Tag Archives: thinking

Active listening and active thinking

Posted on by

Occasionally our friends and the media determine what we think. We compromise our thinking by not taking an active role in what we think. If everyone else thinks something, it must be right? At times like this, active listening and active thinking is called for. Often what we are see or hear is an attempt to sway or change our opinion.

It makes little difference if it is deciding what is a weed or flower, or a what makes a better pet, a dog or cat. In our day to day activities much of what we hear, see, or read is an attempt to modify our opinion. To keep from becoming lost in an opinion sea become an active listener and active thinker. I have learned some techniques that have that have helped me. Maybe they will be of help to you. First some examples of what happens in or world.

In a crowd, we tend to quit thinking and go along with whatever the crowd is thinking and doing. While crowd behavior is generally harmless, it tends to get out of control when people are passionate and not thinking. Crowd and mob behavior at their worst commit horrible mob violence no single individual would think of doing. This extreme behavior happens when people in a crowd let the crowd do their thinking for them. This is an extreme form of group think, but unfortunately not uncommon.

The most obvious group think attempts we generally are exposed to is campaign commercials. Some people were sick of seeing campaign ads before they started airing, and they not since changed their opinion. The truth is, this is one objective of campaign commercials. Campaign commercials have various purposes, although showing their candidate in the best possible light is the main focus. The number one objective is to get you to wonder about your choice of candidate.

When you pay attention, you will often notice there is no real content. Carefully staged pictures or clips are shown accompanied by a disparaging voice over. Statements made are usually not as factual as the maker of the ad would like you to think. Although they are not complete lies either.

One of the ads objectives is to get you wondering about who you favor. If the campaign ad can cast a little sliver of doubt about what you think, the ad has succeeded. It is probably true the candidates voted as stated, but campaign ads do not tell you the whole story about the vote and bill.

Another objective of these ads is to make you sick of the election before it even happens. If an ad can make you so sick and tired of hearing about the election before it is time to vote, it is more likely that you will not vote as a protest against the system. If you are not voting, in essence, the party you oppose gains a vote because you did not vote to cancel an opposing vote.

This tactic is not limited to politics, it is also common in the work place too. If you are not actively listening and actively thinking about the real message purpose, you may be swayed into inaction or allowing an action you would normally be against happen. In some work environments, a few people set the tone for everyone.

A few ideas on how to actively listen and actively think appearing soon.

Share

Right think, wrong think, no think

Posted on by

I think we all have this wrong think going on in our lives. We usually have enough information to make the right choices but for some unknown reason we do not. I believe George Orwell first used Wrong Think in his book 1984 which was a look into one possible future for mankind from the invasion of technology. It is probable however that the term was used before it made it into the book.

So how do we wrong think? The most obvious examples are in the state of our health and how we approach the things we do. I know my habits started becoming worse when I became old enough to drive, and fast food was still a novelty. I started walking and riding a bicycle less, driving and eating greasy foods more often.

Over the years we become accustom to adding to our lives and not taking away. Our life style gets better, our food gets more expensive, and in general we have more extra money to spend on ourselves, so we do. We buy better clothes, place to live, and start eating more things that we really should not be eating so much of. That was one of the things I found myself doing, something to eat that once was a treat was now a semi regular activity, and my weight was showing this to be true.

When you are young, your body is pretty resilient, and it can deal with the stresses we place on it from poor health choices. After the kids leave home, our body still does a good job of recovering from years of abuse, but we have to help it a little. I decided it was time to help mine but the impediments to that were and are quite a challenge. I think that is where wrong think gets a foothold in us.

We look around for options to make ourselves better, either in health or in how we feel about ourselves. For some people it is spa’s and lotions, for others it is the gym, and for others…they turn to denial. For a few it is a total remake of parts of our lives. What makes it so hard is we forget over the years the basic things that we need to stay healthy. We gave up on exercise generally as soon as we did not have to exercise. The meals we are eating is not even close to what they should be more often than not. Eventually we start to look around to fix ourselves.

We hear or read about a few things, probably another food, some vitamin or supplement that someone we know takes and has good success with. We find that they are not giving us the expected results so we keep looking. Wrong think is rampant at this point. We go to salad bars as they seem to be healthier, but once the counting is done, all we have done is add salad to the excess food we are eating. Maybe we try diet drinks, or light meals as a substitute for one of our regular meals. By this time we are skipping breakfast because we know we have to eat less.

If we are lucky we get to the point where we have to admit that everything we are doing is wrong. Once we realize everything we are doing is wrong, we start to look around for what we really should be eating, and doing to keep ourselves healthy. We start replacing one food for another, or dropping certain foods or types of foods completely.

Finally we start to see the results we know we should be experiencing. We have broken the cycle of wrong think, and now are practicing Right Think, and now are really learning about how to make ourselves healthier once again. Hopefully we stay on the path. We wrong think many things in our lives from the time we get up to the time we go to bed. Wrong think is so easy because it is how most of the people we know think, and they can’t all be wrong can they?

Share

Unhappy with your life? Change your mind then

Posted on by

To see the way our minds shape our reality is really something to behold! I often wonder how many people really understand just how much we create and control our world around us? For many people, I think when something good happens they feel lucky. On the other hand when something bad happens they feel unlucky. In the more extreme cases a few people feel life or something in it is out to get them.

I remember many times when I was out walking the streets of places I had never been to before, where one or more people have told me after the fact, they would never walk down those streets by themselves because they are just too dangerous. For myself, I went out in those areas with the thought that the people living there were just like me, and they were trying to do the best they could for their own lives using what they had to work with.

In all my years of wandering in places where the more cautious would not go, I only had a problem once, and I brought that on myself. I have walked into some of the slums of south Chicago, Gary, Los Angeles, Jerusalem, Minneapolis, Munich, and Seoul, and never had a problem, even though I had been lost more than once into areas where I clearly did not fit in

In south Chicago, there were two men at my departure point. One said to the other, twenty he doesn’t, and the other said okay. I thought nothing of it as I completed my one mile walk to a place where a cab could find me. When I returned the same two men were there, and one was giving the other money. I asked what the money was for. The man told me it was a bet on whether or not I would be murdered before I made it to a cab….

It is a perfect example of how people in the same neighborhood can have completely different expectations about how their life is, and they can both be correct. In almost any city in the country, in any neighborhood, life for the most part is how the individual perceives it. When we choose only to see gangs and violence, that is what we see. When we choose to see a drug riddled neighborhood, that is what we find.

On the other hand, if we expect to find good people trying their best to live a good life, that is what we will find. If we believe we are alone, we find loneliness, if we see the world as a friendly helpful place, we find goodness. Of course there are places that are exceptions, because the world that exists there has been in place so long, and the peoples minds so beaten down, that no other type of thought can penetrate the thinking of the people in that area. Short of a major life altering event, their perceptions and existence will never change.

Our minds operate like this for us in all our states, both conscious, unconscious, awake, and asleep. We are the creators of our world, and whatever we choose to think, our mind goes to work to start creating that world for us. It happens in a way we never notice, but it happens just the same.

We create our own world around us, therefore we can also change our world any time we wish. Rarely does something happen without our allowing it too or even anticipating it happening. As an extreme example, think about someone addicted to drugs.

At some point in time earlier in their life, they had to make a decision about their world. An offer of trying a hard drug appeared in their life and they had to decide if that was a life change they wanted or not. At some level they decided they wanted to go down that path. We need to be good stewards of our own life and ensure the life we envision is the life we want to live. If there is conflict between our vision and our life, we can change it.

Share

Thinking and making good decisions, pass it on!

Posted on by

One of the great things about life is the longer you get to live it, the better your knowledge base for making decisions. Having a larger collection of memories makes it simpler to understand why something happened, or why something may happen. When we are young, we do not have any memory base to share from so our decision making is not very good.

When I was a child, and I would be stopped from doing something, or punished after the fact, I would sit and cry, or feel sorry for myself. I was not able to look over a series of similar situations to mine, and see I was doing something wrong, or that could hurt me.

As a teenager, I started to realize there was a connection of sorts between past experience, and present, or future results. I could go to my friends and ask them about it too, which added to my decision making knowledge, although their knowledge was incomplete. So while my knowledge base was better as a teenager, it was not enough to be of real value because most experiences were still new to me.

It is really not until children come into our lives until we realize our system is not quite as perfect as we thought it was. We may notice some of our decisions are flawed. We act in the same manner we were treated at that age, without really thinking. We hear our parents sayings coming out of our mouth. Decisions are made like, “It was good enough in our Grandparents day, so it is good enough now”, or “Because I said so”. It is not until we are questioned that we start to realize that we have to temper our responses with some thought about how they were arrived there in the first place.

Children and telephones is a good example. When I was a child, being found touching, or playing with the telephone brought about swift, negative reinforcement. Children had no business touching a telephone. Each phone call cost money, and most parents did not waste money on their kids to play with telephones. Times change, and these days it is important for a child to know how to use any phone, perhaps to call an emergency number if they have to.

Having survived through our own children, we now are pretty much experts (if we take time to think) on making good life decisions. We have been through everything – growing up, dating, heartache, divorce, family death, family birth, and everything else that makes up our life. What we do not do so well however is pass on this knowledge to our children. I think it is rare for a child to be raised where a parent(s) has actually taken time to teach their children how a decision was arrived at and why.

If we did, most ‘why not, or why can’t I’ discussion would no longer [really] be about who is in charge. It would now be a discussion of is that a good decision – and why or why not. How nice it would be not to be forcing your children to obey, but rather having them go through a sound process for a decision. Talk about defusing an argument, and enjoying a healthier home life!

Most of us with children rarely get around to teaching our children how to think, and make good decisions. Possibly because we were never taught how ourselves. Or we think it is something school does. Thinking, and sound decision making is not that hard. We should not live almost half of our lives before we learn how to make good decisions instead of good guesses, nor should your children.

In the sciences everything we know from the past is written down and studied. It is dated, referenced, and commented on. We should be like this with our children. Taking the time to show our children how to make good decisions, and how to think. This would be would be a precious gift for any child. Think how much easier life could be for you, if you took the time to teach your children how to think, and make good decisions?

Share