5 Paradigms You Didn’t Even Know You Had

By Bob Proctor,

I have a paradigm.

So do you.

To continue to grow, though, we must lead ourselves outside of our paradigms.

The following are five common, but often subtle, paradigms that affect the outcome of our lives. Take a look to see which ones might be shaping your life.

1. Paradigm: Everything is fine.

Life isn’t a struggle, but it’s not anything to write home about either. You’ve accepted that this is the best you’re going to get in life. Maybe because you’ve settled or you feel you don’t deserve more.

Or perhaps you just haven’t invested the time to think about what you truly want. Without a goal to pull you forward, you’ve resigned yourself to the status quo.

This paradigm is pervasive; however, it is subtly different for everyone. So don’t automatically push it aside if, at first blush, you don’t think it applies to you. Sit with it for a while to see if anything comes up.

Breakthrough Perspective: I am happy, but not satisfied.

Just like a seed in the ground wants more sunlight, nutrients and water, we all have a natural desire to grow and evolve.

The law of our being is to know more, to do more and to be more. Each time we achieve something, another desire for even greater good develops naturally—if we allow it to.

As you’ll see in just a minute, adopting a new perspective is about telling your truth. In this case, it’s acknowledging that you’re actually not satisfied with “good enough.” You want an extraordinary life; you want more for yourself and the world.

2. Paradigm: I’ve reached my income limit.

You reached a particular financial position and no matter how hard you work or what you do, your income pretty much stays the same. You feel stuck and can’t figure out how to get over this financial hurdle.

Breakthrough Perspective: I am excited about my financial future.

You can earn more money than you’ve ever dreamed of. However, you can’t do it by talking about, thinking, or feeling there’s a ceiling on your income.

Dwelling on your stagnated income only brings more stagnation. The Universe responds to what you believe.

Increased income can come only from right and positive thinking, and well-conceived and properly executed plans.

Start by getting a sheet of paper and writing down all the negative beliefs you have about money and your ability to earn more of it. Then, let those beliefs go by shredding or burning the paper.

Re-direct your mind to develop a prosperity consciousness, and the money you desire will be yours.

3. Paradigm: My best days are behind me.

Many people, particularly in their 40s and beyond, feel like they’ve already accomplished what they can, and there is not enough time left for them to start a new career, relationship, improve their health, or accumulate money.

This belief system will hit home for you if, on some level, you have given up on your goals. You may have a “why bother” kind of attitude.

Breakthrough Perspective: My best years are yet to come.

In The 100-Year Lifestyle, Dr. Eric Plasker says that your body has the hardware to live 100 years and beyond.

If you knew you’d live to 100, how would you change your life? Would you still feel you’ve already accomplished everything you can?

Our life span is increasing all the time. Expect to be prosperous, happy and healthy for 100 years and beyond. Adopting this new perspective does nothing but good for your life today and in the years to come.

I’m nearly 82 years old, and I have huge goals and more energy than many 30-year-olds. And I don’t plan to slow down anytime soon.

So if you feel like your best days are behind you, stop wasting your life and get back in the game. Get ready for your next big thing!

4. Paradigm: I am unlovable.

You feel lonely and believe you’ll never find a loving partner. You might think that if you had someone who loved you, your life would be a lot better.

Or maybe you’re very outgoing and have a great sense of humor, but inside you’re sad and lonely because you secretly feel you’re unlovable. You might go in and out of relationships because you often settle for the first person who shows interest.

Perhaps you believe you’re unlovable because you are overweight, and the number on the scale determines your value as a human being. You might think nobody wants to be burdened with someone your size.

Breakthrough Perspective: I love myself, and that love comes back to me multiplied.

You have the freedom to feel any way you want about yourself. So why would you want to belittle yourself?

If you feel unlovable in any way, create a new image of yourself and become emotionally involved with that image by, as often as possible, thinking and FEELING what it be like to be that person.

Your subconscious mind can’t distinguish between what’s real and imaginary, so get very clear about the image you want of yourself.

As you go through your day focus only on what you want (love, happiness, health). Also, develop a new way of speaking to yourself and others. Otherwise, you will sabotage yourself with negative self-image dialogue.

5. Paradigm: I need the world’s approval.

Whenever you want to do something new, you look outside of yourself for validation.

You seek approval, appreciation, acknowledgement and guidance from your employer, co-workers, friends, clients or parents. Or you look at conditions and circumstances to prove that you’re on the right path.

This paradigm is often hard to see because most of us naturally sell our abilities short. Take an honest look at your life to see if you need outside approval before going for goals or taking on new things.

Breakthrough Perspective: Spirit guides me at all times.

Religious texts tell us that we were created in God’s image, and we are “a little lower than the angels.”

So if you think your desires aren’t important, or you have an image in your mind of yourself as doomed to fail, that’s a false idea that you must let it go.

When you have a strong desire to do, create, or express something, that longing is divine discontent. It’s Spirit calling you. And if you answer the call, you will be guided and assured of success.

No matter how many of these paradigms you can relate to, you can shift to a new way of thinking.

What happens when you change your perspective

What do you see when you look at the illustration below?

At first, you might see a young lady. However, if you shift your perspective, you’ll see an old woman.

Whatever you perceive to be true about the illustration (i.e., it’s a young lady or an old woman) affects how you think, feel and respond to it.

That’s the power of accepting a new perspective of your paradigm.

Now I would love to hear from you.

SOURCE

13:50:00 - By Vincent 0

20 Small Ways to Break Out of Your Comfort Zone and Create a Positive Change Starting Today

by HENRIK EDBERG

“Move out of your comfort zone. You can only grow if you are willing to feel awkward and uncomfortable when you try something new.”
Brian Tracy

I’m a big fan of doing the unusual thing. Sometimes in big ways. Often in small and daily ways to mix things up.

Why?

Because this habit is a simple and relatively easy way to:

• Expand your comfort zone. And if you change your perspective on yourself from someone who sticks to the old and comfortable all the time to someone who likes to mix things up then it will feel more natural and easier to break out of your comfort zone when comes to bigger things too. Because this habit makes the inner resistance and the fear that may hold you back smaller.
• Add a spark to your day and come alive. It keeps you from getting stuck in the same old daily or weekly rut. And it adds more fun to your life.
• Refuel your curiousness about the world and life. When you do the unusual thing regularly you to discover a ton of new and exciting things. And that will refuel your curiousness about what else is out there that you haven’t discovered just yet.

So how do you do the unusual thing and break out of your comfort zone in small and sometimes bigger ways?

Here’s 20 ideas that have helped me and still help me to do just that.

1. Eat the unusual thing. Instead of choosing the meat-based dish at lunch try the vegetarian alternative. Or try the fish if you usually go for the beef.
2. Smile towards everyone. Instead of just going along with your day in your normal social way try smiling more. Smile more towards your co-workers, the lady at the checkout at the supermarket, the people closest to you and smile to yourself when you encounter a mirror. See what happens.
3. Cook something new. Each week we try cooking a new recipe. It is most often a tasty experiment and helps us to find, sometimes unexpected, new favorites. It has also certainly made me a better cook in the last few years.
4. Mix up your music. I mix things up by trying new music every month. I have a look at the best music on sites like Pitchfork.com and Metacritic.com. Then I load a few of those albums on Spotify and listen.
5. Work in complete silence and stillness. Shut the door to your office, shut off your music, unplug the internet and just focus on doing the most important thing you can do today while enjoying the silence.
6. Read something that your friends wouldn’t guess that you are reading. Right now I’m reading a Swedish book about investing sensibly in stocks. Definitely not my usual cup of tea. But it’s really interesting.
7. Do all your shopping for the week. Instead of doing grocery shopping when you feel like it or need to, sit down and plan what you will eat and need for a whole week. Go and get all of that at the store. Now you don’t have to go back there for a week and you’ll probably have a bunch of extra free time and less stress to enjoy this week.
8. Have a day of kindness. Instead of having the usual bursts of irony, sarcasm etc. during your day try to go for a day where you are just being kind and friendly to everyone including yourself.
9. Enjoy it all. All fluctuations during your normal day is a part of life and as life it’s a gift in some way or another. So on some days I just tell myself: “enjoy it all”. Then I try to enjoy my day no matter if the inbox is overfull, if I’m hungry and starting to get cranky. The things I usually don’t like so much I tell myself to enjoy as a part of life. And so my day actually becomes more enjoyable because much of how we see life is about how we choose to think about it.
10. Watch something odd. If you usually watch thrillers then try a romantic comedy. If you most often get stuck with documentaries try an animated movie form Japan (I recommend anything by Hayao Miyazaki). If you love Family Guy, try the Wire. Expand what you watch to get new ideas and impressions.
    
11. Listen to the sound of the world. Leave your portable music player/radio at home. Just listen to sounds of the city, nature and people as you move about during your day.
12. Take a day to be offline. I tend to spend a day a week offline (usually Saturday or Sunday). It’s a wonderful change of pace and feels like I’m on a small, healthy and extra relaxing vacation. Plus, it makes it more fun to get back to work on Monday.
13. Take a news black out. Instead of reading the paper or watching the news as usual try to go without that for a day. See how it affects you and how much you miss the news.
14. Hide a note for a loved one. Hide a sweet note of affection for a partner, family member or a friend in his or her cookie jar, tea or coffee container, book on the nightstand, hat, shoes or somewhere else where they look each day. Make him or her happy in an unexpected and unusual way.
15. Take a different route. To work or to school. To your gym or home. See something new even when you are in transport mode.
16. Walk or take the bicycle to work. Instead of taking the car or riding the bus as usual. Get some exercise and fresh air before it is time to start working and on your way home.
17. Let it go just for today. If you often get into arguments or have trouble letting issues go and replay them over and over in your mind then just for today let it all go. Tomorrow you can take up your old habits just where you left them . But for today, instead of getting into an argument just let it go and walk away. If you replay something in your mind, let it go for today. If an old memory pops up today too, let it go instead of dwelling.
18. Go out. If you usually stay in during the weekdays, then call up a few friends and head down to the pub for a few hours even if it’s just a Wednesday. Or call up someone you haven’t met in ages and go for a cup of tea or coffee. Or pop down to the movie theater and catch a movie. If you usually do those things though, consider just staying in with PJs on and taking it easy.
19. Sit in a new place. If you have favorite chair or part of the sofa where you always sit then try another chair or place to sit today. It can give you a new perspective at work or at home. And I have found that it can even give me some new and fresh thoughts and perspectives on life.
20. Throw out the things you haven’t used in 1 year. Go through one part of your home – a closet, a drawer in your desk or bedroom cabinet – and see what’s in there. Go through the items one by one and ask yourself: have I used this item in the past year? If not, give the item(s) away to charity or a friend or simply throw it out.

16:44:00 - By Vincent 0

Exposing Fear Of Change

By Mark Connelly

Fear of change is subtle. It operates under the radar convincing you that it's there to protect you and keep you safe.

In reality, fear of change is one of the most common reasons for resistance to change because it stops you taking any action at all.

Earlier this year I met with a client who was losing her job after working in the same business (a bank) for 30 years. She was terrified by the prospect of being forced to think beyond what she had known for 30 years. It made it hard for her to think clearly.


A coaching client has many brilliant ideas for his future but is frustrated because he can't get started with any of his plans.

In both of these cases fear of change holds them back.

It cannot be seen and convinces people to strongly deny that it's there at all.

Fear of change works hard to convince you that change is bad for you. I often hear its attempts to convince people that they will not cope with change.

This page is an attempt to expose fear of change and give you insight into how it may work in your life, or in the lives of people or groups at work.

In most cases it is the reason for any resistance to change you experience.

Effects of Fear of Change

In most cases fear of change stops us from taking action. It often works with anxiety, self-doubt and guilt to help it to do this.

Anxiety: Some stress can be good because it gets us to do something. But there are times when feeling anxious about something new can really limit us.

This often happens if we are not certain about the future.

High levels of anxiety are often brought about by:

• rumors about change,
• self doubt,
• not knowing what to expect,
• not feeling our concerns are heard

     ...and this can be crippling.

When you notice and address these issues people feel less anxious.

Often a good reality check can be very helpful too. Take time to find out if the rumors you've heard are true as this can make you feel less anxious as well.

Anxiety and Fear of Change work together

Feeling anxious can stop us trying something new and makes us resist change by stirring up fears of what is not known.

In such cases we'll choose to stick with what we know rather than face an uncertain future.

There are a number of common fears that can be mistaken for resistance to change. Be aware of them and deal with the actual fear rather than calling all fears 'resistance'.

Here are some examples of fears that look like resistance:

Fear of the unknown

Not knowing what to expect occurs when we don't have enough information about the change and we're expected to take a 'leap of faith'. This can result in a lot of anxious feelings.

Fear of failure

This fear works closely with the need for perfection and makes us worry about not getting things right. It makes sense that the best way to avoid the pain of failing is not to do anything at all.

Yet failure is the only way to succeed.

Think of the number of failed light bulb's before Edison found the one that worked. Successful people often have a list of failed attempts behind them. It's the way we learn.

John Maxwell calls it 'Failing Forward: Turning Mistakes into Stepping Stones for Success'. If you worry about failure this book might help you think differently about trying something new.

Fear of success

Marianne Williamson has written that "Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous?"

It's as if we don't believe we deserve success.

Concern about success can lead to feeling anxious. We have beliefs about what successful people are like and we fear that we might become like them if we are successful. We believe that we might lose friends or exploit others, for example.

To reduce this fear of change we need to know our values and remain true to them.

Fear of loss

Loss is often a part of change. Change can mean that we lose friends, our salary, or even our parking space! Other losses are not as obvious such as the the loss of known routines or the things that define who we are (like a job title, or a position).

Fear of upsetting others

Life coaches are taught to explore the impact of change on other people close to their client. This is because change can have a ripple effect on others.

Of course, the change can be positive. But the fear of upsetting others can really limit what we do. I've known clients who have refused promotions rather than deal with ill feelings from others.

Fear of leaving a comfort zone

Like it or not we are creatures of habit. We like our routines and don't like to be faced with the unknown.

Comfort zones may be safe but we can't grow or experience anything new, as one of the characters in 'Who Moved My Cheese?' discovered (I love the lessons about change in this book and tell everyone about it).

Self-doubt

Self-doubt expresses itself in phrases like "I'm...not good enough", "...not clever enough", "...not qualified enough", or "I'm stupid".

Not only do we start believing this about ourselves but we fear that others might see this too. Resisting change helps us to avoid dealing with self doubt.

Putting ourselves down in this way stems from a lack of confidence and a fear of change that stops us taking any action. It literally stops us getting ahead in life.

Building self-esteem and self-confidence can counter the effects of anxiety and get rid of fear of change.

Guilt

People that put others' needs ahead of their own are likely to feel guilt if they feel the change they need to make will affect others.

You'll hear guilt in action in the words people use. They use the words "should", "must", and "have to" often. So they'll say, "I really should do xyz", or "I have to attend the meeting". Maybe you do this?

There's a lovely story Stephen Covey tells in his 7 Habits CD set about a student excusing himself from a lecture. When Covey asked why he couldn't attend the lecture the student answered "it's because I have toattend tennis practice" (or some similar reason).

Stephen Covey asked him what would happen if he didn't go to tennis practice and the student said he'd be dropped from the team. "So youchoose to go to tennis training rather than attend my lecture", observed Covey.

Stephen Covey makes the point that we need to be aware of our language, and change our "I have to's" into "I choose to", or our "I should's" into "Iwant to" or "I would like to...". 

Focus on the individual

The fear of change can be one of the biggest barriers to change at work or in your personal life.

While a force field analysis can assess the broader situation the time spent really understanding people's reactions allows you to intervene where they are at.

Encouraging the involvement of employees early in the change process and allowing them to be part of the process also leads to lower levels of resistance to change and higher acceptance and engagement in the change.

As successful change management is defined by the ability of people to move towards, and accept, the vision for change it is essential to support the process by focusing on the individual.

Resistance to change is normal. When you are aware of someone's fear of change your change management planning can support them to make the change.

SOURCE

14:11:00 - By Vincent 0

WHY YOU CAN’T TRUST YOURSELF

By Mark Manson

Bertrand Russell famously said, “The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are so certain of themselves and wiser people so full of doubts.”

Over the years, I’ve hammered on the importance of becoming comfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity, in questioning all of your most cherished beliefs and dreams, on practicing skepticism, and doubting everything, most importantly yourself. Throughout these posts, I’ve hinted at the fact that our brains are fundamentally unreliable, that we really have no clue what we’re talking about, even when we think we do, and so on.

But I’ve never given concrete examples or explanations. Well, here they are. Eight reasons you can’t trust yourself, as demonstrated by psychology.

1. YOU ARE BIASED AND SELFISH WITHOUT REALIZING IT

There’s a thing in psychology called the Actor-Observer Bias and it basically says that we’re all assholes.

For example, if you’re at an intersection and somebody else runs a red light, you will probably think they’re a selfish, inconsiderate scumbag putting the rest of the drivers in danger just to shave a couple seconds off their drive.

On the other hand, if you are the one who runs the red light, you’ll come to all sorts of conclusions about how it’s an innocent mistake, how the tree was blocking your view, and how running a red light never really hurt anybody.

Same action, but when someone else does it they’re a horrible person; when you do it, it’s an honest mistake.

We all do this. And we especially do it in situations of conflict. When people talk about someone who pissed them off for one reason or another, they invariably describe the other person’s actions as senseless, reprehensible, and motivated by a malicious intent to inflict suffering.1

However, when people talk about times when they inflicted harm on someone else, as you might suspect, they can come up with all sorts of reasons about how their actionswere reasonable and justified. The way they see it, they had no choice to do what they did. They see the harm experienced by the other person as minor and they think that being blamed for causing it is unjust and unreasonable.

Both views can’t be right. In fact, both views are wrong. Follow-up studies by psychologists found that both perpetrators and the victims distort the facts of a situation to fit their respective narratives.

Steven Pinker refers to this as the “Moralization Gap.”2 It means that whenever a conflict is present, we overestimate our own good intentions and underestimate the intentions of others. This then creates a downward spiral where we believe others deservemore severe punishment and we deserve less severe punishment.

This is all unconscious, of course. People, while doing this, think they’re being completely reasonable and objective. But they’re not.

2. YOU DON’T HAVE A CLUE ABOUT WHAT MAKES YOU HAPPY (OR MISERABLE)

In his book Stumbling on Happiness, Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert shows us that we suck at remembering how something made us feel in the past and guessing how something will make us feel in the future.

For instance, if your favorite sports team loses the big championship game, you feel awful. But it turns out your memory of how awful you felt doesn’t add up to how bad you felt at the time. In fact, you tend to remember bad things being much worse than they actually were and good things being much better than they actually were.

Similarly with projecting into the future, we overestimate how happy good things will make us feel and how unhappy bad things will make us feel. In fact, we’re often not even aware of how we’re actually feeling in the present moment.

This is just yet another argument for not pursuing happiness for its own sake. All the data indicate that we don’t even know what happiness is, nor are we able to control what we do with it if we actually achieve it.

3. YOU ARE EASILY MANIPULATED INTO MAKING BAD DECISIONS

You ever run into those people on the street downtown handing out “free” pamphlets or books, and then as soon as you take one, they stop you and start asking you to join this thing or that thing or to give them money for their cause? You know how it makes you feel all awkward and uncomfortable because you want to say ‘no’ but they just gave you this thing for free and you don’t want to be an asshole?

Yeah, that’s on purpose.

It turns out, people’s decision making can be easily manipulated in a variety of ways, one of which is by giving someone a “gift” before asking for a favor in return (it makes receiving that favor far more likely).

Or try this, next time you want to cut in line somewhere, ask someone if you can cut and give a reason — any reason — just say, “I’m in a hurry,” or “I’m sick,” and it turns out, according to experiments, that you’re about 80% more likely to be allowed to cut in line than if you just ask giving no explanation. The most amazing part: the explanation doesn’t even have to make sense.3

Behavioral economists have shown that you can easily be “primed” into favoring one price over another for no rational reason. For example:

On the left, the price difference seems large and unreasonable. But add a $50 option and suddenly, the $30 option appears reasonable and perhaps like a good deal.

Or another example: what if I told you that for $2,000 you could have a trip to Paris with breakfast included, a trip to Rome with breakfast included, or a trip to Rome with no breakfast included. It turns out, by adding the “Rome with no breakfast included” causes more people to select Rome than Paris. Why? Because compared to Rome with no breakfast, Rome with breakfast sounds like a great deal and our brains just forget about Paris altogether.4

4. YOU GENERALLY ONLY USE LOGIC AND REASON TO SUPPORT YOUR PREEXISTING BELIEFS

Researchers have found that some people with damage to the visual parts of their brains can still “see” and they don’t even know it. These people are blind and they’ll tell you they can’t see their own hand in front of their face. But if you flash a light in front of them in either their right or left field of vision, they’ll be able to correctly guess which side it was on more often than not.

And yet, they’ll still tell you it’s an absolute guess.

They don’t have a conscious clue as to which side the light is on, much less what color your shoes are, but in one sense, they do have knowledge about where the light is.

This illustrates a funny quirk about the human mind: knowledge and the feeling of knowing that knowledge are two completely separate things.5

And just like these blind people, we can all have knowledge without the feeling of knowledge. But the opposite is also true: you can feel like you know something even when you actually don’t.

This is basically the foundation for all sorts of biases and logical fallacies. Motivated reasoning and confirmation bias run rampant when we don’t acknowledge the difference between what we actually know and what we just feel like we know.

5. YOUR EMOTIONS CHANGE YOUR PERCEPTIONS WAY MORE THAN YOU REALIZE

If you’re like most people, then you tend to make terrible decisions based on your emotions. Your co-worker makes a joke about your shoes, you get really upset because those shoes were given to you by your dying grandma, so you decide, “screw these people” and quit your job to live on welfare. Not exactly a rational decision.

But wait, it gets worse.

It turns out that just avoiding making important decisions while emotional isn’t good enough. It turns out that emotions influence your decision making days, weeks or even months later, even after you’ve chilled out and “analyzed” the situation further. What’s more surprising and more counterintuitive is that even relatively mild and short-lived emotions at one point in time can have long-term impacts on your decision making down the road.6

Let’s say a friend of yours wants to meet up for drinks. But for some reason, your guard goes up and you start hedging. You don’t want to commit right away, even though you like this friend and want to hang out with them. You’re cautious about making firm plans with them but you’re not sure why.

What you’re forgetting is that you had another friend that was hot-then-cold with you a long time ago. Nothing major, just someone being a little flaky for whatever reason a few times. You move on with your life and forget about it entirely and your friendship with this friend eventually normalizes.

And yet, it actually made you a little annoyed and a little hurt. You weren’t rip-shit pissed, but it momentarily upset you, and you unconsciously filed that emotion away. But now, your vague and mostly unconscious memory of your flaky friend is causing you to put up your guard with your new friend, even though it’s an entirely different person and different situation.

Essentially, you often use memories of the emotions you had at one point in time as a basis for decisions that you make at another point in time, possibly months or years later. The thing is, you do this all the time and you do it unconsciously. Emotions that you don’t even remember having three years ago could be influencing whether or not you stay in and watch TV or go out with your friends tonight — or join a cult.

Speaking of memories…

6. YOUR MEMORY SUCKS

Elizabeth Loftus is one of the world’s foremost researchers in memory, and she’ll be the first to tell you that your memory sucks.

Basically, she’s found that our memories of past events are easily altered by other past experiences and/or with new, incorrect information.7 She was the one who made everyone realize that eyewitness testimony isn’t really the gold standard people thought it was in courtrooms.8

Loftus and other researchers have found that:

• Not only do our memories of events fade with time, they also become more susceptible to false information as time passes.
• Warning people that their memories might contain false information doesn’t always help eliminate the false information.
• The more empathetic you are, the more likely you are to incorporate false information into your memories.
• Not only is it possible for memories to be altered with false information, it’s possible for entire memories to be planted. We’re especially susceptible to this when family members or other people we trust are the ones planting the memories.

Our memories, therefore, aren’t nearly as reliable as we might think — even the ones we think we know are right, that we know are true.

In fact, neuroscientists can predict whether or not you will misremember an event based on your pattern of brain activity when you’re experiencing it.9 Your shitty memory seems to be built right into your brain’s software in some cases. But why?

At first, this might seem like Mother Nature screwed up when it comes to human memory. After all, you wouldn’t use a computer that consistently lost or changed your files after you stopped working on them.10

But your brain isn’t storing spreadsheets and text files and cat GIFs. Yes, our memories help us learn from past events which theoretically helps us make better decisions in the future. But memory actually has another function that we rarely think about, and it’s a much more important and much more complex function than simply storing information.

As humans, we need an identity, a sense of ‘who’ we are, in order to navigate complex social situations and, really, just to get shit done most of the time. Our memories help us create our identities by giving us a story of our past.

In this way, it doesn’t really matter how accurate our memories are. All that matters is that we have a story of our past in our heads that creates that part of the sense of who we are, our sense of self. And rather than using 100% accurate versions of our memories to do this, it’s actually easier to use fuzzy memories and fill in the details on the fly in one way or another to fit the version of our ‘selves’ that we’ve created and come to accept.

Maybe you remember that your brother and his friends used to pick on you a lot and it really hurt sometimes. To you, this explains why you’re a bit neurotic and anxious and self-conscious. But maybe it didn’t hurt you as much you think it did. Maybe when youremember when your brother picked on you, you take the emotions you’re feeling now and pile them on to those memories — emotions that are neurotic and anxious and self-conscious — even though those emotions might not have much to do with your brother picking on you.

Only now, this memory of your brother being mean and making you feel bad all the time, whether true or not, fits with your identity of a slightly neurotic, anxious person which, in turn, keeps you from doing things that might cause embarrassment and more pain in your life. Essentially, it justifies the strategies you use to get through the day.

And so you might be asking, “Well, Mark, are you saying that ‘who I think I am’ is just a bunch of made up ideas between my ears?”

Yes. Yes I am.

7. ‘YOU’ AREN’T WHO YOU THINK YOU ARE

Consider the following for a moment: The way you express and portray yourself on, say, Facebook probably isn’t exactly the same as the way you express and portray yourself when you’re “offline.” The way you act around your grandma is probably pretty different from the way you act around your friends. You have a “work self” and a “home self” and a “family self” and an “I’m all alone self” and many other “selves” that you use to navigate and survive a complex social world.

But which one of these is the “true” you?

You might think that one of these versions of you is more real than the others, but again, all you’re doing is replaying the predominant story of “you” in your head, which, as we just saw, is itself manufactured out of less-than-perfect information.

Over the past couple of decades, social psychologists started to uncover something that’s hard for a lot of us to accept: that the idea of a “core self” — an unchanging, permanent “you” — is all an illusion.11 And new research is beginning to uncover how the brain might construct a sense of self and how psychedelic drugs can temporarily change the brain to dissolve our sense of self, illustrating just how transient and illusory our identities really are.12

The irony of all of this, though, is that these fancy experiments published in fancy books and journals by fancy people with fancy letters behind their names — yeah, they’re basically saying what monks have been saying in Eastern philosophical traditions for a few millennia now, and all they had to do was sit in caves and think about nothing for a few years.13

In the West, the idea of the individual self is so central to so many of our cultural institutions — not to mention the advertising industry — and we’re so caught up in “figuring out” who we are that we rarely stop long enough to consider whether or not it’s even a useful concept to begin with. Perhaps the idea of our “identity” or “finding yourself” hinders us just as much as it helps us. Perhaps it confines us in more ways than it frees us. Of course, it’s useful to know what you want or what you enjoy, but you can still pursue dreams and goals without relying on such a rigid concept of yourself.

Or, as the great philosopher Bruce Lee once put it:

8. YOUR PHYSICAL EXPERIENCE OF THE WORLD ISN’T EVEN THAT REAL

You have an incredibly complex nervous system that is constantly sending information to your brain. By some estimates, your sensory systems — sight, touch, smell, hearing, taste, and balance — send approximately 11 million bits of information to your brainevery second.14

But even this is an unfathomably, infinitesimally small slice of the physical realm around you. The light we’re able to see is a laughably small band of the electromagnetic spectrum. Birds and insects can see parts of it that we can’t. Dogs can hear and smell things that we don’t even know exist. Our nervous systems aren’t really data collection machines so much as data filtering machines.

On top of all of that, your conscious mind only seems to be able to handle about 60 bits of information per second when you’re engaged in “intelligent” activities (reading, playing an instrument, etc.).15

So, at best, you’re only consciously aware of about 0.000005454% of the already heavily modified information that your brain is receiving every single second you’re awake.

To put that in perspective, imagine that for every word you’ve seen and read in this article, there are 536,303,630 other words that were written but you cannot see.

That’s basically how we’re each going through life every single day.

Footnotes

1. See Roy Baumeister and Aaron Beck’s Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty.↵
2. See: The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker, Chapter 8, to be exact.↵
3. These experiments and more explained in Robert Cialdini’s timeless book Influence.↵
4. This is a shitty summary of an experiment conducted by Dan Ariely of Duke University, discussed in his excellent book Predictably Irrational.↵
5. In fact, your brain has completely independent processes for each of these and both function independently of logic and reason. See Dr. Robert Burton’s book On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You’re Not.↵
6. Andrade, E. B., & Ariely, D. (2009). The enduring impact of transient emotions on decision making. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 109(1), 1–8.↵
7. Loftus, E. F. (2005). Planting misinformation in the human mind: A 30-year investigation of the malleability of memory. Learning & Memory, 12(4), 361–366.↵
8. She’s also a controversial figure for her work in revealing that repressed memories are sometimes false. She was one of the first to come out with skeptical criticism of a lot of therapists in the 1990s when it was all the rage for them to dredge up (and sometimes plant) repressed memories of childhood abuse and trauma in their patients.↵
9. Okado, Y., & Stark, C. E. (2005). Neural activity during encoding predicts false memories created by misinformation. Learning & Memory, 12(1), 3–11.↵
10. Although, I guess that’s kind of what we do with every new Windows update that comes out.↵
11. See Bruce Hood’s The Self Illusion: How the Social Brain Creates Identity.↵
12. Tagliazucchi, E., Roseman, L., Kaelen, M., Orban, C., Muthukumaraswamy, S. D., Murphy, K., … Carhart-Harris, R. (2016). Increased Global Functional Connectivity Correlates with LSD-Induced Ego Dissolution. Current Biology.↵
13. Much harder than it sounds, but you don’t need a PhD to do it.↵
14. Estimates vary wildly, but nearly all of them are in the tens to hundreds of millions of bits per second. The point is, it’s a lot.↵
15. Technology Review | New Measure of Human Brain Processing Speed.↵

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16:02:00 - By Vincent 0