Mind your mindset!

Most of life around Earth operates at instinct level, the majority of it playing the infinite game of struggling for survival. That’s true for animals, including people. It’s not as true for the flora around us.
It’s all a system of giving and taking and the human is a renowned, yet often times infamous, element of it.

Take any flower or tree or even the grass outside your house. It’s all out there for a purpose beyond its existence. It’s like it was conceived to serve, a given to the world.
Well, it feeds itself from what the soil, the air or the water has to offer, but it barely, if at all, gets in the way of any blood driven creature.

Animals on another hand, graciously diverse as they are, would interfere with the system only to the extent of preserving their existence, deterring or killing on the need basis, to ensure food and protection of their peers.

Ultimately, there is the mankind, presumably the superior kind of all.
But, hey, who’s there to challenge that? Right?

We come around taking and taking we continue to do, as if it was all out there made purposefully for us. And so we take it all, from the breath of air, to the sip of water, to the flesh of beasts, to the ground on which we walk our existence.
And then it’s not enough. So we take from our peers.
We take the time and energy of our parents during our upbringing, and while at it, we take attention and care and opportunities otherwise destined to our siblings and maybe just because that period is so long, we end up to adulthood unconsciously convinced of deserving it all.

And then we take more, and even worse, we do it knowingly. We thoroughly plan for it and we find no purpose in anything but winning.
It is so about getting our place in school, throughout all of its levels, as it is of landing job after job, role after role in the organizations we are part of. And we fail to spend a second on the thought that it’s all happening for us at the expense of not happening for others.

Convenient? I wouldn’t think so!
Then, what to do about it?

Well, it looks like we are always after some results. We get those by behaving somehow. And the way we behave is determined by our way of being, by our mindset.

All of what I’ve drawn before suggests that we are operating on an inward mindset. That is the kind of mindset by which people behave in a fashion conceived to benefit themselves. Sadly, we do so by default, like a machine that runs on factory standard settings. Having been taught that way for so long, we wouldn’t know better.

But that’s ok, because there’s a solution to it. The Arbinger Institute calls it – Outward Mindset!

The even better news is that that’s a toolset, not some sort of new, ideal configuration that we might think about. And we can use that to do our own settings, raising our awareness about ourselves and about the ones around us, and break that chain of “winning over” for “winning with” others.

Outward mindset would be the way of being *”by which people are able to consider and behave in ways that further the collective results of the environment they are in.” (*Arbinger Institute).

More about it, in the next episode.