.png)
Your experience of life may be more about how you see it than how it is.
When you were young and literally impressionable, you were involved in experiences that may have worked for you or didn’t. Either way, your mind filed these experiences for reference and to guide you in future situations.
It also made those experiences and how they turned out mean something about you. Your mind created, carries, and operates from a story it has constructed about who you are in the world. This story, stored in your subconscious, sets the beliefs and standards from which you operate in your life.
So when you enter a situation, your subconscious mind has prescribed, already, what's possible for you in this situation, through your story, your pre-set beliefs, and standards.
You could take courses and read books about how to deal with the specifics of the situation, but you would still be operating at the effect of your thinking which would limit you in other situations and require more courses and books.
There is another way.
Change the film
Imagine that you are in a cinema, absorbed in a thrilling film. Everything about the cinema including its total darkness, big bright screen, loud sound system, comfortable seats, and sound vibration is designed to engage you completely with the film, and it does. You are there, fully immersed in the plot and characters. It is real for you.
But every now and then, a distraction occurs like a mobile phone going off, and you are jolted out of the film and become aware of the cinema. You look around you to see the other members of the audience; the auditorium decor, and exit signs and know for a few moments, that the film is just a film. It has no reality and you are not part of it.
Your head is like the cinema. When you wake in the morning, your mind projects to you its version of your life situation. It also presents you with what your situation means (your beliefs); what problems you have, and what is possible. Your mind immediately goes to work on tactics and strategies to deal with your situation and guilts you into busyness. Your day is planned.
How it is, is never how it is
Your situation as laid before you is obviously how it is. It’s real, except that no other human being on the planet would see your situation precisely as you see it.
Just like the cinema, what’s being presented to you as reality, it’s a show. It’s a perception arising from your mind’s particular perspective. As with the cinema, you can disengage from it. You can also view your situation from another perspective, and see it differently. You can change the film. You do not have to be bound by your mind’s chosen perception.
You can also choose to be guided by your moral compass aspirations such as your purpose, vision, and principles, which will enable you to transcend your unconscious limiting beliefs.
Your purpose, vision, and principles are your guide
Similarly, your team and/or organisation can be operating at the effect of their own perspective and story, completely unconsciously. That story will also set beliefs and standards, determining what is possible in your organisation.
Which is why, as a leader, identifying your own; your team’s, and/or your organisation’s unique ability, purpose, and vision is so important because, when you are guided by your longer term purpose, vision, and principles rather than the shorter term demands of your mind, you are likely to serve the greater good and be more profitable over time.
You and your colleagues will also experience the fulfilment that comes from effective service, reflected in increased sales.
What you wake up to every morning, and when entering a situation, is just your mind’s presentation of how it is. You don’t have to engage with it as you see it - you can just turn on the lights and see it for what it could be.
Christopher Jones-Warner