Leaders, are you leading in autopilot mode?

Let us first glance into the muscle memory which leaders might have formed in their leadership role. 

Muscle memory is a construct of procedural memory that involves reinforcing a definite motor task into memory through repetition, which has been used equally with motor learning.

Muscle memory is strengthened through repetition over time. I might be a department head for the last 5 years so I know what to be done for my business.

Repetition creates new neural pathways in the brain, which actually becomes hard-wired to perform the performed activity. The brain no longer has to perform hard to make it happen, so the activity feels natural for you. We just do it automatically, without having to think about it.

We are in autopilot mode. Yahooo!!

A current study by Daniel Gilbert (who wrote a great book called Stumbling on Happiness) and Matthew Killingsworth, confirms something we’ve all wondered: most of us are ‘mentally checked out’ a good portion of the time. 

If we are practicing a song on the piano over and over again, the idea is that we will continue to advance. 

“Practice makes perfect” can be an authentic phrase because the more we do something, we build up that procedural memory and our brain can quickly instruct our muscles to carry it out. 

The side effect of the muscle memory is that it doesn’t judge whether we are doing good or bad, however, and so if we practice a song poorly for hours on end we are going to be absolutely efficient at making the same mistakes over and over again. All these instructions are written in our unconscious mind for later retrieval. 

This is not merely poor because we have wasted our time learning to be bad or mediocre at a task and may see all this work as a failure. Unknowingly we are making this a habit. When you repeat mistakes again and again, we build muscle memory with those mistakes which makes them even harder to overcome later.

That makes those mistakes even tougher to overcome later. This is one reason why the saying “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks” is generally genuine.

One strong stake is that when we are immature ” when we yet have a most to learn” we have to create a conscious effort to think about what we’re doing. But afterward, after we’ve become more accomplished, considerable of what initially took effort becomes automatic. The great advice is that functioning on autopilot allows us to consume less brain energy on the routine forms of the work.

Ninety-six percent of people in the UK agree to make most decisions on autopilot, according to this research—it has become an epidemic. Our minds are wandering around most of the time.

Our subconscious utilizes muscle memory to automate many types of frequent operations such as: walking, driving, riding a bike, typing on a keyboard, speaking, sport or physical activity. One complication emerges when we start to do things on “autopilot” and we surrender some consciousness about what’s going on around us.

When leaders develop this muscle memory over a stretch of time, they get into the autopilot mode. 

Because Leaders might have seen such instances earlier in their careers, so they know what they have to perform.

But in today’s dynamic world leaders can not work mindlessly in autopilot mode, they have to perform with mindfulness and provide attention to every occurrence.

Leaders reacting to situations with common, predetermined, pre-approved behavior patterns will not perform most of the occasion.

We are residing in an extremely complex world where events are emergent. It is no more the Playing piano or playing golf thousands of times and building muscle memory and get into autopilot mode like daily driving! As a leader, we are handling with diverse complex matters e.g. people.

Much of our behavior is dominated by automatic processes! so while communicating to our subordinate we may get into auto pilot mode and may not be careful. 

What leaders can perform:

• Being Mindful.
• Being connected with the world with data and facts.
• Build a stronger relationship and collaborate.
• Unlearn and learn new ways of working.
• Innovate news ways of building solution and focus on Kaizen( It breaks the autopilot mode)
• Stop and reflect on your day.
• Going beyond the comfort zone.

Look at your autopilot moments and reflect if anything needs to alter.