Being organised
Have you ever wondered what makes some people more effective than others? Have you met somebody who calmly gets things done with no fuss, while those around them run about like headless chickens.
It seems to me the state of people's heads determines their ability to get things done smoothly and easily. You can probably recall times when you have been efficient, on top of things and at your most effective, because of the way you were thinking.
Or you might remember a time when somebody you admire impressed you with their organisational skills. Maybe you noticed how calm and steady they seem to be. They are organised from their thoughts through to their decisions, choices and actions.
Your great big filtering machine
Okay let's agree for the moment that when you are calm, focused and relaxed you can do things more efficiently. And let's pre-suppose you can only do things in an organised way when you are thinking in an organised way.
Organised thinking is important, because every waking moment of every day your senses are bombarded by vast amounts of information. Your subconscious mind manages all the information by selecting some stuff and ignoring other stuff. This is how your mind helps you get things done. It works like a "filtering machine".
You started deciding how to do this filtering a long time ago. When you were just a child you taught yourself how to filter (with a bit of influence from your parents). You created an automated system in your mind to choose which bits of sensory input to notice and which to ignore. And this is still being taken care of now by your subconscious mind.
What's the big idea
Fortunately you can learn to change some of your filtering systems from time to time. You can decide what you prefer to ignore and what you want to focus on. So the next time you experience chaos, confusion or stress you might reprogramme some of your mind's filtering systems - just an idea.
Even though your filtering system operates outside conscious awareness, you can change and adapt it so you have more useful choices.
Changing your filtering
Our internal filtering is thorough. It creates shortcuts to get things done. One of the most significant shortcuts is your system of beliefs. These beliefs can be the big ideas or the little notions. This is the key to how your filtering works. It is easy for you to eliminate or ignore certain "data" when you believe one thing and not another. Because you do not pay attention to things which contradict your beliefs. Similarly you really tend to notice things which conform to your beliefs. This is how people with phobias keep being scared and how people with optimism keep being lucky.
You can think of your system of beliefs as a mental map of your environment. Having the map is useful so long as you remember "the map is not the actual territory".
Seeing is believing is seeing
Did you know, when explorers first crossed oceans in their great ships and appeared on the horizon of remote islands something very curious happened, or didn't happen actually. The indigenous people on the beaches didn't see the ships on the horizon. How could they?
The indigenous people had no preconceived idea of anything like a ship, so it was impossible for their filtering mind to give them that information. Ships failed to fit their system of beliefs. They weren't on the mental maps.
However, shamans were different. As they studied the horizon they saw the ship. It was possible for them because they believed in more remarkable things, like the idea of gods or aliens crossing oceans in mysterious vessels. They could see the ship on the horizon very clearly, unsurprisingly. They had a very different set of filters. People often regarded their shamans as "seers" because they saw things which were invisible to everybody else.
"To filter or not to filter" - that is the question
We all need these filters, we all need beliefs. Otherwise we would constantly re-invent every experience in every moment. We would never have a concept of anything. Every time we saw a rectangular piece of wood in a rectangular hole we would have to rediscover the door. Subjective experience depends upon mental filtering, internal maps, beliefs.
Sometimes it can be useful to adjust your filters, to adapt your beliefs sufficiently to generate new perceptions, to re-organise your mind.
Creating your beliefs
You always have a choice. You can feel like a passive observer of an imagined world produced by old established beliefs or you can experiment from time to time, try believing something new and see what it feels like. You can always change it back again if it doesn't work.
Using your brain for a change
"Using your brain for a change" is the title of one of the early books written by Richard Bandler and John Grinder, the creators of NLP. The title of the book seems to be a clever play on words. Using your brain to create a change in your thinking is a big opportunity for you, the opportunity to be more organised inside out - starting from the inside and effecting the outside.
Getting results
Learning to challenge your own filters and beliefs can feel a little strange to start with, maybe a bit confusing. That confusion can be a sign of changes being made to your filters allowing you to re-organise the way you think and do things. Doing this can allow you to remove obstacles and find more of a flow in what you do.
When you create and adapt your beliefs and thinking as an adult it can be very different to when you did this as a child, because this time you are making a conscious decision about how you organise your mind to work for you.
You can read more about how I can help you organise your mind by visiting my website: Using NLP to be more organised or you can contact me for further information
