Change your Mind by Changing your Perception & Perspective

Learning how to change your mind is one of the best tools or skills to learn, to help you:
• Calm you down when you’re feeling stressed.
• Change your experiences of situations in your life.
• It may open up new possibilities that you hadn’t thought of or seen before.
• Let you appreciate all the good things you have in your life.
• Allow you to make better decisions.

For me 2 key components of changing your mind are perception and projection.

Perception is “a way of regarding, understanding, or interpreting something; a mental impression; ability to see & hear or become aware of something through the senses.” Example: We need to challenge many popular perceptions of old age.

Perception is in other words what you believe to be the truth, based on your past experiences and past conditioning.

Did you know that +- 97% 
of your perception and behaviour happens at an unconscious level? You only have control over +-3% 
of your behaviour consciously.

Did you know that your mind 
Deletes, Distorts and Generalizes 
all incoming information, allowing you to see & experience only the things 
that you are conditioned to see?

Your conditioning is all your past experiences, memories, emotional traumas, decisions that you’ve made, 
belief system & values that you have adopted. These things affect the way you are thinking, 
affect your behaviour & gets you the results 
you have in your life, right now.

We are fed information all around us through our 5 senses (see, hear, touch, smell & taste) at +- 400 billion bits of information per second. 400 BILLION bits of information per second!

That is a tremendous amount of information per second that our senses can pick up on. This goes to our Conditioned Mind for processing. However, it’s a total overload of info and our RAS (Reticular Activating System) reduces the 400 billion bits of info down to only 2000 bits per second.

Our RAS filters the info according to our filters (e.g. personal values, belief system, etc) and prioritizes the info, and then Deletes, Generalizes and Distorts the 2000 bits of info per second.

So you experience a fraction of less than 1% of what actually happens around you every second of every day! This means that you do not see the world as it really is! You experience something according to your filters and how you see things and the people in your life, which in turn impacts on your perspective.

Perspective is a particular attitude towards or way of regarding something; a point of view or viewed from a specific point. Example: History is normally written from the editor's perspective.

This now brings us to the following: people can’t be in our lives, any other way than what we project them to be. You only perceive one version of the people around you and that is the version that has to do with you. Our filters are not the same and we only experience what’s left of the information, which means that you can’t perceive anything from the outside world that is not you.

To illustrate the above, I am challenging you to do the following:
I. Think of 3 people that you like and write down their names.
II. Now, think of 3 people that you don’t like and write down their names.
III. Spend some time on this and find out how all these people are LIKE YOU!

Would you like to learn a short cut to success?

It is called changing your perspective.

Has this ever happened to you? You are battling with a crises in your life and then something else happens, putting that original problem in a completely different place of importance in your life, giving you a wake up call perhaps and suddenly your perspective has changed. Then you find that the original problem is not a problem anymore, just a small obstacle that you have to overcome.

So, I want you to think about this.

1) How clear is your perspective on your life?
Think of perspective as the lens of a camera. The camera lens only shows the picture of what you are focusing on & the angle you have chosen.

2) Are you being real about issues or problems you are facing?
Or are you making mountains of little anthills? Will it still matter in a month or a year?

3) Put yourself in someone else’s shoes
Test yourself doing this with the problem you are facing: write it down on a piece of paper & show it to a complete stranger. Will they also find it such a huge problem? I am not saying spill your guts to a complete stranger. Simply put yourself in the stranger’s shoes. How will they see your problem from their point of view? Try to think how they will experience something and what you can learn from them.

4) Flip things around – look at it upside down; from a different angle.

5) Try something different or new.
So if you are in the restaurant, instead of ordering the Beef Burger like you always do, try something else that you have never tried before. You might just be surprised. Learn a new language or hobby, take up a new sport or go skydiving. Whatever, to challenge yourself to learn.

6) Change your routine
As an example: Take a different route to work or going back home.

7) Change your focus to where you want to go
Do not focus on the little challenges that you have on your journey to your destination. Focus on your destination. Remember, today’s challenge is tomorrow’s memory. By not focusing on your fear, your actions will take you in the direction where you want to go.

The next time you face a challenge, don’t think about it as a problem anymore, but choose the perspective that will help you to get to your destination.