Anth Quinn

As children we are born and have to begin to make sense of the world, we begin to build up our control of our bodies and begin to create out maps of how the world works from direct experience – anyone who has spent any time around a child will know that they can question even your most basic assumptions and have you stumped for an answer.

I was once driving along through a beautiful crisp winter’s dawn in the Yorkshire dales driving a 3 year old boy to nursery, like all children he was full of questions…

My favourite question he asked that morning was:

“Anthony, how do how does the moon learn fly?”

Well try explaining that to a 3 year old…

I’m sure you similar examples from either children you’ve spent time with, or from your own childhood questions.

When was the last time you were that curious?

As children we are still building our maps and we are full of wonder and curiosity, then as we get older at some point we begin to think “we know” and many of the questions slow down, it seems we learn to stop asking questions – what a pity!

The models of the world you begin to construct as a child and store in your unconscious mind become a kind of informal, vague private theory of the nature and rules of reality.

The more sure we become of our models the less it seems we take account of what is coming in from our senses because no longer do we notice and ask, we take in small bits of data make unconscious assumptions about it nature and context then pull up the relevant models in which to fit it.

I read somewhere that perception and the attribution of meaning is like someone running into a cinema projection room with a vague half finished drawing, the projectionist (your unconscious mind) rummages through all of its memories assumptions, rules and associations etc. find the best fit and projects the complete image up onto a screen.

In essence your mind takes in a little information from your senses and then fills in the blanks from its bank of experiences and rules.

So how can this be a problem?

I have a friend who is a successful artist and she was recently explaining too me how when you look at something say a shadow, the logical part of your mind thinks “shadow”, it assumes shadows are “black”, so it fills in the blanks and that is what you see.

However someone with an artist’s eye will “switch of” that part of the brain and look more deeply at the richness of colour and light in that area and will end up using olive green,grey, silver, brown etc to more closely catch what they are really seeing

She said that learning to see that way isn’t easy – but it can be learned.

This is a great example of how our “labels” assumptions, blind us from seeing more clearly what is really there because we fill in the gaps too early.

Think about this for a moment…

…your friends and family have known you for a long time, they think they know you, but they have made their assumptions based on their previous experiences of you and once they’ve done that, they stop noticing. In many ways your friends perceptions of you are not based on who you are now, but on who they decided you were in the past. This is one of the reasons the people closest too us can be the last to see how we have changed.

What outdated assumptions are you carrying around about the people closest to you, do you really see them?

When was the last time you took the time to really see and listen to the people closet to you?

As I’ve been thinking about this I realised that I had a clear example of myself.

Many years ago when I was working as a lab assistant while studying part time for an honours degree. I was getting on fine and was getting good grades in my reviews and eventually I got a 1st class degree which I was pretty pleased with at the time. I was very excited about the new opportunities that would come my way now I was a chemist. But guess what nothing really changed I was given the same type of jobs to do and kept getting good results but I was treat just the same as before. When I raised this with my manager he said that they were very pleased I had done so well, and this made me a top class lab assistant but it would be a few years before I could be considered for a role as a chemist.

So, I decided to take a chance and applied for a job with a different company as a chemist – to my delight I was offered the job and my new manager told me how pleased he was to have a new chemist with such a good degree, after a few weeks I was given a team of technicians to manage and went from strength to strength.

This demonstrates some important principles about how you may have allowed yourself to be held back and how you can begin to change that today; can you spot any of them?

I’ll leave you to ponder that for a while…

For now I’d like you to consider how you are missing potential opportunities around yourself by assuming you know how things work, what you or the people close to you are capable of, or how the world works?

How would it be different if you were to open your mind to the possibility that you are far more than the current labels that you have accepted about yourself?

Just suppose you decide today to suspend that logical part of your mind that is so used to jumping to label and categorise everything. Then began to develop your “artist’s eye” bringing that child like sense of curiosity and wonder to your world.

Who knows what new insights and pleasure you could bring into your life as you see beyond your labels and become increasingly curious about the people you meet, the things they say and the places you go?

What if you were to step out beyond the labels of your old thinking and environment and see the world afresh today?

This entry was posted on Friday, August 22nd, 2008 at 10:19 am and is filed under Personal Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.