There’s a reason that we don’t progress as fast as we want or to the place we want to be. Simply put, it’s our paradigms. They’re insidiously devious. They sneak up on you without you even realizing it. You think that you’re taking purposeful steps toward your goal and all of a sudden you’re sitting at your workstation wondering why you haven’t moved forward.
Paradigms are a nest of habits that we’ve collected over many years. We start collecting them the minute we’re conceived. Genetic paradigms that make us look like our relatives. Then slow progressive training that starts about 3 months before we’re born. By the time we’ve reached 8 years of age our training is almost complete. Our paradigms are set and we start out on your path of security that gets reinforced by your parents, relatives, teachers, clergy, friends and anyone else that has had an important part in our lives, for the rest of our lives.
Now that’s not a problem until we become dissatisfied with what we are doing or whom we are doing it for. But that’s ok, we’re supposed to be dissatisfied. That dissatisfaction is what causes us to want to grow. To take new directions and learn new things. I’m 53 and I’m still learning new things. Not just knowledge from which I can do other things but things about myself.
Very few of us bother looking inside ourselves to see what could possibly improve in order to improve our lives. We often get stuck earning the same amount of money for the entirety of our lives because we don’t know how to earn more. That’s usually caused by the fact that we never follow what we are passionate about. We do what we’ve either learned how to do or what ever it is that comes easiest to us. Not what we’re passionate about.
We all had fantasies as children about being something or doing something. We all wanted to be doctors, or firefighters or something that we were really excited about but some form of blocker was introduced that caused us to do what came easiest. Someone may have said, “You’re not smart enough to be a doctor. You should become a mechanic” or “Being a Firefighting is too dangerous. You could die doing that” or “Photography is too difficult to get a good paying job in” and from that our paradigms get set.
We gain knowledge from the lessons we are taught in school and from that knowledge we muddle through, throw our dreams aside and follow the path we got set upon a long time ago. The dissatisfaction sets in and our paradigms keep us firmly planted where we are because it’s too difficult to change directions once we’ve created our homes and families. It’s those paradigms that make it difficult to achieve our goals.
The thing is that paradigms are created through our thoughts and repetitive exposure to the same thought. The more it is repeated the larger it grows until it is a huge anchor holding us back from what we are passionate about doing. The bond is so strong that we forget about what our passion is and we often have a very difficult time in recalling our passion and even worse when we think about it we become anxious.
So how do you change that paradigm? We create a new idea. We create a thought that gets us going. A thought that rekindles that passion and we’ll create a goal that we want so bad that we can barely wait to have it. We write that thought down many times over. Daily. Hourly. Every waking minute that we think that thought we are slowly changing the paradigm. We write down that thought and turn it into a goal. We turn it into something that we want and will give up everything to have. Then we build a plan to attain it.
But what happens when our basic needs are threatened? The plan falls aside. Our paradigms begin creating excuses and alibies that allow us to stop the change of direction. “You don’t have enough money to do that.” “You don’t know what you’re doing and you’ll end up bankrupt.” “You’re relatives will think you’re crazy.” Sometimes our paradigms cause nightmares to corrupt us into returning to our comfort zone. Back on the rails set down by our ancestors. The small barriers that we encounter, the disappointments and discouragements that we face and the worst of all, the fear of criticism will cause us to abandon our dreams and goals and return to bondage. “Just when I thought I was out; they pull me back in.” ~ Michael Corleone
We have unlimited potential. We can have, do or be anything we want to have, do or be. All we need to do is find the right thought and repeat it until we have a clear picture of what it is that we want which becomes our goal. Then we live in that picture. We repeat the thoughts every minute and hold the feeling it gives us in our hearts and slowly but surely we take steps toward having, doing or being what we want. But we have to take action for this thought to manifest in our lives. We have to take action and believe that we are already in possession of our goal. The paradigms never leave they just change to what we believe. What do you believe?