LTF Weekly Newsletter – April 26th, 2009
Posted by learning | Filed under Uncategorized
A Paradigm Shift
“Any subject is really two subjects…what you want and the lack of what you want.” – Abraham-Hicks
I ask people every day what they want. This seems like such a deceptively simple question and yet it stumps everyone. I get answers like:
- “Well, I’ll tell you what I don’t want.”
- “I’ll tell you what I would settle for…”
- “I know what I want, but I also think it’s impossible.”
Sometimes people just sit there looking very uncomfortable because they want so desperately to tell me what they want but they are afraid that I will ridicule them or tell them all the reasons they can’t have it just as everyone in their lives always have. Sometimes I get a long story about all the times they did want something and they didn’t get it.
I tell a story to my clients in our early coaching sessions to explain to them what a “paradigm shift” is. I ask them if they’ve ever seen elephants at a circus with a little rope around one of their feet tied to a stake in the ground. The elephant sometime sways back and forth but even though they could easily pull out the stake and run away, they do not. Why?
They do not because as babies, they were tied to a stake in the ground, but what was around their foot wasn’t a rope. It was a metal spiked ring and every time they pulled to move around, those spikes would dig into their flesh. They learned over time not to pull on the rope or they would experience pain.
As children, we learn over time that we cannot have what we want. That isn’t our fault because we were raised by people who didn’t believe they could have what they wanted, so they taught us to “face reality.” They taught us that money only comes to us if we work hard, that “money doesn’t grow on trees,” that we can’t do what we want for a living…we have to get a profession where we will be safe and secure…and a lot of other beliefs that have been passed down from generation to generation. All of these beliefs are like that chain around our legs. Early on, we feel our disappointment living with people who are trapped in their paradigms. We feel so much pain that after awhile, we don’t want to feel that any more so we buy into their paradigms. Doing so isn’t what we want, but it is less painful than asking for what we want from people who don’t believe it’s even possible.
When we came into this world, we did so with the knowledge that we were god-like beings, who could create anything we could imagine and believe. If we are to create the world we want to live in, we must learn to let go of the paradigms that don’t work for us and shift them to ones that create the world of our dreams.
© 2009 Jeffrey L. Scholl. All rights reserved
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