Articles by Vince Panella 1

>home> Artcles by Vince Panella

The Secrets of Paradigms

All of our paradigms can either steal from our success or add to it. They have the power to create or to destroy. And as I first told you in this module, you ultimately have full control over them.
That’s it! That’s the simple yet very powerful secret behind all the paradigms you have – all visual, all aural and all behavioral paradigms. You have control over them. I’m sorry to disappoint you if you were expecting a deep, complex, mysterious secret. Sometimes the simplest most obvious secrets are the greatest kept ones of all.
Your paradigms may be strongly ingrained through years and years of living and programming, but you still have control over them. Your focus and attitude may take a long time and a lot of effort to shift in the direction you want them to go, but that doesn’t change the fact that you still ultimately have control over them. It may even be easier to blindly hide behind the façade that your paradigms control your life rather than admit that you are responsible for them.
It’s that simple. You have control over your paradigms.
To take advantage of this secret, you must become aware of your current paradigms and be willing to shift them, to alter your focus and your attitudes when needed in order to grow closer to the success you desire in your life. This is nothing more than creating the habit of stepping out of the mental boxes you’ve created for yourself to interpret the people, objects, events, and situations in your environment. Be willing to look at your world differently. Study it from varying angles rather than just accept the automatic paradigms you have in place. Try to see situations as others do; even try to see them as perhaps no one has before.
This doesn’t mean you’re constantly going to be changing who you are and the principles you stand for. It means you’re not going to take how you see your world for granted. You’re going to look at it through different paradigms and decide which paradigms best leverage your time and your success. You’re then going to use these paradigms as a basis to compare others to either justify continuing using them or tweak them to make them even better. Sounds like continual success doesn’t it? Well, it is!
I don’t want this to become too philosophical. I want this secret to make a very pertinent and practical impact in your life. The best way to do this from my experiences is to help you ingrain another easy-to-apply tool into your Time Control toolbox. This tool, a behavioral paradigm onto itself, is just a simple question.
The Question
All rights reserved.
So this whole module now boils down to a single question that can help you become aware and gain positive control over the paradigms in your life. Without any further delay, your paradigm question is -
"How can shifting my paradigm for this situation better leverage my success?"
Remember, your success is whatever you define it to be. It can be improving your relationships with those you love; it can be improving your career or financial security and abundance; it can be gaining a significant amount of control over your time; it can be growing your business to substantial profits; it can be finding more peace in your life; or it can be a combination. There is no "right" success; there is just what you ultimately want your life to be – however simple or grandiose.
Frequently asking yourself this question throughout your day towards the varying stimuli and situations you encounter forces you to keep your eyes, ears and mind open to the paradigms in your life. When you notice existing paradigms that negatively impact your life, you can make a conscious decision at that time to brainstorm alternatives and act on a positive, new one. Remember, you have control. Change just takes awareness, desire and action.
Will you change your negative paradigms to positive ones overnight or will you instantly make your current positive paradigms even stronger? It’s possible! And it all depends on you. Your paradigm question, if used consistently and aggressively, will force awareness and help you brainstorm positive alternatives. Creating change takes action, and action is influenced by desire or motivation. Only you can act to make changes. You are the key! Like my parents, you can instantly flip a switch to shift negative paradigms to positive ones. If your desire isn’t that great, it may take more time to eventually alter your focus and your attitudes. But even if you need more time to generate the change you desire, time will work for you if you let it. Just consistently apply this question, and take action on it to the best of your ability. You will succeed, and you will better gain control over your time!

Behavioral Paradigms

The final group of paradigms I want to teach you in this module can have the greatest impact on your time control. These are behavioral paradigms. Unlike visual and aural paradigms that are triggered by things you see and hear, behavioral paradigms are launched by events and circumstances. They are again the fusion of our focus and our attitudes. Together they create an interpretation of the events in our environment, and our behaviors follow suit.
Every habit you have, both positive and negative, is a behavioral paradigm. If you are hooked on smoking, the biggest hurdle you have to overcome isn’t your body’s addiction to nicotine but your behavioral paradigm associated with it. If you were to stop smoking this very second, research shows that your body would purge your physical addiction to nicotine in just 72 hours. After that, the battle is completely mental where you must shatter your behavioral paradigm that smoking is something you must do to remain calm and relaxed. Your focus on your nerves and stress without smoking and your attitude towards the calming effect that cigarettes have on your body create your true habit of smoking – not the nicotine.
To ever quit smoking you must purge your body of nicotine for a hard fought 72 hours and then face your true challenge of shattering your negative behavioral paradigm. Both my parents did this instantly. They had both smoked for 20 years. One day my father passed out in our bathroom due to his cigarettes. When he came to both he and my mother instantly shifted their paradigm towards cigarettes and saw them as deadly rather than calming. Their new paradigm got them past their initial nicotine purge and has kept them away from the deadly habit for over 30 years.
Other similar negative behavioral paradigms include caffeine, alcohol and drugs. Like breaking the bonds of nicotine, caffeine, alcohol and other drugs all have a certain purging period of true physical addiction. But this period is again much shorter than most people think, usually on a scale of only a few days. The true monsters are the behavioral paradigms associated with these habits. Shifting your focus and attitude, your paradigms, toward these addictive substances is the only way to truly break free. Knowing this doesn’t mean that shifting your paradigms is going to be easy. Depending on your particular situation, your mental paradigms may be much stronger than others facing a similar battle. But knowing this does open your eyes to the true enemy – an enemy you can gain control over if you generate enough motivation.
Some of our negative paradigms or habits are purely mental. Overeating and gambling are two examples of purely behavioral paradigm addictions. Both require no purging period for our bodies to cleanse a harmful substance, yet both can be equally devastating as smoking or drugs in our lives. Again, the true challenge is shifting our focus and attitude toward our addiction. Until these are shifted, our paradigm will continue to wreck our lives.
Besides influencing our habits, behavioral paradigms can also leave a strong mark on our culture and society. Based on our focus and attitude toward others around us, our behavioral paradigms can help us live in peace and equality with others or they can build the destructive barriers of racism and bigotry. This is evidenced throughout history with some of the greatest negative cultural behavioral paradigms being slavery and racism in America and the Holocaust against Jews in Hitler’s Germany. Even today, having a mental framework against somebody because of their skin color or culture, their sex, or their sexual orientation is a result of our behavioral paradigms. The only way to grow past these cultural black eyes is to shift the focus and attitude, shift the paradigms of those who harbor them.
Behavioral paradigms also have a HUGE influence on our success and our time control. If our focus is on the obstacles in our life and our attitude further weakens us through a "poor-me" mindset, then our behavioral paradigms will be self-defeating and ensure we never reach our dreams. Our paradigms will create low self-esteem and self-confidence to ever take action to change our situation. But the opposite is wonderfully true as well! If we focus on the opportunities in our life and boost that with positive, action-centered attitudes then we are almost assured of reaching our Clarity and goals. Our paradigms will strengthen our confidence and increase the positive motivation we generate to take success-building action. Now that’s the true power of behavioral paradigms!
My entire Time Control program to date has centered on building positive behavioral paradigms to constantly increase your time control. How much have I taught you has helped you shape and strengthen your focus? How many tools have built your attitude towards uncovering opportunities and taking positive action? Every module you’ve worked through from creating your Clarity to increasing your motivation to defeating stress and procrastination to even last month of increasing your wealth, every single one of them, has added another tool or dimension to increasing the positive, time-building behavioral paradigms in your life. My entire Success-Centered Time Management philosophy is built on this premise!

Concluding your assignment

Let’s quickly put everything you’ve learned in this module into a summarized perspective.
I started this module by teaching you that paradigms are how you see things in your environment. They’re a framework, a perspective in how you interpret part of your world. And your paradigms are a combination of your focus and your attitudes.
I followed by showing you the power of the most commonly known paradigms – visual paradigms. These paradigms are created by our focus on the visual information in our environment and our attitude towards it. Together, our focus and attitude greatly influence our interpretation of what we "see" and our following actions. Our visual paradigms have the power to significantly impact our most important relationships, our self-confidence and self-esteem, and even our physical safety.
Similar to visual paradigms, aural paradigms are the creation of the sounds we focus on and our attitude or interpretation of that sound. Our temporary aural paradigms can have a great impact on our communication, even influencing us to completely misunderstand someone else while paying attention. Repeating back important elements of your conversations is the key to prevent this paradigm from tripping you. More permanent aural paradigms can evoke strong emotions in you and influence your behaviors when you hear certain sounds.
The final paradigm type I taught you and the one that can have the greatest impact on your behaviors was behavioral paradigms. These paradigms are launched by events and circumstances rather than sights and sounds. All of your habits, both positive and negative, are behavioral paradigms. Our thoughts and behaviors toward others are influenced by these paradigms, as well as our failure or success mindsets. Even every Time Control tool I’ve taught you in this program is designed to create positive behavioral paradigms.
I then taught you the simple, powerful secret to all paradigms – that you have complete control over all of your paradigms and you can change them whenever you wish. To help you generate the awareness to act on this on a consistent basis, I armed you with a question to pose to your daily stimuli and situations.
"How can shifting my paradigm for this situation better leverage my success?"
Through awareness, desire and action on your part, you can use this question to leverage all of your paradigms towards your increased success in time.
Now for your assignment. There are no worksheets to go through this month, just a simple, behavioral exercise to test. And I’ve already alluded to it. For starters I want you to write down our paradigm-shifting question onto an index card or convenient piece of paper. Take this card or paper with your question with you wherever you go for the next three to four weeks to encourage you to apply it to as many paradigm situations as you can.
Throughout your days, at least five days a week, try to go through your paradigm question as often as possible. It shouldn’t take you long, maybe even just a few seconds. Wherever a paradigm could be involved, in other words wherever your behaviors could apply and that’s a lot of situations, consciously ask yourself, "How can shifting my paradigm for this situation better leverage my success?" Listen to your answers and then take action as appropriate! Try this for a few weeks to ingrain the habit of applying this question for life.
This isn’t a hard assignment. As a matter of fact, it’s one of the easiest assignments I’ve given you to date. Please don’t let this simplicity fool you. If you can create the habit of observing your paradigms and then mentally step back to brainstorm ways to change or improve them, you can take your time control to ever-increasing higher and higher levels.
Until next time.

	© 1999-2004 PLANiT OrganiZer™, ABN 43 003 616 144
Last update 06/04/09