by Elaine Sihera

Created on: May 31, 2007

New initiatives tend to bring out the worst reaction in us, making us needlessly defensive of our territory while firing our natural instinct to protect the status quo at all cost. It seems that accepting any form of change depends primarily on the personal perception of our individual situation; our vision of how we could be affected by something new; our degree of readiness for a different experience; how much we perceive we have to lose and our level of confidence in dealing with the unexpected. Having no vision means we can only see through a narrow tube of familiarity which usually gives us just a tiny part of the whole picture. This keeps us firmly where we are, without letting in any more light, while detaching us gradually from both reality and the action. In this way we continue to have a distorted, jaundiced view of the potential effects of anything new in our environment and to the detriment of our development.

For instance, if you were to play blind and deaf from today and move to an uninhabited island, you would learn nothing else about the world you left behind, you would meet no one else and probably do nothing more than the basics. Ten years from now, you may be an expert on plant life, or on how to survive on very little, but you would be technologically ignorant and trapped in a time warp while the world would have moved on at a cracking pace. There are many people like that in life who miss out on new developments, and benefits which are rightfully theirs, because they lack the courage to overcome one main confidence killer: a preoccupation with the past

The old days look better because we cannot cope with the new, especially when there are no consistent rules to guide us, when we do not feel included in its message and when the seemingly secure boundaries we are enjoying are gradually being stripped away. The past always looks better when we lack confidence because it allows us to dismiss anything remotely uncomfortable while we remain deliberately blind to what we do not wish to see. But this merely increases our sense of insecurity and keeps us on the periphery o change, feeling isolated and ignored.

When we rely too much upon past solutions to resolve current dilemmas it is an indirect admission of our inability to control our own destiny. To feel more secure, we hark back to tried and tested methods of dead men that were ideal in a bygone era but is of less relevance, and limited use, in the present revolutionary age with its vastly different

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