CEO Financial Freedom & Mindset Coach
Running in circles without success? Updating your Paradigm could be the answer to upgrading and leveling up your life.
When was the last time you updated the operating system of your mobile phone or laptop? Last week? Last month? We know what happens when we procrastinate and ignore the persistent update notifications. The system’s performance steadily declines with slower responses, glitching and hanging at the most inopportune moments. It could even completely shut down.
Even when using the latest laptop with all new-fangled features, a decade-old operating system will botch up applications and will often crash – in short, not performing to its full potential.
The bottom line is, when you rely on old, outdated systems and practices, it’s only a matter of time before they begin to give way. Everything in life must upgrade.
Seeking a paradigm shift
Putting ourselves in perspective – What about updating your operating system? Do you update your habits, paradigms, and beliefs with changing times?
How often have you ignored the update notifications you receive from life – your report card, financial statement, medical reports, or other results?
Are you content with the results you obtain across your experiences in life – when creating wealth or in health, relationships, business, and overall happiness?
Your results reflect your current operating system, also known as Paradigm. Used to describe a mass of information programmed into an individual’s subconscious mind, genetically at the moment of conception and then environmentally through life, the paradigm is expressed in behavioral patterns producing the results a person gets in life.
Paradigms, simply put, are nothing but an accumulation of habits that have almost exclusive control over our habitual behavior, and nearly all of our behavior is habitual. They are the software governing the hardware, i.e., your body.
Since most people do not grasp the intensity of this, around 90% of people don’t understand that they are stuck in a paradigm and thus obtain the same results year after year. This is as true for students in school as it is for people in business. When the system is stagnant, any improvement is incidental and hence temporary.
Most of us are confronted with the same challenge every day. We are stuck doing things we don’t want to do, getting results we don’t want to get, and strangely, we continue to do them anyway.
Some real-life examples of stagnant paradigms you’ll find are:
- People who are grossly overweight want to lose weight yet continually eat food that packs on more pounds.
- Smokers who talk about quitting every day, yet they can’t help lighting up another cigarette.
- Salespeople who complain that they have difficulty selling ignore the patented sales techniques that all the top professionals follow.
- Managers criticizing someone in front
of their peers, despite knowing it’s non-productive and only aggravates the existing problem.
All of the above are common examples of the ‘knowing-doing’ gap.
In all the above situations, the person knows the consequences of their actions and even knows the better route they should take or the changes they should make. Then why do their actions remain the same? Because their paradigms control them.
Paradigms are extremely powerful.
They tend to talk you out of doing the very thing that you decide to do or the habit you desperately wish to inculcate. Understanding and changing your paradigms will prove to be a turning point in life for you.
The Brain we see, the Mind we don’t
To understand paradigms, how they are formed, and most importantly, how to change them, you need to dive deep into your mind and confront your inner rhetoric. To do so, let’s start from the ABCs and learn about the two levels of our thoughts – the conscious mind and the subconscious mind.
The conscious mind interacts with the world around us through our senses. We see, hear, smell, taste, and touch. We have been raised to rely on our senses to gather information, which goes on for our lifetime.
The subconscious mind is the part of the mind that expresses whatever is impressed upon it, which we refer to as ‘doing’. So you could infer that the subconscious mind is in ‘Control of the Doing’.
The paradigm rooted in our subconscious mind is responsible for the compulsiveness we mentioned before – we do things we do not want to do to get results we do not like. That’s because knowing is not enough; results come from behavior, and behavior is controlled by the paradigm. Paradigms controls all the key areas of your life — your belief system, ability to earn money, usuage of time, logic, productivity, effectiveness, self-image.
Paradigms control all the key areas of your life— your belief system, ability to earn money, usage of time, logic, productivity, effectiveness, and self-image
The way to change your Paradigms
These steps may seem simple, but you will have to commit to them to really beget a change. Start slow but challenge yourself to be consistent.
Step 1: Write one or two limiting habits or beliefs that are holding you back from your goals
Step 2: Replace them with uplifting habits and beliefs that help you progress to those big goals
Step 3: Get emotionally involved with this new habit from a benefits point of view
Step 4: Act as if those goals are already achieved. Let that drive you to make the change
Step 5: Repeat the process for other limiting ideas/ habits/ beliefs
To make a shift in logic and break out of that box to freedom, one needs understanding, courage, and determination. This becomes possible with the assistance of a coach or a mentor.
Specialized knowledge combined with professional coaching over a reasonable period of time can help shift your paradigms permanently, thus ushering in a new chapter in your life.
So, are you willing and committed to shifting your paradigms to achieve your big goals in life?
Reach out to Dipak to know more at [email protected]
