Fresh Eyes Fresh Opportunities - By: Willie Horton

Someone once told me that he’d never come across an opportunity in his life – ever. In fact, he told me that he’d never had a positive experience in his life either! You might say that that’s an incredibly negative take on life but I would suggest that this is just an extreme example of how the normal mind works. Psychology tells us that our subconscious automatically dictates our behaviour. It also appears that the average subconscious has a taste for the negative. As a result of all this, we actually create our own dark versions of reality – and never see reality for what it really is. Quite obviously, therefore, you’re never going to see the opportunities with which life presents us – unless, of course, you open your eyes.

Obviously what I might describe as 'dark-glasses syndrome' comes in a whole load of different varieties - from the guy or girl who is just going through a bad patch struggling with their business, their job or their relationship to the seriously delusional people who trot out nonsense like "nobody loves me" or "I hate my life". But these different perspectives are all symptoms of a normal everyday disease that all of us normal everyday people suffer from. The disease is called reality blindness.

The normal adult mind sleepwalks through life with their eye firmly shut. We think that we're looking at reality but it is a psychological fact that we are looking at the world through our own misconceptions about it. We learned those misconceptions about life in general and ourselves in particular during our formative years. All these 'truths' that we hold dear are what psychologists call our 'stored knowledge'. Maybe we could take a more detailed look at how this stored knowledge of ours plays a key role in creating our version of the real world.

You encounter a total stranger in an airport - fog has closed the airport. Whether or not you talk to this stranger will, first of all, depend on your mood. That mood of yours, which is often as variable as the Irish weather, is automatically determined by your subconscious - you have little control over it. If you normally get all stressed out because your plans have been messed up, well, it is what it is - and you behave like that routinely. But let's say you're in the mood to talk to this stranger. You will not see the stranger, you will see who you think the stranger is. Your eyes perceive a set of images of which your mind has to make sense - this process is called cognition. To make sense of all these, you subconscious mind refers to your stored knowledge. Now, this has got nothing to do with the person that you've just met - it's all down to who your subconscious mind thinks they remind you of. Psychology terms this process as 're-cognition' - what you and I call recognition without appreciating the impact that it has on our lives. In other words, you'll re-cognize the stranger as someone you can get on with or someone you might dislike. This process takes only a few seconds and you've no idea that it's going on.

Right, it's time to ask yourself a couple of important things. Is it true that the most important people in your life today were once complete strangers? How would you have the first clue that you might be talking or not talking to the next really important stranger who could transform your life? The answer to the first question is, obviously, 'yes'. The answer to the second question is 'you haven't got a clue' - unless and until you take those dark glasses of yours off and start seeing reality as it really is. To do this, you need to disrupt the automatic link between basic cognition and stored-knowledge-driven recognition - you've got to learn to stop relying on your stored knowledge to make up your mind for you.

Now, don't get me wrong - some of our stored knowledge is useful. The point that I'm making is that you've got to stop being a slave to it. And there's really only one way to do this - you've got to train yourself in the art of observation. Basically, you've got to stop your subconscious making up your mind for you - after all, it will always arrive at the wrong conclusion because it's using decades-old stored knowledge. The fine art of observing without adding any personal spin can only be developed and honed in an environment in which you don't actually need it - so that you're good at it when you do! What I mean is that you need to set quiet time aside to practice this art far from the cut and thrust of your daily life. Five or ten minutes a day will transform the rest of your day because, once you start actually noticing what's really going on in those few minutes, you will be far more attuned to reality for the rest of the day.

Go sit in the park or in a pavement cafe or, fi you're really stuck, your regular seet on the train each morning. Turn off your iPod and your cell 'phone. Fold up your newspaper, put down your book. Drop your thoughts, cares and worries and simply observe. Watch what's happening. Don't let your mind start wandering into what it thinks might be going on. Make no judgement, jump to no conclusions. Just observe and you'll notice that the scene before your eyes is changing moment to moment as, in reality, our whole universe is changing moment to moment.

When you start developing your innate ability to notice and observe you interrupt the automatic process by which you normally jump to what is often the wrong conclusion. Observation will give you a fresh set of eyes. And with a fresh set of eyes you will have a completely new perspective of life. You might even start noticing all life's opportunities which have been there all the time but which you've never before seen.

Copyright (c) 2011 Willie Horton

About the Author

Willie Horton enables his clients be highly effective, happy and successful. He launched his acclaimed Personal Development Seminars in 1996. His clients include Pfizer, Deloitte, Nestle, KPMG, G4S & Allergan. An Irishman, he now lives in the French Alps. His Online Personal Development Seminars are available at Gurdy.Net

Article Directory Source: http://www.articlerich.com/profile/Willie-Horton/45533

Additional Articles From - Home | Self improvement | Success