Paradigm Shifts

The key to major improvements comes from shifting our paradigm. If you want to make minor changes, change your behavior or your attitude. If you want to make major changes, you need to shift the way you look at things.

Stephen Covey gives several examples to illustrate this point. If you are looking for a building in New York, but you’ve got a map of Detroit (but don’t know it), you’ve got several options. You can change you behavior and try harder, drive faster, etc. You can change you attitude and be more relaxed and optimistic about finding the building. But those will ultimately fail. If your map is wrong, you are almost certainly going to fail.

Sometimes our paradigms are DEAD WRONG, like in this map example, and they severely limit our effectiveness in life. What paradigms do you have of the people in your life? How does that affect your relationships with them?

If some kids were being rambunctious and disrespectful of other passengers, and their father was ignoring them, what would you feel, what would you do? You might be upset, and might be rude in return to the children and complain to the father. But what if you knew that their mother had just passed away that morning, and both were distraught and didn’t know what to do with themselves? Your behavior and attitude would naturally change as a result of your changing paradigm, without effort to change your attitude or behavior.

Attitude and behavior are consequences of how we perceive the world. Working on our attitude and behavior are desirable things, but can only get us so far.

There is a fundamental resistance to paradigm shifting – especially if our security lies in something outside ourselves like credentials, possessions, reputation, etc. If we can generate security from deep within, we can learn new paradigms. That is, if we are not vulnerable deep down, we can afford to be vulnerable on the ‘surface’ of our lives, and take risks with seeing the world in a different way.

A way to do this is to build our security on timeless values, and to have a changeless core. Covey gives the example IBM, which held as its values the respect for individual dignity, excellence, and service.

So what limiting paradigms do I hold, that affect my behavior and attitudes? This is one of the limitations of the human mind, and is not something that I can see by simply asking this question of myself. To me, the word IS the way that I see it. Think about the absurdity of answering this question with something like ‘I believe that I am not good at math, but this is not actually true.’ It’s a tautology that I cannon see the errors in the way I see things.

So how does one shift ones paradigm? Perhaps observation and gathering ‘evidence’ help. I know people tend to look for evidence to support things they already believe, and I'm no exception. Part of a paradigm is the mental ‘filter’ we use – that is, the parts of reality that we habitually see. If I tell you to look around the place where you are and make mental note of everything that is red, then ask you to close your eyes and recall everything you saw that is green, you would have a difficult time. Part of what defines a paradigm shift is learning new habits for what we habitually pay attention to. Perhaps consciously gathering evidence that supports the new one can help. I will just have to wait to see what Covey says about this.

As for having core unchanging values from which to derive our security, this is where I have admiration for people that know their values, and strive to hold themselves to them. I know Covey is a Mormon, so I suspect he, like many others, gets their values from their religion. Where did I get my values? Parents and peers probably. I was not raised in a religious household, and I sometimes regret that I was not raised in some ethical/value framework like that. I am thankful though that I appear to have absorbed the values of being reliable to others, striving to be fair, and continually learning.

I hope that Covey expands on these concepts more in later chapters, because I feel that these are very important concepts.