Just Like Riding a Bike…

They say riding a bike is something you never forget. But what if you never learned how to ride it properly in the first place?

It was Christmas morning in the pine-covered forest of Southeast Texas. At 13 years old, I was wild with excitement about my brand-new 21-speed bike. I had grown up in inner-city Houston, where riding a bike around the neighborhood was not something I had really been able to do safely as a child, so while I technically knew how to get on a bike and make it move, I had never actually learned how to ride one properly.

Without a second thought, I jumped on the bike and started going. It did not take me long to realize that I had absolutely no idea how the brakes worked. I crashed directly into a pine tree, landed on my dominant arm and broke it in seven distinct places.

And this happened at a particularly awful time in my life to have something like that happen. My family had just moved, and when school started back after Christmas break, I was going to be the only new kid beginning at a brand-new school. So not only was I an awkward preteen at perhaps the most awkward time of life, but I also had to walk into that experience wearing a massive, inflexible cast on my dominant arm.

It sounds like a relatively small childhood story when I tell it now, but I think that experience changed the trajectory of something for me. I did not get on a bike again for more than 30 years. I had a true fear of it.

Fast-forward to me at age 45. My life had brought me to a place of doing two things much more consistently: pushing through personal fears that had quietly limited me, and getting back in touch with my body.

See, I am one of those “cerebral” people. Don’t take this as me saying I am intellectually superior, because that is not what I mean at all. I just spend a LOT of time in my head. I can get incredibly absorbed in thinking, analyzing, strategizing, creating or solving a problem and stay there for a very long time. There are certainly benefits to this. It has served me well throughout my career. But there is also a downside: you can become very good at living from the neck up.

My mind and spirit take up shop at the control panel, and they leave my body to run around headless on autopilot.

As I went through my career, I began to notice an interesting pattern. When my body was not being intentionally supported, I tended to lose my emotional center much more easily. And the opposite was true, too. When I became stressed, overwhelmed or restless and then supported my body in some way — maybe I went for a walk outside, moved around, stretched or simply changed my physical environment — I would often feel better relatively quickly.

And when my body felt better, my thinking and emotional intelligence had room to breathe. I could focus better. I could respond better. I could work better.

When my body is supported, I perform better.

There is a lot of science underneath this, but the simplest version is that our brains and bodies are not operating as separate systems. Our nervous system is constantly taking in information from inside and outside of us and adjusting to what it encounters. We even have a word for our ability to notice what is happening inside our bodies: interoception.

The more I have learned about regulation, and the more I have paid attention to my own experience, the more I keep coming back to something very simple: if we want to support how people think, feel, learn and perform, sometimes we need to start with the body.

Which brings me back to the bike.

About nine months ago, I finally got back on one for the first time since 1994. And now, after all those years of being afraid of something as ordinary as riding a bicycle, it has become one of the ways I am learning to connect back to my body.

Today, I was working on my new training offerings for sensory regulation when I noticed myself getting restless. Usually, I would have forced myself to continue my brain-work. I would have stayed focused on computer screens, stayed accessible to people and convinced myself that being productive meant continuing to sit there and think.

But instead, today, I took my own advice and got on my bike.

I rode around the diverse streets of my Portland neighborhood. The sun was out, and I really did not have a destination. I just started going. And there was something so simple and joyful about being able to take all of that restless energy in my system and convert it into movement.

To be transparent, I was on an e-bike. But I turned off the juice for most of the ride, and hauling an e-bike around Portland without the motor is quite the workout…(promise, I did!)

It was exactly what my system needed.

I am writing this directly after getting home, and I feel immensely better than I did before I left. My body feels better, which means my thinking feels clearer. I feel more settled, more energized and ready for a whole other run of work. And I think I am going to enjoy that work more now because I actually feel good while I am doing it.

This is why the work I am doing now has become so deeply personal to me. I spent much of my career thinking about people, performance, organizations, strategy and change. And now I find myself increasingly interested in what sits underneath all of those things.

Because whether we are talking about a child trying to learn, an employee trying to focus, or a leader trying to make a thoughtful decision under pressure, we are asking a human nervous system to perform.

That is a huge part of why my life’s work has become focused on regulation of our systems, starting with the body, and why I am so excited about the work I am doing with the Alert Program® and sensory self-regulation.

So, if you are feeling overwhelmed, stressed, restless or out of your center, maybe don’t immediately ask your brain to solve it.

Start with your body. Ask what your system needs.

Oh, and push through that fear, too. :)

P.S. There is a LOT of research behind the relationship between the nervous system, body awareness, interoception and regulation. Rather than turn this story into a research paper, I left most of it out. But if you are curious, let me know and I will happily send you the articles.