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Birds fly because they believe they can; one moment of doubt and they would plummet to the earth. Unknown The centipede was happy quite
If we treat people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat people as they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... You and I belong to a species with a remarkable ability: we can shape events in each other's brains with exquisite precision. Simply by making noises with our mouths, we can reliably cause precise new combinations of ideas to arise in each other's minds. Steven Pinker [1994] Learning would be exceedingly laborious, not to mention hazardous, if people had to rely solely on the effects of their own action to inform them what to do. Fortunately, most human behavior is learned observationally through modeling: from observing others one forms an idea of how new behaviors are performed, and on later occasions this coded information serves as a guide for action" A Bandura [1997]
As you think, so shall you feel. Lazarus & Lazarus "Optimism, the conviction that you can change, is a necessary first step in the process of all change" [Seligman - 1994]. "The problem is that when we say a person seeks true information we really mean that the person seeks information that [s/he] considers true. ...subjective truth is largely a matter of coherence; statements that complement (rather than contradict) what one already believes are likely to be seen as true." [Gilbert - 1993] Inner speech is one of the most important modes of experience. Most of us go around the world talking to ourselves, though we may be reluctant to do so out loud. We may be so accustomed to the inner voice that we are no longer aware of its existence 'metacognitively'......the inner voice maintains a running commentary about our experiences, feelings and relationships with others; it comments on past events and helps to make plans for the future [Klinger - 1971]. ...One may say that the loss of consciousness of a predictable event 'is' the signal that the event has been learned completely. [Baar] ...Unconscious context helps to shape the novel, conscious information. Our ability to learn any new information is critically dependent on prior, largely unconscious knowledge [Bransford, 1979]. The existence of de-automatization is one reason to believe that consciousness may be involved in debugging automatic processes that run into difficulties. [Baar] Conscious experiences have internal consistency, but unconscious processors may be mutually contradictory. [Baar] Human beings are intensely concerned about the future, and we often have strong beliefs about it, even when future events are inherently probabilistic [Tversky & Kahneman, 1973]. "These two meanings of expectancy - likelihood of occurrence and normative - are sufficiently different that they can be contradictory. If the boss tells a subordinate that he is expected [in the normative sense] to report in on time, but in his heart he actually expects [in the probability sense] the subordinate to be late, it is the latter expectation, not the normative one, that will be unwittingly communicated and initiate a Self Fulfilling Prophecy that may result in tardy behavior on the part of the subordinate. Thus it is expectancy in the sense of that which the expecter believes is likely to occur, rather than that which a person believes ought to occur, that leads to the behavior that fulfills the prophecy. In particular the use of "performance expectation' refers to the level at which the manager believes the subordinate is likely to perform" [Eden - 1990]. "We don't see things as they are. We see them as we are."--Anais Nin We are what we pretend to be." -- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Attentiveness to our deeds, but above all to our thoughts and our words, which precede deeds. Buddha One cannot get rid of what has been said and done; it does not simply vanish, but continually exerts an impact. From that a personality is formed. Buddha If environment means literally what's around, it must also mean whatever is around. This is because the unconscious psyche selects quite arbitrarily among the stuff encountered every day in the environment. Tiny and trivial bits of information may have huge subliminal psychic effects.. - James Hillman He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how. - Nietzsche When we are no longer able to change a situation - ...- we are challenged to change ourselves. Frankl Watch your thoughts; they become words. Stories are our habitation. We live in and through stories. They conjure worlds. We do not know the world other than as a story world. Stories inform life. They hold us together and keep us apart. We inhabit great stories of our culture. We live through stories. We are lived by the stories of our race and place. [Mair - 1988] "The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for." --Ludwig Wittgenstein I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives. Leo Tolstoy [As Reported by James Gleick, 1987]
Every perception ... is an act of creation. Sacks |
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