What Is a Paradigm

The first place for us to start is to understand just what paradigms are. Simply put, paradigms are how you see things. They’re a framework, a perspective in how you interpret part of your world.

If this sound like your focus and your attitude play a part in your paradigms, you’re right on the money! Remember that your focus is the screen that chooses what you will pay attention to and notice from all of the possibilities in your environment. Your attitude is how you interpret what you focus on based on your culture and life’s experiences. The combination of your focus and your attitude for specific stimuli and situations creates paradigms. You literally can have hundreds to thousands of paradigms at any one time with each greatly influencing your behaviors. And as you should have ingrained in you by now, behaviors are the basis of your time control.

Your paradigms can be automatic or consciously created. Most of our paradigms are automatic, and this is where we can get into trouble. How we interpret and then act upon what we see or what we hear or situations we encounter is usually influenced by paradigms we have subconsciously created through our lifetime. These automatic paradigms are primarily influenced by our culture, our upbringing and our life’s experiences. For most of us, some of these paradigms are positive and help us succeed in life, but others are often negative, stealing from our success and blinding us to opportunities to better leverage our time.

As their name implies, automatic paradigms exist and influence our actions when we live life on automatic mode. But you do have a choice! If you desire, you can shift your paradigms and consciously create new ones. This takes a little work, but more than anything it requires you to keep your eyes and mind open to the paradigms in your life. When you notice existing paradigms that steal your time and success or negatively impact your life, you can make a decision to change them at any time. You can shift discovered negative paradigms to any positive ones you wish. It just takes awareness, desire and action.

Visual Paradigms

The most commonly discussed paradigms, ones you are very probably familiar with, are visual paradigms. These paradigms, as their name implies, center on our perception of what we see with our eyes. How you interpret what you see is strongly influenced by the visual paradigms you hold. Depending on your focus, you filter much of the visual sensory information in your environment that your eyes actually see. And your attitude towards the filtered information you "see" determines your perception towards that information. Your perception, your interpretation of what you see, in turn impacts your behaviors and your time. This impact can be neutral, positive or negative.

Let’s look at some examples.

A classic example used frequently in training seminars to demonstrate the power of visual paradigms is a simple drawing that depending on your current paradigm will reveal to you either a beautiful young woman or an old lady. By instantly shifting your paradigm of what you expect to see, you can switch what you actually do see in the drawing back and forth.

You may recall a fad that occurred in the 1990’s with picture prints that looked like multi-colored zigzags and other similar line patterns. By relaxing your eyes and slightly shifting how you looked at the prints, you could instantly see recognizable objects appear out of the blue in the prints. The Statue of Liberty, Naval ships, airplanes, animals, plants, and a wide variety of other objects were in these prints. Only by shifting your visual paradigm could you ever recognize them. My wife could barely give these prints a glance and always see the hidden picture they contained. My visual paradigm was different, and I had to work hard to shift it in order to catch even a glance of what she saw instantly. I’ve developed many a silly headache straining to match her paradigm for these prints.

I would classify the impact of these two examples as neutral, but they do demonstrate the power that visual paradigms can have on what you see. Let’s now take a look at how these paradigms can actually influence your time and your success within it.

I’m sure you’ve heard the expression that beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. This is nothing more than a visual paradigm, and its impact can be great. If your focus and attitude create a paradigm to see only the beauty and wonderful uniqueness within people, your relationships will be positively influenced. Like a parent seeing their child as the most beautiful in the world no matter what their physical or mental makeup, this paradigm will influence you to treat people with respect and admiration. Your behaviors will definitely enrich the relationships you apply this positive paradigm towards.

This positive paradigm is often applied in the beginning of marriages. Usually the new groom and bride see each other as beautiful or handsome and their focus and attitude skim right over each other’s faults. But unfortunately for my couples as they begin to face the pressures of life, they slowly shift this positive paradigm to a negative one. They begin to shift their focus towards the faults of their partner and then their attitude follows as they begin to magnify how irritating these faults are in their mind. Combined, the new focus and attitude can create a negative paradigm that births resentment and begins to destroy their once wonderful relationship.

Have you ever seen this before? I know I have! And in my own incredible marriage, I work hard to constantly build my positive visual paradigm of my beautiful wife to never take her for granted. Occasionally when I’m tired, I feel my focus trying to shift towards her minor faults. When this happens, I catch my attempted negative paradigm shift and redouble my efforts to eliminate it. The result – I’m not perfect, but I definitely feel my ten-year marriage is very close.

Another negative visual paradigm young women especially need to be aware of is the tendency to see themselves in the mirror as someone who is grossly overweight. No matter what is actually reflected by the mirror, their focus and attitude skew their interpretation of what they see. This paradigm can influence their actions, preventing them from taking chances to succeed or may even drive them to damaging and sometimes tragic medical conditions such as anorexia or bulimia. Their visual paradigms are the key! They determine what they see and how they interpret and then subsequently act on that filtered information.

Visual paradigms can be strongly locked into your mind for years or even decades or they can exist temporarily. They are created on a temporary basis when something recent influences how you think about something you see. This creates a short-lasting mental framework of focus and attitude that can positively or negatively impact your actions in the near term.

Here’s an exercise to help drive this point home. I want you to spend a minute looking around your room for objects that are white in color. Go ahead. Make mental notes of all of the white things you see. Depending on your room or location while going thorough this module there may be a ton or hardly any at all. Don’t go any further until you’ve completed this.

Did you focus on all of the white objects around you? If you just read through and didn’t complete this exercise, stop and do so now!

Now, without observing your surroundings any further, I want you to close your eyes for a minute and try to recall all of the objects around you that are rectangular in shape. Don’t cheat! Do not look around you until you’ve completed this exercise.

How did you do? Take another minute or so to look around you and find all of the rectangular-shaped objects in your surroundings. Did you miss some? Did you miss a lot? You probably did. If you’re in a room, are your walls rectangular? What about your floor and ceiling? How about shelves, desks, drawers, lights, vents, windows, pictures, books, computers, and other furniture? I’m sure there are other rectangular objects around you as well.

The point of this exercise is to demonstrate the power of temporary visual paradigms. By having you first direct your focus towards the white objects around you, I helped you create a visual paradigm that filtered and disregarded shapes. You may even have done a similar exercise to this in the past where you had to close your eyes and recall another color than the original one you were supposed to concentrate on. If this were the case, you still created a temporary paradigm to see various colors and in all probability still disregarded shapes.

What does all this mean to you? Plenty! Have you ever blindly walked into something? We all have at some point. When you did, you were experiencing a temporary visual paradigm where you filtered out seeing objects in your environment to focus on something else – usually thoughts. Rarely did this visual paradigm do anything other than give us a bump on the head and a bruised ego.

But what happens when you experience a temporary visual paradigm while driving? The results can be devastating! If you are only focusing on the car in front of you, you could filter out cars or people approaching you from the side. Or if you temporarily just focus on your surrounding environment, you might actually filter the car break-lights or stop light or stop sign in front of you. In aviation, we’re taught to trust our instruments over our eyes, especially at night or in inclement weather. This is from experience that visual paradigms have been deadly to pilots in these situations on more than one occasion.

What’s the best thing to do to protect yourself from these temporary visual paradigms? Awareness. Just keep these lessons in mind and do your best to catch yourself when drifting into a temporary visual paradigm of filtering out your environment. In these situations, awareness is your best ally to positively influence your behaviors.

Continue learning in the next coaching article.

Why not visit www.timemanagementinc.com for a free trial of the 34 powerful eLearning modules.

and its Author, Vince Panella

What Is a Paradigm - To learn more about this author, visit Swarup Dutta's Website.

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