with exercise. Exercise science is phenomenal. There are things that we're learning as far as how to teach and how to gain skill and less time. Now this doesn't mean that we become impatient and we don't learn the discipline of how to develop a skill such as weight lifting.

or running, dead lifting in particular is quite the discipline or even a martial art or even walking. But learning what is not only appropriate but correct that would encourage a person to continue and therefore develop skill over time and you're still going to have time to develop but the skillfulness coming out of a position of conscious incompetence to a level of conscious competence but at a higher level and moving in the direction of unconscious competence.

in a quicker way. You may not arrive at the highest level of skill sooner in the sense of in comparison to somebody that's already been there for 30 years, but you'll get to those levels that may have taken them longer as a result of that clarity of how to teach, but also how to sophisticated the learning process so that there's less effort required to gain skill more quickly. But once again, that doesn't mean mastery all of a sudden to the equivalence of a 30-year practitioner of said skill.

But the understanding, once again, innovation is about making the learning easier. And I love to hear of teachers of physical skills, martial skills, and also instructors in academia that can teach you the understanding more quickly. So this is a phenomenal idea that we'll revisit here shortly. Now the next term is conservation. So to conserve, of course, is a synonymous term to preserving.

armando (07:36.674)
And when it comes to preserving a skill or a way of doing things, this is really very critical because there are certain things, for instance, that are traditional in, let's say, learning how to make certain types of food and processing food for storage. Or let's even say martial arts, once again, where my backdrop comes from, that I get more from my skill and understanding from. And what is it that we're trying to preserve or conserve?

that is so important that we not lose that into the next generation. Well, this is very close to traditions per se, but if we're conserving something, are we just conserving the outer shell of something such that it is only the trappings of, but not necessarily filled, it's empty. It is a dead tradition, so to speak. If we're conserving the actions, but don't have the understanding, the conservation and the effort in the conservation

to preserve a tradition is fruitless, it's pointless, and it's a waste of time at that point. Doesn't mean that there's not a lovely coming together of people, but if we no longer understand why we did this from the initiation, or what started us doing that, then we've lost a great deal, whether it be knowledge, skill, and maybe even time, if we really think about it. So conservation is the preservative aspect of developing

a way of keeping skill alive that is very close to the innovative part of how we teach it, but also in the traditional sense, being able to pass it on with a degree of understanding. Now these things are very closely tied, but often they're not separated. And that's why I was so happy to be listening to Mark Walley's podcast when he was talking to Russ Smith about the physical skills of a martial art and the content, understanding what the movements mean, not just following through and

doing a rote repetition without understanding why you do it. are many people that I've trained with that through kata, a way so that it's useless. And MMA is way to go. Well, know, MMA is an aspect of application if they're wrong with that, but kata plays its role, but it's also a textbook. If you don't understand what the movement means, well, no kidding, you're going to feel silly doing something, especially if you're wearing the white pajamas of karate. And the key, mind you, I'm not disparaging it because I've worn one and I continue to keep them.

armando (10:01.456)
But it does not embarrass me because I do know that I'm practicing a skill and I've understood why I do those so there has been no embarrassment or feeling like somebody's watching my my flaws as a result of my not knowing what I'm doing or why I'm doing it and then whenever it comes to application starring well, I don't fight the way I can then there is a loss of understanding and definitely there is a lack of

Practical effect and therefore people don't want to waste time in that much rather do something like boxing where there's impact and Things like that where you're working with somebody, but you're not working alone. So that is one of the greatest Things that I've seen as far as traditions becoming empty where somebody teaches without full understanding or they're rough to teach and they can memorize moves But they can't tell you what to do with them or when they fall apart when they work best and when not to use them

So there's a lot that goes along with that. Now, as far as family type traditions, why is tradition so important? Often we think tradition and we think about people coming together for holidays and doing things together like going out and fishing on the lake the first summer of June and we get together and have like a family reunion. Those are beautiful things. But even those things have a start. And they also have a little midpoint where we have an understanding as to why we do it and then

the later generations that come to it might find it pointless because they didn't have the same motivations that the initiators of the tradition may have had. Now, if it's about sharing family, those aren't hard to pass on. It's about sharing family time. That's okay, but not everyone enjoys it the same way. We have differences of person, personality, and opinion, and what we like and dislike, and these change with generations too. So what we would consider a useful tradition

get people together may have actually had to do with making sure that everybody was healthy and we might have all gone to go work in the fields or do something for a while and then we'd celebrate afterwards because of the ending of the harvest this sort of thing so there's something to think about when it comes to tradition. Now what we're going to discuss now is the application of these three ideas to self-regulatory skill. How is this helpful? Well I can tell you it's very helpful in this sense. If we are learning a skill

armando (12:25.124)
that is something that we can show to someone. I would say that generally speaking, self-regulatory skills are things that we learn very young. But it doesn't mean you can't learn it as we get older. They just take a little more practice because we have the backup of experience. And we'll call this the biological tradition in quotes. And that's my term. That it is our reactivity. It is our experience. It makes us sensitive.

It is also those things that we've had happen to us that make us more sensitive to things than let's say the general public because it hurt and I'm trying not to have that happen again and if there is in essence a tradition in quotes or reactivity that comes up frequently enough and it's familiar then we try to avoid those things that bring that up and the avoidance is the practical skill. The avoidance becomes the tradition in a sense because it's repeated and we understand why we do it.

But it's an empty tradition to an observer on the outside in the sense that they may not know why you're avoiding. And you may not want to talk about it because you're not comfortable. It's not something that you owe everybody. But think about regulatory skills in this sense, that these are the things that help us overcome those individual situations where we may feel like we'd be judged, where we feel like all eyes are on us, which is actually a symptom of anxiety. We become very,

attentive to people's eye movements even if they're not involving us and we become very self-centric. Not selfish, self-centric in the sense that I feel like everyone's looking at us and they're known as bigger and I'm somehow smaller in that physical environment that I'm enduring. So those repetitions of responses and reactions, correctly reactions, they become like a tradition. And at some point it takes off and it becomes a living thing in that we can't stop it, it becomes very powerful.

Of course, that depends on the environment, but now I'm to avoid things. Maybe I self-medicate. Maybe I'm doing things like getting angry and irritating people so they don't want anything to do with me. Or maybe I isolate because I just feel safer as a result. Now you notice that these are things that I've mentioned that are often practiced. They're often repeated. So not unlike the traditional, we gain skill in them by virtue of the fact that we've done more than once. Even if it's not intentional on purpose or we do it as a result of our intent.

armando (14:45.184)
and I on purpose do it because I want to feel safer and I don't want to feel like that. And I'm trying to avoid those things that bring that up. So the sense of self-rejectory skill tradition, in quotes, is that behavior, that feeling, or that sense that I may get that is repeated often enough. And sometimes traditions are hard to break, aren't they? And there are certain traditions that are tied to emotional warm fuzzies and senses of love and acceptance of being part of the tribe and the family.

They can also be very isolating in the sense that how we have our inner traditions, so to speak, our inner practices, we have to understand why am I keeping that up? Well, part of it's survival thing and sometimes it's fast, are we by avoiding fixing it, conserving a tradition that may not serve us anymore? That's the idea. And yes, I would say indeed, exactly that.

By virtue of avoiding trying to gain skill and overcome those difficulties, we are conserving a tradition that is an unhealthy tradition within our body, within our mind, within our emotions and self. So what is the innovation? How does this apply? Self-regulatory skills. Well, by virtue of the fact that we learned so much from neuroimaging, we have gained an understanding of parts of...

brain firing whenever we're thinking certain things. Mind you, this doesn't bridge the gap to understanding consciousness, but rather we know where sugar is being metabolized as we're thinking certain things, remembering certain things, whether we're looking at a picture that makes us scared and gasped or something that makes us happy and giddy or something like totally random and maybe have a sense of ambiguity and confusion that makes areas light up that have to do with I can't identify that or maybe something pops up so fast.

that we treat it as potentially dangerous and our heart rate goes up because we can't afford to treat something as good like it's good if it's coming in so fast and I can't identify it. So innovation once again that has stemmed from neuroimaging, innovation that has come from the meditation schools that have been around for thousands of years that our current psychological science has kind of lifted literally as it should, mind you, but I'm just making fun.

armando (17:09.23)
of the fact that we're Johnny-come-lately's in the psychological field for the most part, but the folks that have done the meditation and the quieting and the skill gaining of the people that actually practice physical training such as running long distance or doing weights or swimming, this sort of thing, where we condition our body tend to be a little less reactive to emotional things. We may do things that are hard, but the endurance we develop develops resilience within us. We know that.

If we can deal with physical resilience on the outside, we are less apt to be sensitive to the things that are conceptions of stress, conceptions, ideas, subjective things that we call thoughts that might be stimulating to us in a good way, or it could be scary to us, or it could be irritating. That it brings on our sense of expectation and our ideas of predictive programming that based on past behaviors

that we can kind of trust what people are going to respond like. Of course, that's still an average and still kind of a gamble. It's not a perfect descriptor of what's going to happen next. can't predict perfectly. All you mind readers out there, or those that think you are, and I'm not going to get into that, but I'm just making some fun. But the fact of the matter is that these three aspects of tradition are great principles to put together whenever we're applying. How am I going to improve myself? One.

What do I want to stop those negative traditions, inner traditions on the inside? And how can I innovate by learning things that are brought on not only by science but by the meditative self-regulatory schools such as like the Zen, the Taoist traditions, the Hezekastism that came more from the Eastern European Christianity that teaches the be still and know. Be still and know that I am God for those that are religious. And also

being still and controlling the breath, not just holding the breath, mind you, and also working on the deep exhalation beyond what the inhale is. And that actually will activate the sympathetic nervous system. That is something that doesn't require step one, step two, step three. And then you have skill. We already have this. This is something that we're not skilled in the sense by gaining it by virtue of thinking how to breathe.

armando (19:37.87)
but rather it's our internal endowments, our genetic endowment, we know how to cool our system. Even those that struggle with frequent anxiety can manage the stress levels that they have and make them better. It may not erase them perfectly, but it'll certainly have a very palpable impact on that will improve your quality of life and the quantity of quality things in your life because you're able to engage in them more. Is practice required?

All things that are good require time and effort. They don't come easily require engagement and We can reap the fruits of our labors in that sense and we gain great benefit as a result so To end this discussion once again, we just discussed tradition innovation and Conservation we have to ask what tradition am I keeping alive? What is it that I'm conserving by doing this and am I conserving something that's useful to me? Does it work?

If it doesn't work, why am I doing it? Now this is something that we have to ask whenever we're learning something new. This comes from Dr. John Painter. He's a martial artist from Arlington here in Texas and a very high skill. I had the great pleasure of meeting him once whenever I was buying books in my early 20s from his school years back. But his students have proffered these three principles and he's had them in print before.

So I'm not hijacking anyone's ideas here, but I will credit Dr. Dale Dugas, a phenomenal world-class doctor, Warrington Medicine and herbalist. And he mentioned it in the podcast with Mark Wiley, which he had, and I would encourage you to listen to as well. And the three questions that one asks about learning skill is, what is it? The second is, it work? And the third is, how do you train it?

So these are worthwhile skills, even self-regulatory skills, and we apply these three questions. We will determine whether or not those traditions that were key in behavioral traditions, internal traditions, if they are useful to us, what is it? Is it fear? Is it scared? Is it anxiety? Is it pain? Is it something useful? And does it work? And finally, if I want to learn these innovative ways of dealing with these things, this is where we ask this third question, how do you do it?

armando (22:01.274)
Can you teach it? Can I learn it? Important stuff. So for now, I want to tell you thank you for passing this Thursday evening with me. I think we're expecting some rain. Hopefully we'll get some. West Texas is a bit dry by nature and we can always use some rain. Certainly looking forward to that. But I appreciate your time. I want to tell you thank you for listening. I've had a few of my listeners reach out to me and give me some feedback. Thank you for that. It means a lot. But above and beyond all of this, I want to tell you thank you.

for sharing this podcast with people you all have and I'm going to continue going forward. And certainly when we have any new developments, I will let you know. We're on all platforms where you can get your podcasts. We're on YouTube as well. And I do have some mini lecture videos on YouTube as well that if you're wanting to learn some stuff along the lines of self regulatory skill, where you see me using the running man model, please go to YouTube and see those. I'd appreciate that. We do have some publications that are coming up.

in the future and I will be letting you know when those are ready to go if y'all are interested and once again I hope you have a really good evening take care walk well