Everything is too much for us to know.
Knowing is a mixture of noticing or using effectively
- Noticing can be described as conscious awareness
- Using can be described as our competence in a given area
We could see everything like an iceberg. We could see it floating in the sea with a small part of it poking up above the surface into the air.
We could easily imagine the sea representing our unconscious and the air our consciousness.
There is more stuff we don’t consciously notice in this moment than stuff we do.
We can understand this from two viewpoints
1 There is a lot of stuff going on in everything – more than we can consciously appreciate in one moment
2 We need to survive and thrive – it’s not good looking at the sky and missing the poisonous snake we are about to tread on.
This happens because we focus consciously or unconsciously on the important stuff, this begs a couple of questions:
So how do we decide what to focus on?
Is it even us who decides?
Let’s look again at what this means in practice –
We can be conscious of stuff we know about and also conscious that some stuff is there that we don’t know about. I am conscious of the nature of these models I am describing and where this piece starts and ends. I am also conscious of the fact that I have not yet resolved the idea of life after death as a model I could use to change how I live this life now.
In this moment We are also unconscious of some of the stuff we are aware of – ask me about the feel of the chair on my sit bones and I can now focus here and tell you.
I am conscious in this moment of the stuff I am focusing on – me choosing these words carefully
As I focus more on these words, I lose conscious awareness of other things, like time passing, like my hunger or thirst.
I am not consciously aware of everything all the time and this reinforces my belief that I only have so much capacity for focus and again raises the question of how the focus comes about?
If I focus on my focus its reasonably simple to see this as a thin slice of everything that exists around me
The more I focus on details the less breadth I experience.
The less I focus on the details the more breadth I experience
If I have a new experience, I can witness my focus changing and even targeting on something I knew nothing about or was not consciously aware of before.
Based on the logic I am aware now that there is much that is going on that I have no conscious awareness of. Listen to the international news for examples of this.
Models that describe this
Johari variant
KOLB variant
See it as a line
See it as a circle with us in it
Aware of most things but conscious of only a few
Able to shift consciousness across the awareness at will
How is your focus driven?
Is it by you?
Is by something else?
Is it aligned to suit you?
If not, you are being distracted
Distraction can be external or internal
External stimuli which may include events people circumstances
Internal stimuli which may include thoughts sensations feelings goals desires
Most of us can accept that there is more going on than we know about. Even the parts of it that we know about are filtered because we have a limited ability to focus.
Focussing reduces our conscious awareness of what is and we can’t ‘see the wood itself for all the trees within it.’
This is all written using some logic and once it’s there to see we all know this is a reasonable representation of what we experience day to day.
Once we get to a reasonable explanation of how things work, we can build this into a working Paradigm of how things work for us as individuals. One thing we learnt from our work with thousands of delegates globally is that each of us has our own approach and each of us needs to do success in our own unique way.
Of course, by now, all of us already have a view of how things work.
These are usually built as part of a normal maturation process. Driven by our interpretation of our experiences, this happens largely unconsciously and without conscious appraisal.
As Sales Academy we worked with thousands of people globally. Most of the delegates we met had never consciously evaluated the effectiveness and suitability of their own Paradigm.
The acquisition and maintenance of an effective Personal Paradigm that represents how you think the world works and that you can use to help you have the life you want underpins the secret of your success. It is the number one priority because the success of anything else you ‘try’ rests on this.
The Paradigm each of us must build takes into account who we are and our own circumstances. It represents our view of the world and how things work. It’s something we use constantly without thinking, to make the choices decision and plans that we think will give us the life we want. You can’t do this by copying a guru or running with the latest fashion.
Although we each require our own unique Paradigm, the good news is that all Paradigms need to cover some common bases to enable us to operate effectively. They may also contain similar truths, the ‘first principles’ or ‘models’ that other humans have tested for us.
Truths we can use with a degree of certainty to understand and predict reliably what is really going on and what will happen if we take a particular action.
These core building blocks can allow us to check or fabricate critical areas of our Personal Paradigm quickly and effectively.
The implications of this assessment have enormous ramifications for how we live and how we succeed and forms the basis for the secret of your success.
Our mission is to help you unpick what this means for you and help you to build your own Paradigm that you can use to have the life you really want.