A week ago I had the unexpected pleasure to see Bob Proctor (best known from The Secret movie) live. As I subscribe to Bob's Six Minutes to Success I was sent an invitation to see him speak live and in person in Toronto for free. While I had suspicions about why it was free (trying to sell me something?) I was quick to jump on the oppurtunity.
Sure enough, there was a sales pitch which I won't bother to go into because it's not relevant here but the rest of the 2 hour session was golden.
There was a lot of goodness that Bob covered but what struck me the most was his points about paradigms. I will try to recap the information as best I can here.
Bob started with a simple drawing of two circles, one above the other connected by a line. The top circle is the mind and the bottom the body. Obviously the mind controls the body. However, the mind has two parts - the conscious mind and the subconscious mind. So he drew a line through the upper circle to show that with the conscious mind over the subconscious mind.
The conscious mind has more direct control over the body than the subconscious however whenever the conscious mind isn't giving specfic directions the subconscious mind assumes control. IE: You may consciously decide to hold your breathe but you don't consciously breathe, you just do it.
The conscious mind has the capacity to evalute new information and determine it's validity. What the conscious mind decides to accept as fact is transferred to the storage banks of the subconscious, otherwise it's discarded. The subconscious mind however does not have this capacity, it merely accepts everything given to it as 100% fact.
This much I knew, Anthony Robbins in particular covers this topic quite well in his book 'Awaken the Giant Within'. All success coaches in fact depend on the subconscious mind's total acceptance of fact to change behaviours through visualization (NEC). Basically the subconscious cannot distinquish between what is real and what the conscious mind vividly imagines. Ever had a really pronounced dream and when you awoke you wheren't quite sure if it had happened or was a dream for a second until your senses determine where you are and that you were dreaming? But Bob added a new twist to this idea for me.
The subconscious mind takes the information it's given and creates a paradigm - a belief system that says because I have X number of references for this, it must be true, a fact, a law. Generally this serves us well. But not always. In my previous post I spoke of a woman who had trouble believing that her lover wasn't cheating since all her previous lovers had. She had developed a paradigm that was no longer serving her and was in fact perventing her from finding the very man she desired.
The conscious mind generally is swayed by the paradigm when deciding what information is relevant and what actions need to be taken. Rarely if ever do people stop to think about their paradigm beliefs or how they acquired them.
At this point Bob erases the upper part of the circle representing the conscious mind. When we are first born, we have no consciousness, no structured thought. So all information is being fed directly into the subconscious mind and accepted as fact. This continues to a lessening amount for the first few years. At this age the brain is like a sponge and absorbs an amazing amount of information. For example children from multilingual homes have no difficulty in learning the multiple languages. By the same token, they learn the prevading beliefs of their surroundings. So if they grow up in poverty they develop a paragidm of poverty - that money will always be hard to come by. If they grow up in a wealthy home they have a paradigm of wealth and that money is easy to come by. This naturally extents to all areas of beliefs from relationships to health to society.
Once a paradigm sets in the subconscious the conscious mind relies on it as a filter to determine what new information we accept as fact. Generally people keep adding new references that support their existing beliefs and reject or dismiss those that don't. Which explains why very few people who grow up in a poor neighbour are able to break the cycle of poverty. It's not that opportunities dont' exist (granted they may be very limited), it's that thier subconscious paradigms don't recgonize them.
