Opinion: What Do You See When You Close Your Eyes?

The environment greatly impacts the way an individual sees, interprets and defines the world and ultimately her roles in it. When the culture of the immediate environment approves mediocrity and limitations, the individual unconsciously soaks the transmitted messages which invariably affect her thinking, actions and outcomes.

When an individual doesn’t see greatness demonstrated to her, first of all by her primary influences and then the secondary ones, she most likely won’t aim high in her outputs because her gathered references and data have stamped restrictive pictures on the plates on her mind.

Even if she comes across people blazing their trails, it would be interpreted as ‘they’ are the ones who are blessed versus ‘us’ who are unfortunate and powerless to do anything about it. Often times, people who remain small in their thinking almost always draw references from what had been demonstrated to them in their developmental years, not fully recognizing that everyone has a significant place in the universe and would have to work for their roles and their placements.

So the question becomes, how does one demonstrate to an individual, with a limited mindset, that she has a significant place in the universe?

By changing her thinking and perspectives.

Firstly, everything passes through two stages of creation. The first and most important place of creation is in the mind where all things are permitted and limitless. In the realm of our imaginations, we create our world and what we want for ourselves, in the place of our imagination, we visualize who we can become. The picture we create therein becomes the visa to the second recreation platform-the concrete world.

Secondly, our actions are the interpretations of what we have seen in our minds and what we see in our imagination is who and what we will work towards becoming in real life. Our imagination gives us the rite of passage to become that person we have projected ourselves into being.

However changing what had been learnt in the developmental years won’t be easy but would be worthwhile. Unlearning the limited thinking would involve tenacity of vision and laser focus process of pruning, refining and chipping away at the raw material of who we were. Unlearning is hard and brutal but it is the necessary mental surgery that has to be undergone for a renew being to emerge.

The imagination is a potent force and no one becomes great without engaging and employing it

Lastly and essentially, make sure you always write down what you see in your mind as reference and guide for the daily building of habits and actions towards a defining end. Documenting on concrete items links the bridge between the imagination and reality and as the good book says, “…write down the vision and make it plain on tablets, that he may run who reads it…”

 

Oluwabusayo Madariola

 

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