Stimuli-Conditioning Illustration

Stimuli-Conditioning Story

The Story about a Bear

By Rom Antony Day

Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Several Years ago I had a business colleague, who used to say a story during his friendly business insightful presentations. The story was about a bear’s behavior he used to illustrate our often exhibited human behavior as a result of what in Psychology we would refer to as stimuli-conditioning. I would like to pass this story on to the general public because it is very powerful in that it helps us see beyond any limitation we often place on ourselves based on FEAR (False Evidence Appearing Real) of the unknown or of what we do not know. And the beauty of the story Steve Fedisky, a brother to me in many areas of life, a fast track, high achiever, prayerful (in other words he was spiritual -- a believer in God; not a religious fanatic) and patriotic, sales executive and Yappy (Young White Executive) American, son of a USA patriotic father, often told was that it offered a solution to break the figuratively speaking sound-barrier or to get in the zone. One of the solutions to not get in the rut the bear (the awesome and majestic California’s moscot) does in the story is to have a Definite Chief Aim. The story which I jotted down from a recording of one of his many speaking engagements goes something like this.

Every time the bear was in this cage, what it would do is the bear would lay down and the [cagers] would put the food ten feet away from it.

And everyday when they would put the food over there [ten feet away] for the bear, the bear would get his big O’body and walk ten feet over.

Eat his food.

Go back ten feet and lay down.

And he would then proceed to give an analogy of the types of routines we often get into and think we can not but in fact we can break out of. For example, we get up early before dawn or at least by 6:14 A.M. so we can get the kids ready for school, eat a quick breakfast, get in the car, drop them off at school, park the car, get on BART or drive one hour or more so we can reach the office no later than 7:55 A.M. So we are at our work station keeping our nose to the grind stone at 8:00 A.M. or 9:00 A.M. whenever you start.And then again in the reverse direction to go home. You are lucky if you drive on reverse commute. You get the drill.

And so this bear would go back and forth ten foot forward, ten foot back; ten foot forward, ten foot back. Then what they [the cagers] did was this, Steve conveyed to the audience.

They extended the cage out and moved it 15 feet.

The bear would walk ten feet and could not find the food. Walk back the ten feet and lay down.

With this in mind he would continue to tell the audience how we are creatures of habit and how we get into a rut or stagnate advancement in whatever and how this story would get him to think about life, asking us to think about our own lives and the songs we were singing in our lives. He would rhetorically ask the audience to think about what it had done the prior five and even the past ten years of our lives. Had it gotten us all the time and money, freedom, peace of mind and happiness we would ever want to have. And Steve would point out that that was an important question to ask oneself.

He would raise the caliber of the questions and make it pointier by asking this:

If you keep doing what you have being doing for the last five or ten years for ten more years, are you going to have what you want to have in your life?

And in a bright way he would say: And these are questions a lot of people don’t entertain. Thereby taking the pressure off so we will not feel any sense of inadequacy that we had not self-evaluated our own progress just yet at that time. Men it felt good we had gotten our hands on tough minded question we could ask ourselves any time. Men I had met a good coach of achievement much of whose wisdom I could apply to just about any area of my life I could get my hands-on income, career, education, family, health and fitness etc.

And the story about the bear would reach its climax by stating:

Need to figure out what you want? Why you want it? When you want it? And how you are going to get it?

You surely can see how the bear could have gotten the food he wanted which had been moved 15 feet away along with the barrier of the cage. Nevertheless, the bear had become conditioned to thinking that the cage still ended at ten feet; and since no longer saw the food at ten feet, he would go back and lay down never venturing beyond the prior barrier which had been extended out to 15 feet where the food now could be found. You can bet the bear could see the food now was 15 feet away, but it thought that it was tied down to ten feet cage area. Hopefully the bear figured it out and went after the food before it starved. The bear’s definite chief aim was not a SMART one; apparently it was where the barrier was as opposed to there the food was. It is kind of like I watched on the news during the last several days a California State University (CSU) Systemspokesperson say that not only are they the most diverse university system in the USA, but that they will hiring will be focused on diversity. What a poor focus that is. They apparently think that they can only hire people that meet certain minority race, ethnicity or foreign nationality. If that is the focus they have, I believe it will back fire on them sooner rather that later. They may starve for lack of competent people like the bear in the story who had a bad definite chief aim. Why don’t they focus on hiring qualified people or the crème of the crop in the various fields? Diversity should only be a measurement criterion of their hiring practices, but not the focus. What if there are not enough qualified people in their job vacancies. Are they going to just fill their jobs with an unqualified person to do a job? Apparently so according to their stated hiring focus. Maybe that is the beginning of the demise of the CSU System unless they ask themselves the pointed questions to redefine their hiring focus.