I’m narrow-minded about open-mindedness. How about you?
I find a continually narrow-minded social environment intolerable and stifling and refuse to change my narrow view about that unless there’s a really good reason to. I am also narrow-minded in favour of opening my mind up to my internal emotional processes. I believe it has to be done by everybody at some point, in the right environment, if they want to be happy.
Narrow-mindedness operates in your Left Neo-Cortex. Open-mindedness operates in your Right.
No-one is totally narrow or open minded in the way they think or see something - both brains operate at the same time. It’s a question of balance. Which side of your brain dominates at any one time depends on the situation or context you are focusing on and how uncomfortable you are willing to be during focussing.
A few years ago I attended an interactive team development seminar for managers on how to develop teams using different managerial styles. There were about 20 participants, all team managers, all of whom knew me well.
In one exercise four flipchart boards were put up with different types of management styles written on them. The characteristics of the personalities of each type of management style were listed and after going through a questionnaire we were all scored and asked to go stand near the board our score showed our management style to be most like.
Out of the 20 I turned out to be the only one standing near the board headed ‘Task/Goal Orientated’. Almost everyone else was standing over near the ‘Social/People Orientated’ board. ‘What are you doing over there', Carl?’ a couple of them asked me. ‘You’re one of the most people- orientated managers we know’.
Listed on my board were such characteristics as ‘Drives change’; ‘Domineering’; ‘Dictatorial’; ‘Single Minded’. I explained that during my period as a team manager I had developed a strong view of what an open-minded, co-operative and high performance team looked like. Before becoming a manager I would have stood over at the ‘People Orientated’ board with everyone else.
But since becoming a manager I had found myself having to enforce my view of what this ideal team atmosphere should look like due to having to deal with folks who thought they had a right to disrupt and dominate teams I managed. Occasionally the odd ego-driven person would see the open natured approach I used as a weak management style and would launch some kind of attempt to dominate relationships within the team - and usually expected to get their own way. Only they didn’t and couldn’t understand why not - given I was so apparently ‘easy-going’.
On the surface it looked as though I hadn’t really thought about my management style much because most of my team managed themselves. In reality I had a very narrow viewpoint of how my team should operate; how individuals in it would treat each other and how we would deal with the external world.
I can think of a number of areas in my life now where on the surface I may appear not to have thought about things much and am easy going - but it’s not the case really. I am very narrow-minded about certain things; but I’ve developed the narrow-minded approach to that area after a phase of being open minded, exploring issues through my Right Neo-Cortex, first.
As a result I have no fear of transferring narrow-minded thinking held in my Left Neo-Cortex over to my Right for further exploration; I know that once a new opinion has been formed and proved its value in moving me towards a better self-image or an important goal often enough it will shift back to the more comfortable Left as a retrained narrow-minded ‘fact’.
Narrow Mindedness focuses on the External and the Past
Your Left Neo-Cortex, the part you think in words with, is concerned with your external world and facts you have learned in the past about it. In brain-mapping terms you have thousands of maps stored saying ‘go here and that happens and you do this and then that happens …’ and so on.
Some of these facts were given to you by trusted sources as emotionless bits of data that went straight into memory storage. Others were acquired through ‘experience’ - a process by which your Right Neo-Cortex informs you of full-body energy release occurring during which an emotional cycle is completed and then the information left after the cycle completes is passed over to your Left and stored as an emotionless memory.
Whenever being ‘narrow-minded’ we are working in our Left Neo-Cortex and looking for mentally held, quickly retrieved emotionless reference data on solutions that worked for us (or for others) in the past.
As we use this data from the past (we call it ‘thinking’) to resolve any external situation occurring we compare how our factual data matches with what’s going on in the external world in real-time. Where the two meet we call that ‘reality’.
Opening Mindedness focuses on the Internal and the Future
Your Right Neo-Cortex sees in pictures, feelings and other senses such as sound tone and is concerned with your internal world and the experiences you are currently processing or may experience in the future. The brain maps here don’t operate in the same way the Left Neo-Cortex does.
Here multiple moving image and pattern maps, some attached to intense energy waves held in your body, interrelate and exchange information. These images and patterns are produced by a mixture of what comes from your Prefrontal Cortex, your Left Neo-Cortex and the full energetic informational content of your entire body.
Options and Choices
Paradoxically we increase our options and choices in the outside world by working on our inner world - not the outer. Think of any external life area or environment you ever wanted to move into and your first step was to agree to change your inner self first. Whenever thinking about what kind of an external experience you would like to have or move towards it pays to first to explore your previous emotional history and move towards doing more of those things you have enjoyed emotionally in previous environments.
Chasing the next salary raise - a Left Neo-Cortex logical thing to do, will eventually lead to you leading a passionless, inhuman lifestyle where you find you have sacrificed your true self.
With the Left Neo-Cortex we may look outwards thinking the new opportunities, the answers to problems and achieving happiness are ‘out there’. But they’re not. Adaptation is achieved internally.
People struggling with depression after a loss of some kind, for example, get stuck in their thinking partly due to believing they have limited options and choices because the outside world took their options away; they start moving away from depression once they start to build new life options; release the emotional energy attached to their losses and any frozen beliefs and deliberately choose to try new things.
All the information you need to access in order to complete any internal information cycle is already contained within you. You just need to be willing to look for it.
The work is slow and painful when your default setting is to avoid your internal world - when you are ‘Left Neo-Cortex Narrow Minded’ about how you should work internally.
Playing with Your ‘Narrow Thinking’ and ‘Open Seeing’
Narrow mindedness gets a bad press - ‘they’ll never change’.
Open mindedness also gets a bad press - ‘they’ll believe anything anyone tells them’.
Whenever we label narrow mindedness as ‘bad’ we just got the Left Neo-Cortex to criticise the way it, itself, processes information. The same thing happens when the Right Neo-Cortex sees emotional responses as ‘weak’.
Any negative self-criticism of the emotional process is false information. You have to get narrow minded about that. ANY SELF-CRITICISM OF THE WAY YOU PROCESS EMOTIONAL INFORMATION IS FALSE.
Self-criticism of this nature stops the self from figuring out and accepting how you really work. So whenever a negative self-criticism arises in your brain grab it; accept you are capable of producing negative self-criticisms (don’t criticise yourself for self-criticising or you’re just repeating the pattern!) and challenge it.
Here are a few narrow-minded beliefs I have acquired by first going through a number of ‘open-minded’ journeys. I used to believe the exact opposite of these beliefs - then I began to open up to the possibility those opposite beliefs might be wrong (this involved exploring emotionally painful experiences stored inside and learning from what the emotions told me about life).
These are now re-fixed in my narrow thinking brain and whenever I find myself emotionally charged I refer back to these, and many other new ways of looking at things I deliberately embraced, in order to achieve and remain emotionally free:
- If I do not schedule time for working with my negative feelings they will work on me 24/7 until I do - so I will always schedule time
- I achieve happiness by going through my feelings not around them
- Negative feelings drive thoughts; negative thoughts never drive negative feelings (no-one would watch the news if they did) - get rid of the feelings and you get rid of the thoughts
- You cannot feel a feeling that is not already waiting to be felt inside of you (your body is a battery)
- Feeling is an action in its own right - I do not need to take external action in order to complete an internal information cycle
- I am neither my thoughts nor my feelings - I am the observer who watches the flow of these things and alters the nature of the flow
- There is no such thing as an abnormal feeling regardless of intensity or type
- I will work to remove any negative self-criticisms of my protective negative feeling protective system
- Whenever I feel rage I am trying to protect something of great value - once I figure out what it is I am protecting and accept it’s OK to feel that way I will be able to release my rage safely
- I am often powerless over what happens in the external world and that’s fine
- I will tackle, avoid or leave emotionally painful environments sooner rather than later.
Regards - Carl
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