Understanding and Retraining Conditioned Reflexes: The Toilet Trigger

 Have you ever walked past a restroom, thought you might need to go, and then the second you opened the door, it was like your bladder hit the panic button? You went from "maybe I could pee" to "I need to pee NOW!" in a matter of seconds. If you're nodding your head, you're not alone. This isn’t just a quirk of aging—this is your brain doing exactly what you accidentally trained it to do.

The Toilet Trigger: A Case of Classical Conditioning

What’s happening here is a form of classical conditioning. Just like Pavlov's dogs began to salivate at the sound of a bell, our brains associate certain environments or stimuli with specific responses. In this case, the sight of the bathroom (or even the door) becomes a trigger for your body to prepare for urination. Your brain has learned: bathroom = time to pee. The reaction is automatic. It bypasses conscious thought.

The good news? If your brain was trained into this pattern, it can also be retrained out of it.

How to Retrain Your Brain

Retraining your brain takes intentional practice. If you want to stop the near-accident urgency that hits when you see a toilet, you can.

Here’s how:

1. Awareness – Recognize that this is a reflex, not a true emergency. You have more control than it feels like.

2. Delay the response – When you feel that strong urge upon seeing the toilet, pause. Take a breath. Wait a few seconds. You’re teaching your body that the trigger doesn’t need to equal immediate action.

3. Gradual desensitization – Practice walking into the bathroom without immediately going. Do something else for a moment. Over time, this helps break the tight link between stimulus and response.

4. Consistency – Like any habit, retraining takes time—typically around 30 days of consistent effort. So practice. 

Why This Skill Matters

This isn't just about bladder control. This is about brain control. Once you understand how your brain is constantly reacting to triggers around you—often without your permission—you can begin to take your power back.

Your emotional responses to stress? Conditioned. Your defensiveness in conflict? Conditioned. Your impulse reactions when things go wrong? Conditioned.

Just like the bathroom example, all of these responses can be retrained.

This Is What My Book Is All About

In Mastering the Five Managerial Superpowers, I walk you through exactly how to retrain your brain to respond more strategically to the world around you. The foundational skills of self-awareness, compassion, and self-control allow you to stop reacting automatically and start choosing your responses with intention.

Whether you’re leading a team or just trying to lead a more centered life, understanding how to rewire your reflexes is a superpower worth mastering.

So the next time your bladder tries to boss you around, remember: it’s not magic. It’s just conditioning. And you can hack it.

Ready to learn how? Check out Mastering the Five Managerial Superpowers and start hacking your brain today. https://humanistlearning.com/mastering-the-five-managerial-superpowers/

Hack Your Brain: Mastering the 5 Managerial Superpowers

 What if I told you that your brain is running on autopilot most of the time? That your reactions, decisions, and even conflicts are often driven by deeply ingrained habits rather than conscious thought? The good news is that you can take control. You can hack your brain, reprogram it for success, and become the leader—or simply the person—you want to be.

That’s exactly what my book and course, Mastering the 5 Managerial Superpowers, are designed to teach. Using behavioral science, I guide you through the process of rewiring your brain to manage yourself, your responses, and ultimately, your interactions with others more effectively. Here’s how:

Step 1: Build Your Foundation – Self-Awareness & Compassion

Before you can change anything, you need to understand how your brain works. Most of us operate on autopilot, reacting to situations based on past experiences and deeply ingrained patterns. Developing self-awareness allows you to recognize these patterns. Pairing that with compassion—for yourself and others—creates the space for real change.

Once you’re aware of how you react, you can begin to practice self-control. This is the key to breaking automatic responses and gaining the ability to choose how you respond instead of letting emotions or old habits take over.

Step 2: Hack Your Brain Using Behavioral Science

The science of change is clear: small, intentional shifts create lasting transformation. Your brain thrives on reinforcement and repetition. This means that with deliberate practice, you can create new neural pathways that make strategic thinking your default instead of knee-jerk reactions.

This is where behavioral science techniques come into play. By understanding how habits form and how reinforcement works, you can train your brain to make better choices automatically. The result? You become more effective in managing yourself, your work, and your relationships.

Step 3: Manage Conflict by Managing Your Response

Conflict is inevitable—but how you respond to it determines the outcome. The difference between escalating a conflict and resolving it effectively comes down to one thing: your response.

When you learn to pause, assess, and choose your response strategically, you take control of the situation rather than letting it control you. This shift empowers you to handle even the most difficult interactions with confidence and clarity.

Your Superpower Awaits

Mastering these skills isn’t just about leadership—it’s about harnessing the power of your own mind to create the outcomes you want. When you learn to control your responses, you gain the ultimate superpower: the ability to shape your own reality.

Ready to start hacking your brain for success? Check out Mastering the 5 Managerial Superpowers and unlock the skills that will change the way you lead, work, and live.

Leading Like a Dancer: The Art of Courteous Leadership

I recently joined a new contra dance community and have been dancing lead quite a bit. It’s been an eye-opening experience, not just for my dancing, but also for how I think about leadership.

But first a primer on Contra Dancing. Contra Dance is a social folk dance with roots in English, Scottish, and French traditions, popular in the U.S. since the colonial era. It involves long lines of dancers who move through a series of repeating figures, guided by a caller who prompts the moves in time with live music. Even though you dance with a partner, everyone interact with everyone else in the set as part of the dance. This creates a dynamic, fun and communal experience. 

While callers historically used gendered roles (“gents” and “ladies”) to describe the roles in the dance patterns, many modern communities use the more inclusive terms “leader” and “follower” as they better reflect the roles being played by the dancers in a set.  This is not done to erase gender, it's more that it isn't uncommon for people of the same gender to dance together. This is, after all, a social dance. Friends dance with friends, and you dance with everyone. Also, there are sometimes gender imbalances at a dance meaning too few women or too few men. If you still want to dance a set, you dance with whoever else wants to dance.

In my new dance community, women outnumber men two to one. If we ladies want to dance and there is no available gent, we dance with each other and since it's silly to refer to ladies as gents and gents as ladies and because we can't both follow, one of us needs to be the leader and the other the follower. This change has made the dancing so much more fun! Sometimes even if it is a gent and a lady dancing, the gent will request to dance as a follower and allow the lady to lead.  The dance is gender neutral, the roles of follower and leader are what matter to the patterns we are dancing, and the point is to have fun, while dancing. 

The Leader’s Job: Ensuring a Good Experience

Having spent decades dancing as a lady, I'm used to dancing the follower role. And I'm quite good at it. I know how to take a lead. It’s why my grandfather loved dancing with me—I could read his signals and respond smoothly to them. But leading? Leading is something I've only recently started doing, and I’ve come to love it! 

In social dance, the leader’s job isn’t to dominate or control or even to show off. It’s to ensure the follower has a good experience. In old-school terms, the “gent” wanted the “lady” to like him, so he led with courtesy and care. His role was to make sure his partner enjoys the dance—because if they don’t, why would they want to dance with him again?

When I dance as a leader, I pay attention to what my partner enjoys. Do they love spins? Great! Prefer to keep things simple? Perfect! The goal isn’t to impose my vision of how we should dance, it’s to guide them in a way that makes the experience enjoyable for both of us.

Leadership as Courtesy

While most contra dances are equal, meaning leaders and followers dance the same patterns, there are some elements where the leader and follower have different moves.

One of these moves is the courtesy turn. In this move, the follower takes center stage. They are the star. They dance across the set to either their partner or their neighbor, often with a flourish. The leader’s role is stand in place and be ready to accept the momentum of the follower, and provide balance and guidance to help them gently turn around, so they can re-enter the dance smoothly.

The follower needs this help because their momentum is taking them in one direction and they need help to turn around in time with the music. This is the job of the leader. To help them turn around by giving them something to balance against. 

And this the key to understanding the leaders role. A courtesy turn is called a courtesy turn for a reason. It’s a courtesy you do for your partner/follower.

I’ve danced with people who don’t know how to lead, and when they don’t provide that gentle guidance or courtesy, it throws everything off and can be dangerous for the follower. A follower spinning and twirling without a leader’s support can lose their place in the dance, flung into uncertainty. A good leader provides balance, guidance, and a clear but gentle path forward.

The leader doesn't just help guide the follower in turning them around to face back into the dance - the great leaders also help guide them into their next position. And they do this gently and with courtesy so that it is fun and not - violent. 

This principle applies beyond the dance floor.

Leadership in the Workplace

Good workplace leadership mirrors good dance leadership. Employees are the stars—the ones doing the actual work. The leader’s role is to guide, support, and ensure they’re moving in the right direction.

Just like in dance, you cannot lead effectively by being harsh, dictatorial, or forceful. It’s not just ineffective—it’s harmful. If a dance leader yanks, shoves, or demands their partner do something. They don't just risk injuring their partner, they risk alienating them. If the partner doesn't have a good time, or is scared by the leader, they won’t want to dance with them again. 

The same is true in the workplace. Employees aren’t tools to be manipulated or forced into compliance. They’re human beings with choices.

If you don’t lead with courtesy—if you don’t guide, support, and respect your followers, they will find another person to dance with. 

The Takeaway

Whether on the dance floor or in the workplace, great leadership is about courtesy, guidance, and ensuring a good experience for those who follow you. If you do it well, people will not only follow—you’ll create something beautiful together.

So, the next time you think about leadership, ask yourself: Are you leading like a dancer?

Bystander Responsibilities

I reporter asked me to weigh in on how to encourage bystanders to step up and help fix problems, like bullying.  Because this impacts more than just that, I wanted to post it here in the context of Humanistic Leadership.

People who step up, and help those in need, are the people who become leaders. Want to be a leader, someone others want to follow, you need to find the courage to live by your ethics. 

Below is the Q&A I did with the reporter.  Here is the link to the article where I am the featured expert: https://www.boredpanda.com/boyfriend-emasculated-girlfriend-help-girl/

1. How often does the bystander effect take place and people refrain from helping those in need?

I do not know.

2. How can the bystander effect be broken when someone needs help, but people around them don’t take action?

This is about personal responsibility. You decide to take action. Don’t wait for others. If you think the person needs help and you are thinking – someone should check to see if this person is ok – that someone, is you. Just do it. Whether or not anyone else does – you should do what you think is right. 

My understanding (and again – I’m not an expert on the studies) is that when one person comes to aid an individual – it gives permission to the others to do the same. And this is one of the things I teach about personal ethics. You don’t need other people’s approval to do the right thing. Just – do it. And when you do – you will find that others appreciate that you took the initiative.  I’ve also found that by taking the initiative to be ethical and act when something is wrong, that people who do this – are seen as leaders – because they are leading with ethics. 

3. In your opinion, how important is it not to be apathetic to other people, especially those in need of help?

Extremely important. If you can help someone in need, you should help them. Take the time if you can. Apathy is emotionally draining and discouraging to experience. When you choose to pay attention and to act with compassion to people in need, you feel connected, you feel alive, you feel good about yourself and about the person you helped. Can you help everyone? No. No one can. But if you can help an individual, help them.  You will be glad you did. The hardest part of this is to find the courage to do it. In your story, the guy was scared. He lacked courage. Finding the courage and acting despite your fears, I’ve always found that personally, I’d rather act (with reason as my guide) than wonder what I might have done. Knowing I at least tried to help, helps assuage any guilt I might feel later if I didn’t act.  The more you act courageously the easier it becomes.  The key for me is to recognize the humanity of the individual and see them as fully human. This makes it easier to take action and find the connection in yourself to see, there but for fortune go you or I.

4. How empathic/apathetic would you say society is nowadays? Do you see a trend indicating that it is going one way or another, becoming more empathic or more apathetic?

I don’t have any studies I can point to – but in my personal experience I think we are at the same levels we have always been at. This is a universal problem that has been written about for as long as writing has been a thing. Humans have always struggled to connect and help one another. We all have moments where our empathy is overwhelming and when our apathy is overwhelming. This is why it’s important to NOT worry about what other people are doing, but to focus on what you – as an individual – can or should be doing in any given situation. Personally, I am guided by compassion and humanism. My personal practice is to see others as fully human worthy of dignity and compassion so when a homeless person asks for help, I help them as much as I can. I stop what I am doing and be present with them and help with what I can help with. Or if I see someone struggling, I try to help them. 

Would you like to add anything else?

Like anything – this requires balance.  You cannot save other people, you can only help them a bit. So compassion has to be tempered with reason.  A homeless woman I met in the DC train station asked me to purchase her some toiletries, which I did. I also bought her some food. We chatted and hugged and then I got on my train. I can’t save her from homelessness. But I could alleviate her suffering a little bit. And sometimes that is enough. It is what I could do in that moment. Another woman I helped, she was squatting with her daughter in an house without electricity and water. I gave her water, let her use my phone. Eventually she decided to return home to her parents and get her life in order. I helped how I could, but I didn’t try to save her. I treated her with dignity and compassion and helped how I could, with boundaries to make sure that helping her – didn’t hurt me if that makes sense. 

But again – this is all about personal ethics. What sort of person do you want to be. Then – be it. Don’t wait for permission to behave ethically and with dignity to people in need.