Notice What You Don’t Notice - Grasshopper

My notion is that we are considered to be who we are by others by the conditioning they observe in us. That’s only a partial picture. We are more than our conditioning.

To discover that, ask yourself who you were before you were conditioned. There was a before and there can be an after, but it will take some noticing.

 

Just as an example, notice how you speak: your accent. “But I don’t have an accent,” you say. Yes you do; you just haven’t noticed. You were conditioned to speak in that accent before you knew what the word “conditioned” meant. It means you were brought up around people who spoke that way, and now you do too. It’s all second nature, meaning it’s unnoticed.

 

Most of what we do (good, bad, indifferent) is conditioned (unnoticed).

 

So how do we go about the process of reconditioning? Start noticing your automatic behaviors. And when you notice one that’s getting in your way, interrupt it. That act of interruption is the passport to the whole picture of you.

 

In between your thoughts, in between your actions is a space where reconditioning lives. So it’s our job to notice our conditioning and interrupt it. That creates a space that leads to where the rest of us lives.

 

You don’t have to begin big. You can start by noticing little things that you do automatically. This gets you in the habit of noticing, which breeds more noticing. Before too long, you start to notice a whole host of things that you didn’t notice before.

 

Some of these automatic, conditioned patterns are working for you. Hang on to them. Others are holding you back. Interrupt them.

 

“Know thyself,” the ancient Greek aphorism, applies today as much as it did during the time of Socrates and Plato. It could easily be called “Notice thyself.”

 

The way to have more access to your reconditioning force is to force yourself to notice. Pay more attention to yourself than you do to others. It keeps your conditioned patterns from hiding under the covers.

 

All the best,

John