New Thinking For A Better FutureMuestra

The identification of essentials, convictions, and preferences is helpful in every aspect of life: at home, in business, in neighborhoods, and with friendships. Many heated conflicts can be avoided (or at least the temperature turned down below the boiling point) by recognizing people have the right to their own preferences. We also need to give them room for their convictions—and we can even love those who have different essentials, although we’re sure ours will never change. This set of categories was very helpful for my students and it has been life-changing for me. I’ve learned to think differently. This simple but profound insight about how to think, perceive, and label people and ideas can radically change how we relate to virtually everyone we know. We will be more open to others’ ideas, less defensive about at least some of our own, and more willing to appreciate different perspectives. What kind of difference would this make on a staff team or an executive team in goal-setting and planning? In a marriage and our relationships with our children? It makes a world of difference—and it all happens when we learn a different way to think.

The processes and contents of our thoughts determine everything: optimism or pessimism, persistence or apathy, security or uncertainty, care or recklessness—and seeing people as assets or viewing them as threats. Developmental psychologists tell us our perceptions are formed in the first years of life. Children are sponges, instinctively absorbing the emotions, values, and beliefs of those around them. These concepts are seldom taught by the adults in their lives, but they are caught like we catch viruses in the air we breathe or the things we touch. Some of us, to be sure, have caught viruses of racism, pride, shame, and xenophobia. Virtually all of us have absorbed values that are important to our families, but upon closer inspection, aren’t really important at all.

These early perceptions and thinking patterns are deeply ingrained in us, so it requires considerable wisdom and effort to change them. 

What prompts us to evaluate how we think? Sometimes, a friend or mentor prods us to see a situation from a different angle that requires us to think in a different way. But more often, a cataclysmic event shatters our closely-held assumptions about the way life should work and we’re forced to reframe what we believe, who we trust, and how we think.