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. 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.

Procrastination is a disease
Procrastination is one of the mistakes, we can make on our they to success. By procrastinating we are just running from a full-rate life, which we can experience at this moment. Only the small amount of people are able not to postpone tasks every day – most of us are sick.

Why is it the disease? If human always procrastinates, he is just lying for himself. He is running from his wishes and his future. He is trying to stay in his past, to hold status unchanged. Maybe he is afraid of failure. It looks very familiar to psychological invalidity. No matter what it is, do you really want to have it in your life? Consider it – you can choose.

There is no procrastinated tasks
What is a delayed task? It is the task, which should be done tomorrow instead of now? But assignments of tomorrow don’t exist, because tomorrow hasn’t come yet.

What is procrastinating? It’s nothing. In the reality there are only completed and uncompleted tasks.

So, task is completed or not. Black and white. There isn’t a place for grey.

How to stop procrastinating

1. Read again the paragraph “Procrastination is a disease”. Do you really want to be sick with it? To stuck in one place? To achieve nothing? Always to be pity about yourself and say “tomorrow is the day I’m going to start doing X”.
2. Instead of “tomorrow” assign a concrete time, for example, Wednesday at 18:00. Commit yourself to it, brace yourself. Impose a reward for completing a task. And just do it.
3. Do you remember that pleasant feeling, that you’ve done something important? A project or a task is very large, elaborate. There isn’t enough information to understand how much work is needed to complete it. We always want to accomplish any task very well, so we procrastinate again and again. After a while we start to feel discomfort – the conscience is eating us from inside for our laziness. Finally, we do a small part of the task. We start to feel great, because the job is moving forward. Also, we understand that it was easier than we previously thought. It looks like it’s more fun and simple than we originally guessed. Remember the pleasant feeling.
4. Maybe you are postponing a concrete tasks. When ask yourself, whether you really want to do it. Why to do something, which deep inside of you looks like a stupid, unpleasant and unessential thing? Maybe somebody else is trying to make you to do it? In this case write down advantages of doing a task. If the list doesn’t reduce your wish to procrastinate to a minimum level, then just drop out this task and don’t do it.
5. It’s hard to complete a task with one attempt. Assign 30 minutes of your precious time for doing the task. After the time has passed, you can stop doing. This way you can avoid procrastination, which is caused by elaboration and size of the task. Also, we see that the task was easier than we thought. We get a pleasure of moving forward with the task and it motivates us to go further with it.
6. Understand that you are to much valuable to be always worried about things you need to do. When next time you’ll feel uncomfortable because of procrastinating, remember that people who loves themselves don’t hurt themselves like that.
7. It’s better to do something than to try to make it perfect at the very first time and have nothing tangible, nothing completed. So, just do something. You’ll have plenty of time to improve it.
8. If you’re going to start reading, start now. If you’re going to learn more in you profession field – begin now. The only time we have is the present. Yesterday is gone, tomorrow hasn’t come yet.

Conclusion
Don’t lie to yourself and don’t trick your conscience. Just do it. Start today, start now. The sooner you’ll start the sooner you’ll get the desired results. Don’t leave for tomorrow, what you can do today.

The interesting fact is that healthy people act as it is a must be and natural thing. Is it? Well, humans who don’t have it appreciate such “common” things and tries harder to cling to their lives.

I could tell many stories about men, which didn’t have something we feel like “must be and natural”. For example, a woman who was able to see only with an edge of one eye. She got two master’s degrees. She was forced to read holding a book 10 centimetres from her face! After 40 years, when the medicine improved, she regained the ability to see. The dish washing for her was a feast, because there are so many colours in the bubbles. And you still think you can’t get the science degree you want? Which probably would drastically change your life.

Or how about a child, who was born without ears. He was able to hear only when people were talking to his temple or were shouting very loudly – hearing through bones. He never gave up, studied in a standard school and university. When he was at the last semester at the university, there was invented deaf-aid, which was able to make him hear as a common person. He was inspired. He created two years plan, how to enlarge ability to sell devices to people, who need them. After coming with the plan to the owner of the company, which made deaf-aid, he was hired. He helped for a lot of people.

Do you still think that you a poor person? I suppose that you are an idler, procrastinator,  layabout or anybody else, but not a person, who lacks something. You are not a beggar, who need somebody’s mercy. Wake up from your own dream in which you are living and thinking that you are a victim. You have abilities to procure anything you want, live as you like, spend time with people you like, and do whatever you want. Deep inside you know it. Let it be on your conscience. Use your life privileges and talents. You are the master of your destiny.

Conclusion
These Henry’s Ford words perfectly illustrate what I want to tell you: “Whether You Believe You Can, Or You Can’t, You Are Right”. Process it, consider and apply.