Who is That Person in the Mirror?

By Debra Kessler

How we act when no one is looking is a good indicator of what we are made of. Do we have integrity? Are we morally sound? Is honesty in the forefront of our thoughts when we are faced in any situation? Every day we are tempted to face our self image and decide will we compromise our beliefs and values.

It is said that it can take as little as two weeks to make or break a habit. It is amazing how fast one can destroy a lifetime of integrity. When one lives by a belief system, our actions are guided by it on a daily basis. Our integrity or character will keep us from going out and hitting someone with our car because we value human life. And in the same vein we wouldn’t wake up and quit our jobs because we didn’t feel life going to work.

I realize that these examples are extreme and one could ask who would do a thing like that. You’d be surprised. We do not just wake up one morning and decide to not be honest or have good character. The slipping of our character starts in a series of small steps. It is so vital to keep ourselves in check to keep that from happening.

Have you ever noticed that the bad guy looks like an ordinary person? In the movies, the guy gets caught and tells the police that he never set out to embezzle a million dollars from his company. He thinks he is not a bad person. His character slipped and he failed to keep is integrity in check.

Yes, staying true to our integrity filled belief system is a twenty-four hour job. We come under fire when we least expect it. Something will happen and it could be that pivotal point that pushes us over the edge of staying true. It is like seeing that man who drops his wallet. Do you pick it up and give it back or keep it, thinking that he should have been more careful?

Situations like these are the defining moments. We have the right to chose to do right or wrong. Each little decision changes us. We must always keep our thoughts in line with our integrity. If we chose to comprise, a little more of our integrity is chipped away. It becomes easier to give in each time.

We must continue to look at ourselves in the mirror. Do we want to be labeled a hypocrite? Are our principles becoming less concrete and fluid? If we have compromised it will be hard to regain our integrity especially around those for whom we compromised. But with the help of understanding and trustworthy people, our self-image can be restored and we can begin to rebuild our life.

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The Dangers of Recognition

By Willie Horton

We all have the ability to recognise - someone we already know, a difficult situation when we see one, an opportunity that’s staring us in the face or a problem that needs our attention. However, our psychological ability to recognise is just as much a curse as it is a blessing. We take in raw data through our body’s five senses - a psychologist would term this “bottom up” data - through the process of cognition. At this point, the data, of itself is meaningless - we need to interpret it. This is done by adding our “stored knowledge” or “top down information” to the raw data and, in this way, we make sense of what is going on. This is the process of re-cognition.

As I said, this process enables us to make sense of the present moment. Or does it? The big problem with our stored knowledge or top down information is that, generally speaking, it is decades out of date. We generally start storing key elements of that “knowledge” between 12 and 18 months - when we create “schemata” (or pigeonholes) into which we then fit anything similar that we might encounter in later life. From an evolutionary perspective, this gave us a huge advantage - we didn’t have to waste our precious attention on routine day-to-day stuff - we needed that attention to watch out for the next man-eating tiger that might otherwise devour us!

But the result is that, in the modern day, we pay little or no attention to what our senses are actually telling us in the present moment - we prefer, automatically and subconsciously of course, to let our top down information make sense of what’s going on for us. And, in the process, we make nonsense of the present moment and react accordingly.

Somewhere between 12 and 25 years (adolescence), we generally stop taking in new top down information. That has drastic implications for the rest of our lives because, for the rest of our lives, we live in an illusory world of make believe - we create what we think is going on based on out of date information. As a result, so-called “normal” people never really appreciate what is actually happening - everything is “filtered” through their stored knowledge - and, as result, they react to what they think is going on. And, as you and I know, reacting generally makes matters worse, not better.

Quick example. Somebody at work asks you to do something. Because of the way we automatically pigeonhole people, you will have made up your mind whether you like or dislike the person who’s doing the asking within four minutes of meeting them for the first time. Say, for example, she reminds you of your sister-in-law (and you hate your sister-in-law because she reminds you of someone who bullied you at school thirty years ago). Also, the thing you’ve been asked to do is something that you think you don’t like doing - you might, for example, have a hang-up about putting together some sales figures because, when you were small, your father gave you grief over how awful your math marks were (these are all true client stories, by the way).

So, someone, who not only could be the nicest person in the world but who might also have a major impact on your career and on your life, asks you to do a simple task - and you snarl at them in return. It’s an automatic reaction. The request is the raw data - but you’ve made nonsense of the request based on a load of out-dated notions that are stored deeply on your subconscious. And that’s the process of recognition.

And that’s what gets normal adults into trouble. Conflict breaks out at work and at home - not because of what’s actually going on but because of what normal people think is going on. But, worse than that, real opportunities are missed because they are never spotted in the first place. The opportunity could be staring you in the face and, because of your top down data, you wouldn’t recognize it for what it truly is.

Normal people need to stop recognizing and start cognizing all over again. That’s why so many business and sports people meditate - it enables them stop recognizing and start experiencing what is actually and really going on, using their five senses, in the present moment. Watch your TVs - all the great sports people “meditate” before a field kick or a tee shot, before a penalty or a serve in tennis. And I meditation was good enough for someone as prolifically successful in business as Thomas Edison well then, it’s good enough for me. Start paying attention to what your five senses are actually telling you. Stop analyzing, judging, adding your top down out of date information.

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