How to Coach Yourself and Others Essential Knowledge For Coaching | Page 419

paradigm, to a new one, a restructuring of the patterns we rely on for
decision-making, and is the only way to achieve a better outcome.
The problem with a paradigm shift is that you do not know you are in it,
until the new paradigm becomes the 'conventional wisdom' (rarely do
people like Einstein come along and write a small book and shatter a
paradigm, as he did overturning Newtonian physics which had
dominated for hundreds of years and, within the scientific community,
was the prevailing paradigm of thought). The process the mind goes
through during a paradigm shift is, to many, fascinating.
Paradigm shifts can be shaped by the choices we make, by forces beyond
our control, or a combination of the two.They are not just ideas that are
used by scientists, they are a part of the way our brains work and we all
rely upon them.They are one way of creating an instant belief change,
and can take place only after a sudden and opposite change in our
perceptions, which is normally different from reality.
Perhaps the greatest barrier to shifting our paradigms, in some cases, is
the reality of paradigm paralysis, the inability or refusal to see beyond
the current models of thinking. This is similar to what Psychologists
term Confirmation Bias which is usually defined as when as humans we
seek out information that confirms our held beliefs and ignore facts that
run counter to those beliefs.
Historically, one such shift is the Copernican revolution in which a belief
in the world being flat was first challenged by the invention of the
telescope, and then with the progression of science, discarded. Also
consider the Swiss who failed to patent or market the quartz watch, even
though they invented it, because they couldn't shift paradigms. They
couldn't shift paradigms because they couldn't see that there would be a
market for another kind of watch besides the kind they had already been
successfully m