To Take Your Opportunities You Have To See Them

Copyright (c) 2011 Willie Horton

Someone once told me that he'd never come across an opportunity in his life - ever. In fact, he told me that he'd never had a positive experience in his life either! You might say that that's an incredibly negative take on life but I would suggest that this is just an extreme example of how the normal mind works. Psychology tells us that our subconscious automatically dictates our behaviour. It also appears that the average subconscious has a taste for the negative. As a result of all this, we actually create our own dark versions of reality - and never see reality for what it really is. Quite obviously, therefore, you're never going to see the opportunities with which life presents us - unless, of course, you open your eyes.

And, as you might imagine, dark-glasses disease comes in a variety of different sizes and shapes - from the person whose job or business is going down the tubes to the couple whose relationship is on the rocks - all the way to those seriously delusional so-called normal people who are convinced that "nobody loves me" or "my life's not worth living". But these different perspectives are all symptoms of a normal everyday disease that all of us normal everyday people suffer from. This disease is what I call 'reality blindness'.

The normal adult mind sleepwalks through life with their eye firmly shut. We think that we're looking at reality but it is a psychological fact that we are looking at the world through our own misconceptions about it. We learned those misconceptions about life in general and ourselves in particular during our formative years. Psychology calls all these deeply held 'truths', that we actually believe are true, 'stored knowledge'. Maybe we could take a more detailed look at how this stored knowledge of ours plays a key role in creating our version of the real world.

Let's say that you end up sitting beside a total stranger in an airport lounge - fog has closed the airport. Whether or not you talk to this stranger will, first of all, depend on your mood. And your mood is determined, automatically, by your subconscious - you can't really control it. If you normally get all stressed out because your plans have been messed up, well, it is what it is - and you've been like that forever. But say that you're in the mood for talking and you engage with this stranger. You will not see the stranger, you will see who you think the stranger is. Your optical system receives a load of visual signals which, until you make sense of them, make no sense at all - this process is called cognition. To make sense of all these, you subconscious mind refers to your stored knowledge. This has nothing whatsoever to do with the guy or girl sitting beside you - it's all got to do with who he or she reminds you of. This process is called re-cognition. In short, you will re-cognize this stranger as a person that you could either like or completely hate - or anything in between. Believe it or not, this whole show only take a couple of seconds and, because it's subconscious, you've no idea that it's happening.

Now, let me ask you a couple of vital questions. Isn't it a fact of life that all the most important people in your life, as it is now, were once total strangers to you? How would you have the first clue that you might be talking or not talking to the next really important stranger who could transform your life? To our first question the answer is a resounding "Yes". The answer to the second question is 'you haven't got a clue' - unless and until you take those dark glasses of yours off and start seeing reality as it really is. In order to achieve this, you must disconnect basic cognition from this nonsense of re-cognition - you need to learn to stop depending on this so-called stored knowledge of yours to automatically make up your mind for you.

Now, don't get me wrong - some of our stored knowledge is useful. The essential thing is that you need to stop following it slavishly. And the only way that you can do that is to train your mind to observe and notice. Or, to put it another way, stop your mind arriving at the wrong conclusion - after all they couldn'tbe the right conclusions because your so-called stored knowledge is seriously past its sell-by date. The fine art of observing without adding any personal spin can only be developed and honed in an environment in which you don't actually need it - so that you're good at it when you do! What I mean is that you need to set quiet time aside to practice this art far from the cut and thrust of your daily life. Five or ten minutes a day will transform the rest of your day because, once you start actually noticing what's really going on in those few minutes, you will be far more attuned to reality for the rest of the day.

Go sit in the park or in a pavement cafe or, fi you're really stuck, your regular seet on the train each morning. Umplug your iPod and switch off your 'phone. Throw away your newspaper, fold up your magazine. Lose your thoughts, drop your baggage, forget your worries and start simply observing. Watch what's happening. Don't start trying to figure out what might be going on. Don't start putting your own interpretation on what your watching. Don't start second-guessing what's actually in front of your eyes. Simply observe - nothing else - and you'll begin to notice that the scene that you're watching changes from one moment to the next just as, in reality, the whole universe is changing from one moment to the next.

When you start developing your innate ability to notice and observe you interrupt the automatic process by which you normally jump to what is often the wrong conclusion. Observation will give you a fresh set of eyes. And, armed with a fresh set of eyes, you'll suddenly discover a totally different perspective on what you previously thought of as life. You might even start noticing all life's opportunities which have been there all the time but which you've never before seen.


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Willie Horton's acclaimed Personal Development Workshops have enabled his clients change their lives. He works with top companies like Allergan, Pfizer, Diageo, Nestle and Deloitte around the world. His Personal Development Website, Gurdy.Net, is home to his online workshops and seminars. A published author and sought-after speaker, he has been working in the field since 1996.