We’ll talk about ‘they’, but this applies to ‘us’ more than we’ll admit (at least in public…). I was flying back from Dallas after spending a few days with a new client. While those meetings are always fun and exciting…it had been a long day and I mostly wanted to just settle in as the plane started to back away from the gate. My mind was wandering a bit as the flight attendant moved up next to my right elbow as she started the ‘safety instructions’.
“To buckle your seatbelt, take the metal clip and…” Then the thought popped into my head. I know I should have just let go of it, but I couldn’t.
Why in the world do they teach us, in this wonderful group setting, how to use a seatbelt on a plane as it leaves the gate? Now think about it (but not too hard or you might cry). Of course, 99.9992% of us already know at least the basics of how to use a seatbelt. We got onto the airplane and already put our seatbelts on. The flight attendants already checked to make sure we had them properly in place. We rode to the airport in a vehicle in which we fastened a seatbelt very similar to the one across our laps right now. And we’ve all been doing this for years and years.
So why do ‘they’ believe they must train us in the proper technique of doing something we’ve all been doing for years? I’m not going to go into the deep black hole about regulations or protection from legal action. Where I do want to go is that it’s a simple real world example of people ‘just not thinking!’ And while we can find situations all around us, every day, that are better examples of people not really thinking. The point is, what about us?
What do we continue to do that we should have stopped doing years ago? What beliefs do we still hold as true, even though they are decades old (or from a different time in our lives)? Are we sticking to an outdated mode of thinking, because we just haven’t been “thinking about our thinking?”
Question: What can we change right now, by realizing we don’t need to do, think, act that way anymore?
