Can you rewire your brain at any age? Or can you teach an old dog new tricks?
In my experience, yes, you can. In fact, many of the major changes I made in my life came when I woke up and realised I had been living on autopilot. I was in my late 30s/early 40s when that penny finally dropped.
I left school at sixteen with a handful of GCEs and very limited ambition. What I wanted to do was to be a typist. This was despite my teachers telling me I was wasting my talent. Ironically, that skill has been one of my most accidental wins, given the world of working on a keyboard, which emerged long after the push typewriter I learned on went out of date.
It’s not that I wasn’t bright at school. My school reports consistently showed I was an A-grade student. In my mock Maths GCE exam, to my absolute horror, I was called out in assembly for achieving 97%, which was apparently a school record.
Even so, staying on at school and going to Uni were for other people. People who entered that world were like an alien species to me. They had a certain gravitas; they were clever, had healthy relationships, and, of course, bags of confidence. Of course, it was my lack of self-worth and belief in myself that drove my decisions.
Rewiring The Belief That University Was Beyond Me
Nearly thirty years later, I walked into a university as a mature student and came out with a degree in Lifelong Learning. Along the way, I trained as a coach and became a Fellow of the CIPD.
None of that happened because I suddenly became cleverer. It happened because, slowly and often reluctantly, I changed what I believed about myself. And it turns out that changing a belief is something the brain can do throughout life.
The Gift Of Neuroplasticity
Scientists call this neuroplasticity: the brain’s capacity to change its patterns of activity and connectivity in response to experience, learning and behaviour. It isn’t equally flexible at every age. Some forms of learning come more easily in childhood. But the old idea that the adult brain is essentially fixed by the time we’re grown has been firmly overturned.
This raises a far more personal question. If the brain can change, why is it so hard to shift a belief you’ve held for many years?
Changing Embedded Beliefs Via Your Neural Pathway
Repeated patterns of thought and behaviour can strengthen the neural networks involved. The shorthand often used is “neurons that fire together, wire together”. Beliefs are more complex than a single neural pathway, but repetition can make familiar patterns of thinking easier to return to. The best way I explain this to coaching clients is the analogy of treading a well-worn path.
Imagine you’ve crossed the same grass meadow every day for twenty years. There’s now a clear path through it. Where you and others have walked frequently, the grass has gone, the soil has compacted, and you don’t have to think about where you’re going. It’s clearly visible, and it’s genuinely the path of least resistance when you want to get across the field. Your feet simply take you there.
A few metres away is another possible route. This route will take you to a different destination, but it has the same starting point. You can just about see where a path could be, but the grass is knee-high, and there are nettles and brambles across it. Every step takes effort. It’s slower, it’s uncomfortable, and the old path is right there, inviting you back.
That’s roughly what’s happening when you decide to think about something differently. The old belief has years of well-practised patterns behind it. The new one is unfamiliar. Trying to change your thoughts and beliefs along a new neural pathway can be uncomfortable and, at first, seem unnatural. It also takes effort.
My Well-Trodden Path
In the series Living From Your Higher Self, I describe my lack of self-worth and the decisions it led me to. That lack of self-worth affected my relationships and my financial situation for years. It also affected my education. Despite doing relatively well at school, I grew up believing that any form of higher education simply was not for someone like me.
My first job as a 16-year-old was as a typist for an insurance firm. I worked with another girl, who was my senior. She was paid a lot more because she also ran the accounts. Unfortunately, it was not her forte, and for months I took them off her and handled them for her. Our boss didn’t know any of this, and so when she left her job and I applied for it, he told me that I was too young. Instead of fighting my corner, I just accepted it. I moved on, but the idea of studying still did not occur to me.
The Confident Front
I joined a public-sector organisation, where I first received positive feedback on my abilities. A seed of ambition had been sparked. I started with them at seventeen and became a junior manager at twenty-three. I found I could see what needed doing, and I knew that getting the best out of people was the key. Over the 20 or so years I forged that path, I gained a couple of promotions that really kept my interest.
In that setting, where I could excel by my abilities, I slowly began to feel I had something to offer. Throughout this time, as well as having a natural aptitude for the work, I also came across as extremely confident, and I’m convinced that’s what got me through. I had acquired the belief that I was a capable and effective manager. Still, apart from the necessary work-based training, which I enjoyed, I didn’t think of enhancing my skills through any formal education.
The Education Begins
I experienced a major health crisis that led me to leave my comfortable management job. Only then did I realise how much my confidence in my abilities had relied on that role. When I started looking for work again, I felt wholly unqualified and had no confidence I could be valued as I had in my earlier career.
Only then, when I had no choice, did I sign up for a couple of college courses, with acute trepidation. I decided that if anyone was going to see me as a credible manager, I needed a management diploma. Soon after, I trained as an adult teacher and took my Cert Ed. At the age of 38, I began to clear the grass and nettles of the alternative path. Every assignment I handed in, every piece of feedback that said this is good, flattened a little more of the long grass. Research has since found that sustained engagement in unfamiliar, cognitively demanding learning can improve memory in adults aged 60 to 90 (Park et al., 2014).
The Cert Ed mattered in a way I didn’t expect. Teaching adults put me face to face with people carrying the same story I was. Bright, capable people who’d been told, or had told themselves, that learning wasn’t for them. I could see so clearly that their belief wasn’t true. It took me rather longer to apply that to myself.
Returning To The Old Path
Following my newly acquired qualifications, I worked across several sectors until I reached a plateau in my early 40s. I was a middle manager overseeing a regional team. While I enjoyed it, I felt I needed to move on, though I wasn’t sure where. After some soul-searching, I realised that my lifelong ambition to help develop people would best be realised by becoming a Human Resources Professional.
While many people reached senior positions in this profession without formal qualifications, my lack of self-worth resurfaced, and I realised I needed a university degree. Its absence made me feel unworthy and undeserving. I remember vividly writing in my journal about the possibility of entering this world, and I felt sick with dread and fear.
That old path, the one I thought I had conquered by going to college, was coming back in full force, urging me down it. Research on extinction learning offers a useful parallel: new learning doesn’t necessarily erase the old; it can sit alongside it, and older responses can resurface in certain contexts (Bouton, 2002).
Reinforcing New Beliefs
This time, however, I had spent years in self-reflection and self-observation. I had already shifted limiting beliefs about relationships and money, so I knew the belief was coming up to be healed.
Despite strong resistance, I enrolled in my Uni course and my Professional qualifications, and the new pathway, which contained the belief that I was one of those people who embarked on higher education, was reinforced.
That wasn’t the end of the story, though; the pathway needed constant reinforcement. I nearly gave up many times, but my self-awareness of what was driving me to throw it all away helped me keep going. Scientists observed something similar when they taught older adults to juggle: the brain changes appeared with practice and began to fade when practice stopped (Boyke et al., 2008).
At one point, I gathered the courage to tell my tutor I was going to withdraw from the course. I had my reasons lined up, and I felt some relief that it was all going to end. However, thankfully, she was having none of it. She listened to my reasons, suggested workarounds, and reinforced my pathway by declaring how well I was doing.
And it led somewhere. I graduated with my degree in Lifelong Learning, became a Fellow of the CIPD. I also trained as a coach, and at 45 I became a senior leader. The path that had once seemed impossible became the one my feet took without thinking.
A Life-Long Journey?
My journey to higher education took almost 30 years, from leaving school to starting university. For the first 20 years, I was on autopilot; my lack of self-belief and self-worth was running the show. However, even then I began to recognise my strengths and abilities, and something to offer. I began to wake up in my late 30s, and that’s when I started to challenge those beliefs and change my mind about myself in every area of my life.
It doesn’t need to take that long, though. It never occurred to me, and no one taught me to observe myself, that I had a Higher Self that thought a lot more about me than my ego self. I could have challenged those assumptions about myself much earlier with that gift of self-awareness. And so can you.
Rewiring Your Brain At Any Age
Yes, you can, and I am still doing it. I sat on the idea of writing a book for ten years. I put it off because the familiar old lack-of-self-worth path kept reminding me that those things weren’t for someone like me. Luckily, I rarely go down that path now, and as the years go by, it becomes more and more overgrown.
If you have a limiting belief that means your life is not working for you, there are a few steps that might help.
- Become aware of the beliefs that are driving you – See the pathway you’re on. Journaling and quiet self-reflection help you spot it sooner.
- Work out a believable alternative belief that would work for you – Look and see the new pathway you want to begin to walk down. Make it something you can genuinely believe, not the opposite extreme.
- Accept the Resistance to something new – Realise the old pathway will continue to beckon you for a while, and it will feel uncomfortable.
- Make a decision to change your belief for good – Without this decision, you are at risk of vacillating between pathways for much longer than necessary.
- Notice the old thought and choose the new one – When the old belief turns up, name it (“there’s the old path”) and choose your new thought instead. You don’t need to listen to the old belief.
- Act on the new belief and keep repeating it – Your brain learns from experience, so take small actions that give it evidence that the new belief is valid. The more often you walk the new path, the clearer it becomes.
- Expect to slip back and turn around – Under stress or in familiar situations, the old path can pull you back. That isn’t failure; it’s how brains work. Notice it, then step back onto the new path.
Your Meadow
Can you rewire your brain at any age? Research says yes, and so does my own life. I was sixteen when I decided university wasn’t for me, and in my mid-forties I proved myself wrong. Nothing about my brain was special. I simply kept walking a path that, at first, barely existed. If you’re standing at the edge of your own meadow, wondering whether it’s too late, it isn’t. Pick one belief, choose your new path, and take the first step.
Enjoyed this article? Add People Development Magazine as a preferred source on Google:
Enjoyed This? . This Essential Guide brings the whole framework together in one place, free to download.
