I
disturbing. And yet, the man sitting next to me did nothing.
It was difficult not to feel irritated. I could not believe that he could be so insensitive to let his
children run wild like that and do nothing about it, taking no responsibility at all. It was easy to see
that everyone else on the subway felt irritated, too. So finally, with what I felt was unusual patience
and restraint, I turned to him and said, "Sir, your children are really disturbing a lot of people.
wonder if you couldn't control them a little more?"
The man lifted his gaze as if to come to a consciousness of the situation for the first time and said
softly, "Oh, you're right. I guess I should do something about it. We just came from the hospital
where their mother died about an hour ago. I don't know what to think, and I guess they don't know
how to handle it either."
Can you imagine what I felt at that moment? My paradigm shifted. Suddenly I saw things
differently, I felt differently, I behaved differently. My irritation vanished. I didn't have to worry
about controlling my attitude or my behavior; my heart was filled with the man's pain. Feelings of
sympathy and compassion flowed freely. "Your wife just died? Oh, I'm so sorry. Can you tell me
about it? What can I do to help?" Everything changed in an instant.
Many people experience a similar fundamental shift in thinking when they face a life-threatening
crisis and suddenly see their priorities in a different light, or when they suddenly step into a new role,
such as that of husband or wife, parent or grandparent, manager or leader.
We could spend weeks, months, even years laboring with the personality ethic trying to change our
attitudes and behaviors and not even begin to approach the phenomenon of change that occurs
spontaneously when we see things differently.
It becomes obvious that if we want to make relatively minor changes in our lives, we can perhaps
appropriately focus on our attitudes and behaviors. But if we want to make significant, quantum
change, we need to work on our basic paradigms.
In the words of Thoreau, "For every thousand hacking at the leaves of evil, there is one striking at
the root." We can only achieve quantum improvements in our lives as we quit hacking at the leaves of
attitude and behavior and get to work on the root, the paradigms from which our attitudes and
behaviors flow.
Seeing and Being
Of course, not all Paradigm Shifts are instantaneous. Unlike my instant insight on the subway, the
paradigm-shifting experience Sandra and I had with our son was a slow, difficult, and deliberate
process. The approach we had first taken with him was the outgrowth of years of conditioning and
experience in the personality ethic. It was the result of deeper paradigms we held about our own
success as parents as well as the measure of success of our children. And it was not until we changed
those basic paradigms, quantum change in ourselves and in the situation.
In order to see our son differently, Sandra and I had to be differently. Our new paradigm was
created as we invested in the growth and development of our own character.
Our Paradigms are the way we "see" the world or circumstances -- not in terms of our visual sense of
sight, but in terms of perceiving, understanding, and interpreting. Paradigms are inseparable from
character. Being is seeing in the human dimension. And what we see is highly interrelated to what
we are. We can't go very far to change our seeing without simultaneously changing our being, and
vice versa.
Even in my apparently instantaneous paradigm-shifting experience that morning on the subway,
my change of vision was a result of -- and limited by -- my basic character.
I'm sure there are people who, even suddenly understanding the true situation, would have felt no
more than a twinge of regret or vague guilt as they continued to sit in embarrassed silence beside the