The Choice After Every Disruption: Restore vs Reform

Whenever I get thrown off my normal routine and schedule by a life disruption, I notice that I am eager to “get back to normal” — to restore order.

This is a pattern that repeats in a lot of places, for myself and for my clients, students, and friends:

When we get injured we seek to restore function.
After a prolonged visit from family or friends, we seek to restore order to our house.
When our car gets damaged, we seek to restore it.
When a way of doing business in a particular industry gets disrupted, we often seek to restore back the old status quo.

The Limits of Restoration

To restore means to bring something back to its previous state or condition.

There’s nothing wrong with that goal, if the previous state was functional and worked well.

But what if the previous state was not working well?

Consider the body:

Injury and illness are often the result of conditions that were not optimally functional, such as compensation patterns in how we use our body, poor diet, too much stress, or not enough sleep.

To “restore” our body back to the previous status-quo is to invite the same patterns to reoccur. It’s only a matter of time before the injury repeats.

If you’ve ever sustained an injury to the same part of your body multiple times, you’ve experienced the limits of “restoration.”

Bringing something back to its previous condition doesn’t help move you forward in a sustainable way.

The Alternative: Reformation

In this case, what we really want is reformation, not restoration.

Instead of restoring to a previous condition, we want to reform to create a new baseline.

In the body, this might look like retraining neuromuscular patterns that led to the injury. We can re-inform the neurological wiring that drives our movement patterns, strengthen weak areas, and create new habits for how we use our body.

The same concept applies to how we move forward after any disruption — whether it’s to our routines, to a way of doing business, or to a relationship.

Why Reformation is the Better Way to Heal From “Injury”

Injury of any type — whether literal or metaphorical — is generally the result of malfunctions of multiple systems.

The disruption is a chance to examine where the fault-lines are and create new, better systems that will help us prevent a future reoccurrence.

At every disruption, we have the choice:

Restore or Reform.

One will take us back; the other will take us forward.