rel="nofollow" href="#fb3_img_img_7ef701c0-9497-5fd1-b4ff-ce75ca85a8e7.png" alt="bullet"/>The world would be a better place if more people tapped into their own innate wisdom.
CHAPTER TWO
Why change?
One who asks a question is a fool for five minutes; one who does not ask a question remains a fool forever. Chinese proverb
You are unique and you know yourself better than anyone else can possibly know you. Despite this, in my experience most of us do not tap into our inner awareness and knowledge, preferring to rely on the opinions and judgments of others.
Asking for advice or opinions can become the norm. We can develop an habitual response and a dependency on others to be there to help us work our way through life’s challenges. In fact, often we rely on certain people as being the fountain of all knowledge and unconsciously turn to them whenever we need help.
I’m not saying that there is no validity in seeking advice from others; indeed there are many occasions when this is a great option and we become wiser and more knowledgeable as a result. There are times when we really don’t know the answer and need expertise and valid input in order for us to make an informed decision. However, many of us have a tendency to use this as our first option when looking for answers when, in many instances, there is another option readily available to each and every one of us – ourselves!
Let’s explore what can happen when we involve others in our decision-making. Sometimes when we turn to others we are looking for a ‘good listener’ to enable us to verbalise our thoughts and to work through an issue so that we can find an answer. In my experience, this is rarely all we are offered. People are programmed, it seems, to offer wisdom, advice and opinions even when this form of help hasn’t been asked for. Because our thoughts become dominated by those of other well-intended people, we do not have the opportunity to fully tap into our own resourcefulness.
Alternatively, we approach others because we lack confidence in our own ability to make an informed choice. We are bombarded with other people’s thoughts and ideas that may or may not be useful. In this process, we potentially allow our own ideas and thoughts to be diluted by the well-intended opinions of others, and in fact often lose the opportunity of getting a break-through idea because there simply wasn’t the space to find it.
This process becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because we lose a sense of what we originally thought, and instead do what others suggest. The end result is that we lack confidence in our own ability to make a decision. It’s interesting that we frequently take actions that we think are going to help, but in fact our actions compound the problem and we end up doing the same thing and getting the same result. Clearly, this is a time when we need to consider taking another line with a view to getting a different result. Going to others for advice when we lack confidence in our own ability will not break the cycle.
Sometimes we ask other people’s advice because we know that we have someone else to blame if things don’t work out. People who operate in this way are not always consciously aware that this is why they are behaving in such a manner. However, subconsciously they know that they don’t have to take full ownership or responsibility for the choices and decisions that they are making. Whilst some people would be horrified at the thought of living their lives in this way there are many others who see this as an easy and valid option because there is always someone else to blame.
Some people make a lifestyle choice about operating in this way, in their workplace or in their lives generally. They then enrol others in their ‘blame game’ which helps to justify their actions in behaving in this way. The sad thing is that many people, who usually have good intentions, sustain the ‘blame game’ by offering sympathy and opinions that totally support the other person’s views and ways of behaving. Parents, as well as friends, are frequently very good at this, but sometimes this kind of support is the worst thing that you can do for the other person.
I’d like now to turn this around a little to consider a different perspective. Instead of us considering the impact on the person who has the problem or issue, let’s now consider what primarily drives the need for an individual to solve other people’s problems for them.
Be honest with yourself, if someone came to you right now with a problem, what is your most likely response? The majority of us will reply that we’d listen intently until we understood the problem. We may indeed ask a few questions in order to understand the problem in more detail, and then we’d process it through our own perceptions and suggest what we think is a valid response in terms of advice or even a solution.
As we offer our ideas, we are likely to be feeling good about ourselves. Not only have we helped the other person, we have provided our own guidance and wisdom, which makes us feel good because it strokes our ego. Unfortunately, our ego, as we will learn, plays a problematic role in our ability to let go and to ask better questions of others. It seems that we are ‘hard-wired’ to believe that helping people means that we give them advice and answers whenever there is a problem. Indeed, this allows us to give ourselves a pat on the back for being such a good, generous and kind person.
In reading the next sections of this book, I hope that you challenge that perspective and see that it is possible that your action may be considered in quite the opposite way. That is to say, by always providing the answer, you may be providing a disservice to the other person. The skill I am about to teach you will provide you with the opportunity of always being helpful. However, this may not mean that you give help in the traditional way with which you have become familiar.
By way of additional background and to help you become more conscious of the issues involved with our own thinking, I am going to share an interesting statistic. Psychologists suggest that in a typical day most human beings have around 60,000 thoughts. When I heard how much thinking we do every day I was quite shocked as that number represents a huge amount of thoughts that are processed through our brains in a short space of time.
Having reconciled in my mind the number of thoughts we have every day, I went on to read that we typically have 95 per cent of the same thoughts the following day. Again, I was quite shocked by this statistic and whilst the word ‘typically’ was used, I spent some time internally arguing with the data. I searched for evidence to indicate that I am not representative of this statistic. I concluded that I am not ‘typical’ because I am well educated, have an interesting life and am what I consider to be a reflective person. Given all of that, how could I be such a repetitive thinker?
Upon further reflection, however, my routine way of thinking was obvious and I began to acknowledge that maybe I was even more ‘typical’ than I thought. I recognised that my ‘typical’ day began with my early morning alarm at 6 am – this was the signal for me to get out of bed and to undertake my early morning routine, which included some mundane tasks such as getting breakfast, showering and preparing lunch. Whilst working in the city I chose to catch public transport. Each day I greeted the same bus driver and saw many of the same passengers. When I left the bus I boarded a train bound for the city, and because it started its journey at my station I always had a choice of seats. Despite this ‘choice’ I sat in the same seat (unless someone had beaten me to it) on every journey, and watched familiar faces join the increasingly packed train until we arrived at our destination. I then proceeded to walk in the same direction as all the other passengers to exit the station and to find my familiar way into my office nearby.
As most of my colleagues
