Changing Your Mind

I've talked about shifting attention before and mentioned the limitations of my faith in self-assessments. The theme is back today as I remembered a presentation I gave last year called Changing Your mind About Marketing.

That talk was inspired by my experience of creating a different experience of marketing and selling by changing my thinking about those activities. And changing my thinking didn't require repeated affirmations or years of meditation. It was simply a shift in attention. I stopped paying attention to my thinking, and my thinking automatically changed.

The more recent inspiration for this topic was in two recent conversations with friends who had recently taken self-assessment tests like the Enneagram or Myers-Briggs. One of the challenges associated with these tests is that we convince ourselves that they reveal permanent truths about who we are when they actually reveal generalizations about our preferences.

We're not limited to the experiences that the tests associate with our types. We have a whole range of possibilities; the only thing at play is our thinking from moment to moment. Thinking that I'm an introvert creates the experience of introversion and vice versa. I can show up as every Enneagram type. The test only gives me a general idea of my most habitual patterns.

Life is not set in stone. If you want a different experience, then think differently. If you want to think differently, pay attention to different thoughts. If you want to shift your attention, you can expand and contract your point of view at will. 

#mindset #attention #consciousness