Change Your Thinking to Change Your Actions!

Whether as an underlying tone or overtly stated, the theme of my blogs are always about change.  My last blog didn't feel complete, I thought it rambled a bit and didn't fully articulate some of the points.  It left me feeling like I should apologize for posting thoughts that weren't fully formed.  But as I reflected further, I realized that less than fully formed thoughts are part of the change process.

Precisely what makes change difficult is not knowing--is not having a fully formed sense of where we're going.  Isn't that what we're facing right now as a nation?  And doesn't that uncertainty extend beyond our borders to the global community as a whole?  We expect our new President to have the answers, to lead us back to something we're familiar with.  But I sense that Barack Obama understands that change is a process and the shear magnitude of our difficulties means that returning to a comfort zone will take some time.

To be honest, we don't ever return to anything.  The comfort zone we establish will be formed from new realizations as the unknown is revealed through the process of the future becoming the present.  Time and all things move in only one direction, forward.

Which is why I believe partially formed thoughts are acceptable and a means of shaping the future as it unfolds.  If I haven't convinced you yet, consider that the continuous action of cause and effect are at the base of our evolving future.  That's because everything we do can be seen as actions.  Each of us and everything in this physical reality are interacting and interconnected to a future that is continuously revealing itself in the present moment.  So the future is not a concept divorced from our present reality, it's a set of constantly changing probabilities that through our actions we have a hand in creating.

All change can be seen as an opportunity to learn something new.  In fact, any change that directly affects us makes an overt demand on us to learn from our experience.  Now, do we learn from every experience?  No.  Frequently a part of life is having the same experiences again and again until we start to learn something from it.  Have you had this experience of life seeming to repeat itself?  If you have that's a good sign, you're starting to wake up!

Waking up eventually brings us to this monumental awareness: what we think, determines how we act!  The implication is that if we want to change our actions we have to first change our thinking.  This is easy to say, but far harder to do.  The first issue is to become aware of what we're thinking.  The second issue is to what are we going to change our thinking?  This raises questions about how can we know what we don't know?  The third issue is all the psychological barriers--fear, a sense of control, and the need to know--that arise as soon as we begin to even contemplate changing our thinking.  [All of these issues are critical to our ability to change and have been addressed in the Everything Changes! series that can be found in the archives of this blog beginning back in July '08.]

As I thought about what I was trying to communicate in my last blog "Are we addicted to money?"  I realized that I was using partial thoughts to get us to question a reality that is undergoing change.  We need to think about money--the things it does for us--and how we feel when we perceive that we have less of it.  But something even more important emerged from my query and that was the thought to approach the subject of our thinking from an entirely different angle.

That angle is to look at what informs our thinking.  In other words, where does our thinking come from?  In Everything Changes! I talk about our senses collecting data from our surroundings, but a lot of what our senses pick-up are the systems that we've put in place.  Systems theory isn't a new idea, but my thought as it relates to systems isn't about analyzing them as much as it's about recognizing how these systems inform our thinking.

For example, the lifeblood of an economic system is money.  We don't have to be told this it's readily apparent the first time we walk into a store.  Our observations shape our thinking and this thinking begins to define our actions.  Since meeting even our most basic needs takes money, we've associated money with survival.  From the perspective of a system that informs our thinking it seems almost absurd to ask; Are we addicted to money?  Only from a perspective that is attempting to think outside this system does that question start to make any sense.

How can we change our world?  It's our actions that create consequences and produce outcomes.  To change the outcome we have to change our actions.  But our actions are driven by the systems that inform our thinking and as long as those systems remain in place our thinking will remain unchanged and our actions will continue to produce the same old outcomes.

This economic crisis signals a change in the economic system.  It's an opportunity to see how the system has informed our thinking and driven our actions.  Our thinking is represented by things such as expectations, future projections, carefully laid plans for our economic future, etc.  So what happens when the system takes a hit and our hopes and expectations take a hit along with it?  This is a time when we need to be better informed about the impact that change has on us.  I'm suggesting that any questions about the system we've relied upon to inform our thinking are healthy.  And these questions are at the root of any change in our thinking and the product of different outcomes resulting from changes in our actions.

Thanks for reading!  If you have a comment or question please send it to me.  Dan.