Our paradigm, our perspective
Business speaker/coach Scott Hunter's new book, Unshackled Leadership , makes an initial demand on readers: that they recognize that they live their lives in a paradigm. Their existing beliefs determine their perspective on the world and that those beliefs are unchallenged with regard to their validity or effectiveness. When the paradigm is "truth," all is well, but our beliefs virtually always have "blind spots" or outright errors. Hunter equates the resulting problem to trying to find downtown Chicago with a street map of Detroit.
Hunter goes on, helpfully, to identify various, often "petty," personality flaws as illustrative of the mis-perceptions (my blog co-author, Mort Satin, terms them "myth-conceptions"), but the basic insight is that unless we change our personal pardigms, we cannot change our course in life. He reminds us that Albert Einstein defined insanity as doing the same thing and expecting a different result.
Remodeling a paradigm just doesn't work. It needs to be knocked down and re-built. The entire method of thinking about the events we observe must be changed. To get us started, Hunter suggests:
1. Start noticing what you believe to be "the truth." Be willing to challenge your most deeply held beliefs.
2. See if what you believe is true all of the time. Do you just ignore the facts when you encounter situations which are inconsistent with your beliefs? Maybe your deeply held beliefs are just that, beliefs.
3. Ask what life would be like for you if what you believe was not the truth? Or what would life be like if just the opposite was the truth?
4. Be willing to consider the possibility that you are living in a body of beliefs that are not only not the truth, but not even useful. Your willingness to open your mind and question everything will be an enormously valuable first step to shifting your paradigm.
Using an illustration about salt, we've locked ourselves into a paradigm about salt and health where we believe that only the blood pressure impacts of intake levels of dietary salt have heath implications. As long as we remain immobilized by this perspective, we will be forever frustrated by the evidence that is accumulating that lowering dietary salt may improve blood pressure, but actually increase the risk of heart attacks, strokes and death due to cardiovascular events. Until we reconsider and change our paradigm to accept that there may be multiple effects to reducing dietary salt, we will remain in a state of denial.
It's time to "unshackle" our public health nutrition policy leadership by replacing a flawed paradigm.
