Lets start with this first, we all are exposed to a variety of stimuli in our lives from the moment we become aware as children through life up to death. This stimulus is influential in that it helps us create our personal belief systems of understanding of things and our follow-up perceptions that build on our beliefs thus making a more complex, yet simple, self-image. This self-image makes for our character and personality while our beliefs come from the stimuli and what it teaches us to form our understanding of many or the myriad of things. Both character and personality along with beliefs and understanding are what we depend on to live.
It is kind of a ‘chicken and egg’ conundrum that makes all this work and sometimes I wonder how we humans have survived all these centuries. In order to have beliefs and understanding you have to take in stimuli of the environment and those who provide us as individuals experiences, knowledge and understanding so we may learn, grow, adapt and survive ourselves. What they provide along with our own experiences plus all the stimuli from the environment, i.e., tribe connections and the socialization that goes on for the group survival, etc., all contribute to the input so we may hypothesize, analyze, and synthesize things all in the name of knowledge, understanding and survival applications, etc.
As we build our database of facts, perceptions and beliefs we build memories that we use to make moment-to-moment decisions of life both good and bad. All of this leads to our need to make decisions quickly, a holdover of ancient times when fast decisions meant life or death. This has not changed much even tho modern times would make us think that those types of things are no longer needed, but … they are. Taking too much time to analyze and decide, i.e., observe then orient on what is important and in this case what would end our survival vs. make sure of our survival then make decisions with most needed in split-seconds to milliseconds and then to take appropriate actions from our knowledge, understanding and what works lizard brain flight or fight memories all at the speed of light form databases built from perceptions and beliefs often effected in the process of preconceived notions that all, mostly, help us to make decisions for action quickly.
Most times this is good and beneficial but due to modern times and the effort to make larger than able to handle groups where we are now socialized toward others as if they were family or tribal members makes for a huge amount of stresses that just overwhelm. Add in that we all through this mass socialization have been steered wrongly away from the very nature that makes us human, our survival instincts built on millennium of survival in more dangerous and chaotic times. Nature moves at its own pace for evolutionary progress and thinking we can force it deals out even more stress.
Stress equals adrenal stress-effects from the chemical dumps that are triggered more often due to ignorance then needed for survival therefore creating stressors that have never been felt, experienced or dealt with in human history.
In modern times preconception seems to be at least one aspect of our survival instincts that can be handled then trained into our primal conditioned response system so that our lizard can trigger that memory vs. coming up against no memory leading to great stress. The following quotes provide information about our preconceived survival model:
“Every day we go into life with expectations about how things will occur. These beliefs have an astounding impact on our perceptions of and reactions to the world around us, often times without us even being aware.”
“When we allow these expectations to override our senses (and with them, often our better judgment) we set ourselves up to miss out on an amazing number of opportunities for positive interactions in our lives. And while it’s not necessarily easy to overcome this habit (when are habits ever easy to change), the fundamental principles aren’t that difficult to understand.”
▪ First, be conscious of these tendencies and their role in your behavior. At every chance you can, ask yourself, “What do I expect to happen here? Why do I expect that? Could something else happen?” Cultivating awareness is probably the hardest task, as we are so used to simply reacting to things without thought. The simple kinetic act of putting our thoughts on paper can be amazingly illustrative. What sounded perfectly logical in our minds looks absolutely ludicrous once we actually spell it out.
▪ Second, work to change the underlying negative scripts that support the beliefs in the first place. When you find yourself saying “My kid always needs my attention. Why can’t they just leave me alone? Can’t they see I need to take care of the other kids?”, try changing it to “Boy, my kid sure does love to spend time with me. How can I let them be a part of what I’m doing while not neglecting the other kids?” Here again, I think writing these thoughts down (both the old and the new) can be a difference maker. Our thoughts hold incredible power over us, so we may as well learn to turn them to our advantage.
“Don’t go through life blindly listening to your own expectations. Examine them, question them, and drop them by the wayside if they aren’t helping you lead a happier, productive life.”
Notes:
• a preconceived ((of an idea or opinion) formed before having the evidence for its truth or usefulness.) idea or prejudice.
• our pre conceived thinking affects our attitudes toward people.
• unconsciously made two prejudicial assumptions.
• The problem of holding preconceived notions, as being true is that they can lead us to very negative and critical beliefs about others and that can affect our behaviors toward others.
• characterizing people as all one way or all another is another example of stereotyped thinking that affects how we vote and as well as how we treat other people.
• it is better to have an open mind about other people and to not allow ourselves to be guided by beliefs founded on stereotypes.
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