Personal Advancement

Blink your eyes.

It’s a simple thing, isn’t it? It’s a familiar action, firmly under your conscious control. Yet if a bug flies towards your eye, or you bring your finger close, it happens automatically. Walking, in fact, is something of a controlled fall, leaning forward and then catching ourselves, balancing on two narrow columns. In fact, if we had to think about each little action involved in walking across the room, most of us would never get there.

Yet we do.

Our lives have been an ongoing process of learning complex tasks to the point where we achieve “unconscious competence” and turn the task over to our trusted assistant, our unconscious.

In fact, much of what we do each day that passes for “thinking” is pretty much unconscious reflex – learned patterns of behavior and thinking.

Here’s a simple brain-teaser – take a moment count the number of times the letter ‘F’ appears in the following sentence:

Finished files are the result of years of scientific study combined with the experience of years.

Most people find three “F’s” in that sentence. If you found all six, then you’ve probably seen a similar puzzle before, but even so, you probably still had a “gotcha” moment the first time you saw it. Your unconscious simply ignores the word “of” as a connecting device and not a “real” word.

A few years back, I went out shopping for a new car. I wanted something sporty, appealing, and “uniquely me”. While I was visiting the various car lots, I found a model I’d never noticed before that appealed to my aesthetics and met my practical needs. I did all of the paperwork, and took my new car home, all set to enjoy this new expression of my individuality.

If you’ve ever bought a car, you probably know what happened next. Yep – no matter where I went for the next three weeks, I saw tons of the same model of car – it was everywhere I turned! Did half the world run out and buy the same car that weekend?

No, of course not. What changed was me – my unconscious learned that this model of car was important to me, and suddenly started “sorting” for similar cars. They’d been there all along, I just hadn’t been “paying attention” to them, since my unconscious had not been sorting them out as important.

In fact, a lot of things go on and are part of our world that we never notice – thankfully! We’d be totally overwhelmed if we noticed each and every detail of our daily experience. We tend, instead, to notice those things that our unconscious has learned are important to us. This “sorting for importance” allows us to eliminate distractions and focus on the “important” things. As the old saying goes, “Energy flows where attention goes”.

Our unconscious does not make value judgments – if we pay conscious attention to anything long enough, our unconscious will start sorting for more of the same. This is occasionally referred to as “The Attraction Principle” – like attracts like. It’s just the way we work.

Does this mean that if we focus on things we like, we tend to find more things we like? Absolutely. It also means that if we focus on things we don’t like, we’ll find more of them, too.

“If you look for problems, you will find them – and you will master them!” - Richard Bandler

An acquaintance of mine took a class awhile back where they discussed this principle – they had each person remember various times that they’d found quarters laying around, and to consider just how common this experience is, and think about it a few times over the next few days. They also had each person think of something more unusual they’ve found before, and treat it the same way. One person remarked on how many old mattresses he’d seen alongside the road.

A few months later, the attendees were asked what the results were. Uniformly, everyone reported discovering an astonishing number of quarters. The person who’d mentioned the mattresses had seen thirty or forty of them – and most everyone else had seen at least a few.

Over the course of the next week, take a moment every so often and jot down the activity you are performing, and the thoughts that are most on your mind at that moment. Try to find different times of days and different activities. Afterwards sit down with the results and see what things you are focusing your attention on. Are these things that you want more of in your life? If not, what do you suppose the result of focusing on those things is likely to be?

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Filed by  Chuck Lawson  under  Mindfulness