About PersonalBest Publishing

Personal Best Academy, home of PersonalBest Publishing, has developed a fresh approach to improving learning and transfer of learning; eradicating bad or unsafe habits; accelerating transition and conversion training; and correcting technique faults, misconceptions, and other persistent errors.

We maintain that the main reason even motivated people have difficulty changing their skilled performance, behaviour, thoughts and beliefs is because they are the prisoners of habit.

Emerging research in cognitive psychology shows that learned habit patterns influence and direct what we think and do every day of our lives. This includes our performance in sport or at work, our conceptual framework, including any misconceptions; our ability to learn; how we interact with others; and the thoughts and beliefs that guide our daily lives. All these learned behaviours, whether right or wrong, safe or unsafe, suitable or unsuitable, effective or ineffective, well adjusted or maladjusted, are under the powerful influence of habit forces.

Habit patterns develop during practice, i.e., repeated conscious recall of a thought, word or deed. When we practice recall, we soon develop neural networks in the brain that automatically trigger when a similar situation arises, allowing us to respond instinctively and appropriately by doing exactly what we have learned or trained to do. The brain is naturally wired to operate in this manner.

Habit patterns are useful because they require less mental energy than conscious thought. The brain finds it more efficient to work this way. Habits, developed from conscious practice and effort, help us function better during our daily lives.

As long as those habits are suitable reactions to what we encounter, they remain beneficial. But when circumstances change and an uncommon response is required to a familiar situation, that habit we have developed can be a real handicap.

As we all know from bitter experience, habit patterns are notoriously resistant to change. Anyone who tries to change an established routine soon comes up against a powerful mental resistance which interferes, slows down, and sometimes even disables the desired change and improvement in performance and behaviour. The better someone has practiced, learned and therefore habituated the thought, performance or behaviour; the harder it is to change.

Available coaching, teaching, training, and therapeutic methods can be very effective when dealing with a blank slate, i.e., when the person has no prior experience or training and no preconceptions that might get in the way of correct performance. However, coaching, teaching, training and therapeutic methods find it very difficult to deal with maladaptive habit patterns.

Finally, after dedicating a significant amount of time and effort, change occurs and the individual progresses, but there is typically a prolonged period of adjustment where reintroducing coaching, teaching, training, and therapeutic interventions is necessary. Experts refer to this problem as the transfer of learning/training problem.

The period of adaptation to change and the associated transfer problems make coaching, teaching, training and therapy less time- and cost-effective. As an old coach once said, "The problem is not learning the new; it's unlearning the old." There has to be a better way.

PersonalBest Publishing uses and teaches Old Way New Way to free people from the chains of habit and empower them to achieve their personal best.

Old Way New Way is a powerful, cost- and time-effective yet very user friendly learning method that can rapidly change habit patterns, permanently. Old Way New Way dramatically reduces the typically extended and often risky adaptation period during which people try to adjust to change.

Since its inception in 1986, PersonalBest Publishing has provided training courses in Old Way New Way to individuals, groups, organisations and corporations striving to achieve their personal best.

Recipients of Old Way New Way training include Olympic athletes and coaches; players and coaches of elite and recreational sports; pilots and flight instructors; drivers and driving instructors; firearms trainees and instructors; police departments; mining machinery operators and instructors; workplace operators and supervisors; employees and managers; musicians and music teachers; dancers and teachers of dance; school, college and university students and teachers; and children and parents.

PersonalBest Publishing is a registered business managed by Dr Paul Baxter and operates from Brisbane, Australia. Our customers primarily come from English speaking countries but also include individuals, groups, and organisations from many nations around the globe.