So, this blog marks the start of a little project into personal paradigms and paradigms themselves, which is going to circulate through the blog and the YouTube channel and the podcast over the next few weeks and months.
This has been an area of my life which has fascinated me for some time and one which I used to lecture about to unwitting audiences around the subject of ‘why men pee standing up in normal toilets’.
For the answer to that question, you'll probably have to look out for the next podcast, which is to be recorded in the next week or so, but the point about personal paradigms is that they both enhance our lives and hold us back at the same time.
One of the things which seems to separate out people who have reached levels of personal or professional success is their ability to disregard paradigms and to move in a direction which suits them best for their own purposes.
These people are disagreeable, and they are disruptors.
Nobody ever made a difference by following the rules that everybody else has already set.
A difference is made by someone who decides to question the norm and to go in a different direction and this is how the paradigms are broken and this is how change is made.
Racism can be considered a paradigm, as can sexism and other aspects of discrimination.
The world view that we have and the narrative that we were sold when we were young creates a paradigm and a deep belief system within us, which is very difficult to see and even more difficult to change.
This is why paradigms are so important.
We also see paradigms in our work and in our industries.
And when I step back for a minute and look at dentistry, there are enormous historical behavioural patterns among all dental practices that can and need to be broken in order to move to a different place.
We still exist in a situation where patients attend routinely for check-ups and X rays and scale and polish around a financial model that can’t be broken because ‘that's just the way it is’. That is not the way it is, nor will it be the way it is for a lot longer.
If you're not prepared to accept the change in narrative and paradigm, which is definitely coming up the road. It's likely that your business and your practice and your life will be pushed backwards through the curve of innovation adoption to laggard, where you will sit and only be able to change when you are forced to, because it's not possible to behave the way you did before.
The ability to see the paradigm and then question the paradigm and then change the behaviour around the paradigm and the narrative is perhaps one of the most consistent and important behaviours that people who become successful (and happy) are able to achieve.
Watch this space for more discussions about this because it's fascinating and insightful and, dare I say it, extraordinarily helpful.
Blog Post Number - 3290
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