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On Friday, I said that learning yourself and your filters will give you some of the expanded awareness of the Naive (or Beginner’s) Mind while still leaving you your knowledge and experience. The resulting combination is much greater than either one would be individually.
The tricky part is, how do you see other than what you have been seeing all along? If you could see otherwise, wouldn’t you already? Well, yes and no. I wear glasses, so my easiest analogy is what happens when my glasses get dirty. In the past, the gradual nature of dust gathering on the lensed meant that that I didn’t notice it until I either got eye strain or someone commented.
You can make the same analogy by thinking of a windshield. It’s the same principle. You are looking out at the world through something. Over time we come to accept what we see as what is going on. We may be surprised when we learn how dusty and distorted our view really is when we take off the glasses or get out of the car.
Here are seven methods that have worked for me to help step beyond my perceptive filters:
- Check out a book an an alternate view (not an argument, but an internal work) and compare their idea of reality to yours. See what they notice about the world and vice-versa. For example: Say you really like type “A” products. Yet you know that you’re missing something. To use this technique, you would try to get your hands on what users of product type “B” say. Not testimonials or other marketing. For this to work, you would need to get something written by a pro “B” person for pro “B” people. Study how their minds work. See how it matches up and how it doesn’t.
- Learn a new language. I simply can’t recommend this one enough. Not only is it a great mental workout in its own right, it’s phenomenal for getting a “big picture” of how reality is “mapped” in many ways due to our language. Fluency is secondary to an understanding of the underlying mindset of the language itself. I’ve studied Japanese and Spanish myself, and I can say that the differences are best described as “subtle yet profound”.
- Play the Devil’s Advocate. A classic trick, but for a good reason. Stepping into the opposing view can allow you to see more than what your own view can see. In fact, when I would gear up for a debate of one kind or another (be it friendly banter or the out-for-blood kind) I’d play both sides of the fence in my head, just to see what I can come up with.
- Come in from a different angle. Oftentimes we look at a situation from a certain “angle”. If we instead come in from a different angle, we might have better luck For example: Say, your computer keeps rebooting randomly. Software-inclined people will be checking for virus activity and other such things. Backing up and coming from the ground up will have you checking the hardware and will expand your view, and might just reveal it’s a hardware issue like a faulty power supply.
- Change the scope. This one I learned as a way of checking the ethics of a situation. Does making what you are looking at smaller or bigger in scale change anything? Why? What changes?
- It’s not a problem. Seriously. Much of our reasoning capability goes out the window when we’re faced with a “problem”. If we’re not careful then panic sets in and from that point it’s game over. Just imagine that what you are working with isn’t a problem. This can be done many ways, but a few are to imagine that it has already been solved, to imagine how your hero would solve it, and to imagine how it would be solved in the future.
- Look for the “impossible”. This one is a little slippery, but can be invaluable. Remember Sherlock Holmes: “When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” If you find something that doesn’t fit with your “map”, then by definition, the map needs to be updated.
The trick here (as with all of these) is that you need to be open to actually looking at your filters and be willing to look beyond them. You also need to be willing to actually try to collect the data. It’s no good if you’re trying this on something that has already been pre-chewed by your mental processes. This may not be as fast as “business as usual”, but I find that it’s worked well for me, and can be done on-the-fly if you wish.
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