Take any domain and you will find a silent contributor to the results you are producing in that domain. That silent contributor is your worldviews on that and the related domains.
Your worldview is simply what it says – your view of the world.
Think about a few areas that matter most to your professional life. Let’s say they are marketing, team work and leadership to start with. Whether you want it or not, you will have a worldview of what these are for you. In fact, your worldview is “truth” for you. You don’t typically see them as “your” worldview – you treat your worldview as your truth. In fact, you think that those who don’t share your worldview are either missing something or they just don’t get it.
How did you form these world views in the first place?
Obviously you didn’t get them by birth. This means you acquired them as you lived your life. You would also agree that you didn’t form these one fine day because you felt like it. If that was the case, changing those world views would have been easy. Easy to form, easy to break. These world views formed very slowly – so slowly that you didn’t even notice them being formed. At some point, they become THE truth for you.
The major contributor to the formation of your world views on any topic comes from all the touch points you have with the world. The mother of all these touch points are the conversations you are having with people around you. Every conversation creates new realities or strengthens your earlier beliefs. You keep having the same conversations and very soon you will start believing the ideas from these conversations.
Why is this important?
Your results and returns in a particular domain are widely influenced by the worldviews you hold on that domain. Remember that your worldviews are not the reality, they are simply “your realities” of the world. If they are flawed, you see the consequences in the returns and results you produce. The problem gets complicated as you generally don’t share your deeply held worldviews in public. So, unless you realize the link between your world views and the results you are producing, you may end up just fixing the actions that are the results of having those worldviews. Those fixes may produce temporary shifts towards better results but unless the worldviews are fixed, you will snap back to old ways sooner than later.
But, worldviews are hard to change…
Yes, that’s right. But you can start changing what creates those worldviews – the conversations that you are having. What conversations you choose to have is totally under your control. Start choosing the right conversations and sooner than later you will start shifting your worldviews and soon you will have better and more powerful worldviews in the domains under consideration. Once your worldviews shift, it won’t take a long time to see a shift in the results you are producing.
Photo courtesy: Amin Arjmand on Flickr