Power of paradigm shift

First of all, I’m sorry that this post wasn’t published yesterday as promised. To redeem from sin, I will post two articles today.

This article is closely related to the previous one – “how we improve”. This time I will tell you not about the specific skills and qualities of character, but how we can improve our views and and perception of the world. The article was inspired by Stephen R. Covey book “The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People”.

Firstly, let’s answer the question what does paradigm mean? This term was introduced to scientific work by Thomas Kuhn, in his book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”

Paradigm – a philosophical and theoretical framework of a scientific school or discipline within which theories, laws, and generalizations and the experiments performed in support of them are formulated.

In personal development this term means the system of views for understanding the world, or simply the certain world model, which we use to interpret everyday events.

Experiment with drawing having two meanings
The experiment was conducted at Harvard University. Lecturer divided a student audience into two parts. The first half was given the young woman’s images, and for the other – old. jauna_sena_moteris In the images you were able to see only one woman. Then the teacher showed a large aggregate picture on the wall, which you can see on the left. Then he asked students what they see. Disputes were started in the audience. Some of the students were furiously trying to convince others that this is the young woman, while others on the contrary – that this is the old one. Eventually, students began to particularly analyse the image, until the whole classroom was able to see both women.

The experiment perfectly demonstrates how it’s easy to confuse facts with their interpretations. In this case, facts were only black and white lines. While the image that we see is our interpretation, based on our paradigms of reality perception.

Thus, people tend to think that sees the world objectively, but in reality it is not the case. We see the world through who we are.

Power of paradigm shift
Paradigm shift is a change in system of attitudes, leading to a new interpretation of the events and circumstances. For example, in the previous example this shift occurred when the students saw the both women in the single image.

Let’s go to to more real life situations. It’s late evening and you’re getting home. A man with three children board a subway. The children act very ravingly and it is clear that they are beginning to increasingly irritate and interfere with passengers. However, the father does not resort to any action to make them stop. Finally, you lose your patience and say: “Hello, your children cause a lot of noise and disturbs the passengers. I think you should discipline them”. It looks like that the man sitting next to you awakens from a dream and says: “Yes, I’m sorry. You see I don’t know what to do or say, we’re returning from the hospital, where their mother has died”. These words suddenly change your attitude. You start looking to the man and children differently. It does not matter anymore that they behave as before, after all, the man still hasn’t resort to any means to change children behaviour. However, it is likely that now your view to situation justifies such behaviour. You may even offer to help them. The shift of paradigm has occurred.

Now let’s imagine that instead of a pleasant appeal to the man, you roughly say to him: “Stop your children from acting ravingly? Are you blind? Don’t you see how they are behaving!?” Well, after these words it’s possible that you wouldn’t even know why the man with children are acting in a such strange way. And probably you would be ashamed after getting aware that you have been such a “fair” guy and told him everything so crudely.

All of this takes place in a much larger scale. For example, R. Kiyosaki book “Rich dad poor rad” radically changed my attitude to money. I’ve started to think that I should have money for a rainy day, that it’s stupid to buy a car on the limits of your income.  That buying on credit is the same as paying for already dead horse, and even more expensive. And the most important thing, I’ve learned from the book, that money must be my employees, who work for me. The money they earn becomes my new employees, who are working for me too and etc.

How to change paradigm – perform its shift

  • The diversity in life experience. New experiences, other cultures and other areas encourages us to look at everything differently. Error forces us to edit them and learn from them, so, the next time to do it properly.
  • Reading, reading and one more time reading. It’s best to read books, whose ideas are contrary to your beliefs. If you read to understand the different approaches and supporting arguments, then it is likely that your own attitude will change. Probably not radically, but some aspects of the paradigm will change.
  • Communicate with many people. It seems like the case with books. Different people see life differently. Understanding their paradigms helps us to adjust our own, bringing them closer to an objective understanding of reality.

Summary
Paradigm – the whole pack of attitudes through which people look at life. People with different paradigms sees the world entirely differently. This means that people think that they see the world objectively, but they see what they are. This leads to errors when interpreting the data, where facts are mixed up with interpretations.

If you want to improve the understanding of the world and bring it closer to the objective reality, you need to compare your paradigms with others existing in the world and select what is real and what is not.

December 5, 2009  Tags: , , , , , , , ,   Posted in: Personal Development

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