Opportunities to Realize Your Dreams are Evolving and Popping up All the Time

Opportunities to realize your dreams are evolving and popping up all the time, all around you.  The challenge is to not be so hampered by your mental models that you fail to identify these opportunities when they bump up against you.

So what is a mental model?  A mental model is how you see the world (and your corresponding expectations relative to this view of the world).  It is premised on habit, preconditioned mind sets, and pattern knowledge, and pattern recognition.  Professor Srikumar S. Rao frames mental models best in his book, Are you Ready to Succeed.  He goes on to say about mental models, "these are our fixed ideas of how the world works and how things should or shouldn't be done.  We accept these models so completely that we live our lives according to them.  We have different models for different situations - for work, for love, for our families.  We have dozens of them that we use, and some of them may actually be in direct conflict with others and we may not even know it."

Mental models serve us by helping us to put order to our current circumstance without having to constantly reinvent the wheel.  Through pattern recognition and preconditioned response we can move through our current circumstances with a measure of understanding and certainty.  The problem with mental models is that they can, inadvertently, limit us to specific pathways, so much so that growth and learning can become inhibited or prevented altogether.  So what does this mean?  For one, no matter how set your circumstance may seem to you, it is in your best interest to make a commitment to flexing your capacity to adjust and/or change your mental model - equate it to working out regularly in the arena of the possible.

Secondly, nothing is cast in concrete, so experimentation is OK, as is backtracking.  The primary goal here isn't about success or failure, it's about learning and better identifying and moving towards your highest good: fully investing and reaping the benefits of your gifts and talents, while keeping your mental model current.

Mental models aren't a bad thing.  We need them to survive.  They are not cast in concrete and they can and should be updated or disposed of, if need be.  In today's world it is an imperative to surviving and thriving.