Mindset

Every one of us carries in our heads a mental picture of how the world works. This mental mosaic pieces together for us the disparate elements and connections in an extremely diverse and multifaceted reality. Over your entire lifetime you paint in your mind a cumulative and complex picture of the world.

Your uniquely personal portrait of the world is the basis for your thinking, feeling, and behaving. This foundation may lie deeply buried under many layers of thoughts about endless daily matters that consume your conscious awareness. Even you may not know what your world view really looks like.

Yet, hidden from view or or not, your personal global-construct very much colors, shapes and drives your every reaction, decision, and action.

None of us has the time or energy to constantly reassess all the millions of data points to which we are exposed every day. So your personal picture, your fundamental understanding, of the world may have formed mostly long ago (perhaps going back decades, beginning in early childhood). And these basic assumptions that guide your everyday actions may not have been meaningfully updated in quite some time.

Thus, your assumptions about the nature of things --- from the characteristics of particular individuals to the workings of the world at large --- may represent more of what seemed to be then rather than how things really are now.

To increase your effectiveness as a leader (and as a person), critically examine your own multilayered mental model of the world. Try this exercise. Before reacting, deciding, or taking action in response to a given circumstance ask yourself:

     * What assumptions underlie my instincts or gut reaction to this situation?

     * On what previous experiences or information am I basing my course of action? How do I know that my view of this circumstance is currently valid? How might things be different from how I've always known them to be?

     * What higher quality thinking or actions might result if I viewed the situation afresh? What can I do to update my information and assumptions about this matter?

     * What truisms do I need to unlearn, what habits do I need to change, what re-ordering of my beliefs do I need to consider to broaden and refresh my understanding of the world?

In short, remember to stop and ask yourself: Is my reflex reaction to this situation fair and valid? How do I know?

As Stephen Covey (and at least a few others) aptly observed, we see the world not as it is, but as we are.

To be and do your best in the world, understand both how you see the world, and how it really is.

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