Shift Your Paradigm: Empower Your Life & Unlock Your True Hidden Potential

By Dionis J. Rodriguez

Are you ready to unlock your hidden potential? Do you want to empower yourself and discover how to manifest your definition of success regardless of your background or the specific obstacles holding you back? Reading Shift Your Paradigm is a huge step in the right direction. See this as a tool to help

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Release date: Dec 22, 2021
• ISBN: 9798885041003

Book preview

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Shift Your

Paradigm

Shift Your

Paradigm

Empower Your Life

Unlock Your True Hidden Potential

Dionis J. Rodriguez

New Degree Press

Copyright © 2021 Dionis J. Rodriguez

All rights reserved.

Shift Your Paradigm

Empower Your Life

Unlock Your True Hidden Potential

ISBN

978-1-63730-675-8 Paperback

978-1-63730-764-9 Kindle Ebook

979-8-88504-100-3 Ebook

For Nathaniel and Ariela

Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1:

Wake Up! Acknowledge and Understand Your Paradigm

Chapter 2:

Experiences and Relationships Expand Our Paradigm

Chapter 3:

Stuck Paradigms and Limiting Beliefs

Chapter 4:

Vulnerability as the Antidote to Stuck Paradigms

Chapter 5:

Shift Your Paradigm for Greater Access to Power

Chapter 6:

Carpe Diem: Empower Your Reflection and Conversations

Chapter 7:

Do Not Be Controlled by Your Emotions

Chapter 8:

Honor Your Word to Create an Authentic You

Chapter 9:

Develop Your True Self to Access Reality

Chapter 10:

Cultivating a Principle-Centered Paradigm

Chapter 11:

Make Relationships Your Top Priority

Chapter 12:

Society, Purpose, and Meaning

Chapter 13:

Renewal and other Paradigmatic Necessities

Acknowledgments

Appendix

Introduction

I’ve had an incredibly successful life. I was born at the bottom of society in a poor village in the Dominican Republic, but my parents’ decision to immigrate to the United States created amazing opportunities for me. A combination of hard work, resilience, and excellent teachers and mentors allowed me to transform my life via education. After graduating from Cornell University and Harvard Business School (HBS), I achieved great career success, working for institutions like AIG and other multi-billion-dollar organizations. I climbed the corporate ladder and was unstoppable in all of my endeavors.

In 2013, four years after I founded and successfully led the Harvard Business School Real Estate Alumni Association, the school’s newly appointed executive director of Alumni Affairs asked me to step down from my role as president of the volunteer organization I’d thrown my soul into. This blow came out of nowhere, leaving me feeling deeply betrayed by an institution I loved. I felt like a failure.

For the first time in my life, my motivation, focus, and drive to succeed were negatively impacted. My paradigm shifted, and I felt like a sailboat without a mast in a vast sea, unable to move in the direction I wanted.

I was powerless.

So I started to research motivation, self-awareness, and related topics in a desperate attempt to get my power and my life back. I searched deep within myself, looking for that strength I’d used to overcome past obstacles. Before all of this, I’d grown from an impoverished immigrant into a Harvard Business School alum and successful businessman. I was incredibly powerful. Everything had seemed easy, and then a single obstacle changed my personal lens. Even worse, I didn’t understand why I felt that way or what I could do about it.

As a result of this difficult experience, for the past several years I’ve studied how people overcome significant obstacles to find their definition of success. What I have learned from countless books, articles, courses, internal and external dialogues, and other research is that humans are controlled by their paradigms.

Our personal paradigms determine how we view, react to, and feel about life and the world. We develop our paradigms throughout our lives as we form a view of the world and interpret events in light of our general sense of ourselves (our consciousness and our being) relative to the world. Our personal paradigm is our philosophy of what progress through life is all about, and includes a definition of who I am at any point in time, what the world is like, and how I interact with it. Paradigms are essentially the internal mental infrastructure—or computer mainframe, if you will—from which we view life, create feelings, filter experiences, and make decisions.

The biggest complicating factor for all of us is that this is a subconscious function, controlled by past experiences and easily shifted by negative and positive emotions. Thanks to my mentors and teachers, I had powerful paradigms that helped me achieve my definition of success up until I failed, otherwise this negative experience would have prevented me from reaching my goals. It did not matter whether I really failed or not, because my internal lens believed my feelings reflected reality, which then impacted my motivation, actions, and overall life perspective.

We are all slaves to our paradigms.

I never got an official straight answer from HBS as to why they asked me to step down, but I was able to piece together what others believed happened after several discussions with folks from within the school, as well as wealthy alumni who are major donors to the institution.

Apparently, I was the brown face of a club that represented the most successful real estate alumni network in the United States and globally. I was not the right fit for the job because I am a person of color and come from an impoverished background, whereas they were elite—the most powerful real estate network in the world. I should have suspected a possible issue when, a year earlier, an alum and major donor likely worth hundreds of millions of dollars, casually told me the club needed new blood. Since I founded the club and we were adding tremendous value, I did not think much of his comment at the time.

Eventually, I was able to understand it was not my failure that led to HBS asking me to step down, but a combination of classism and, I feared, racism by a small group of wealthy alumni donors who wanted a more acceptable person to lead their exclusive club.

I had such an amazing experience at HBS and a supportive relationship with the past executive director that my paradigm did not allow for that possibility. How could the world’s preeminent management institution have poor leadership in one of its departments? And how could this leader prioritize the biases of some alumni over the extensive, multi-year volunteer efforts of younger, diverse alumni seeking to add value to an institution making a difference in the world?

What message would this communicate to others?

As Friedrich Nietzsche said, That which does not kill us makes us stronger. This experience shocked my life plan, introducing uncontrollable elements I didn’t see coming. It led to internal struggles, feelings, and emotions I was not used to. It forced me to see the real me and have more empathy toward other people. Facing the obstacle head-on allowed me to look at life more holistically and redefine my definition of success, but more importantly, it revealed that I needed to focus more on the journey than on the destination—that is where all the magic happens.

I gained greater self-awareness as a result and attained the personal power to free myself from a debilitating paradigm. I decided my paradigm was my responsibility—I had to acknowledge it, learn from it, and cultivate it to access my full potential. Finally, it unleashed a tremendous amount of gratitude for all the people and institutions that have positively shaped my paradigm, including HBS. I now understand I am paying their good deeds forward, since there is a multiplier effect to their efforts and kindness.

Success is not a destination, but a long, unending personal journey with numerous obstacles to be conquered. And sometimes, the greatest obstacles lie within us. Your paradigm determines your ability to achieve success, have meaningful relationships, make a difference to society, and secure a fulfilling and happy life. It determines whether you are a good parent, a good leader, a good friend, or a good person. However, our education system, leadership institutions, and self-help books focus primarily on the external factors that lead to success, leaving a significant opportunity for personal and societal improvement.

I was better equipped in that category than most people, as I have a Bachelor of Science degree from Cornell University and a Master in Business Administration from Harvard Business School. Nonetheless, I was unprepared to face difficult internal obstacles. Based on my research, we all go through difficult life experiences we are unprepared to address, which can result in a state of powerlessness. Though I was initially looking to solve my own problem, I came to realize society as a whole benefits substantially if we all focus on improving our paradigms.

Feeling like a failure was an emotional sensor pointing to an unconscious, internal struggle. I had achieved my long-term definition of success by excelling academically and getting myself out of poverty, graduating from Harvard Business School, and starting my own business. I accomplished what no one in my family had ever achieved; however, I needed a new definition of success to work toward—a new mountain to climb—and facing this problem opened my eyes to this subconscious feeling. At the time, my job was deeply unsatisfying and I was getting purpose and meaning from my volunteer work with HBS! When it was taken away from me, it felt personal and created imbalance in my life. The resulting journey of self-discovery, coupled with working on my paradigm, allowed me to let go of the debilitating belief that HBS betrayed me. Instead, I became grateful for the opportunity to be transformed into a better version of me.

Most of us have significant limiting beliefs preventing us from achieving our definition of success or otherwise limit our potential. These limitations are embedded in our paradigms and could result from numerous areas, including but not limited to traumatic childhood events, difficult life experiences, negative societal paradigms (such as racial injustices), socioeconomic conditions, and distinctions that make us feel less worthy than others. To make matters worse, we do not have the requisite self-awareness to understand that these issues impact our daily lives. We operate mostly on autopilot.

According to Dr. Tasha Eurich, an organizational psychologist, executive coach, researcher, and New York Times best-selling author, 95 percent of people believe they are self-aware, when the reality is just 10 to 15 percent of the population actually is. Can you imagine what a complicated society this creates and how difficult this problem is for relationships? All of us are controlled by our paradigms, but most of us don’t realize this.

As Eurich states in her Harvard Business Review article, What Self-Awareness Really Is (And How to Cultivate It), Research suggests that when we see ourselves clearly, we are more confident and more creative. We make sounder decisions, build stronger relationships, and communicate more effectively. We’re less likely to lie, cheat, and steal. We are better workers who get more promotions. And we’re more-effective leaders with more satisfied employees and more profitable companies. This means even a nominal increase in self-awareness, say 1 percent, would have a significant impact on the advancement of society.

Imagine if we actually lived in a society where, instead of the majority of us incorrectly thinking we are self-aware, most of us worked proactively on our paradigms. We are witnessing the unfortunate signs of limited self-awareness all around us. We are controlled by uncultivated paradigms, or worse, by those with the ability to manipulate our perspectives and beliefs. Politicians spend more time trying to hold on to power and blaming the other side than on solving problems for constituents. And yet, we still elect them! Most employees are unsatisfied with their careers and lack meaning and purpose in their lives, but they do not take actions to improve the situation. We know we are destroying the environment and experiencing greater climate effects than in recorded history, but do not curb our ways. Sadly, most of us spend more time on social media than quality time with our children and loved ones, which will have catastrophic consequences on relationships and society. At the same time, we are witnessing the reduction of the middle class and greater economic disparities.

The solution is to proactively work on our paradigms to lead better personal and professional lives as well as add value to society.

I realize I have the power to effect real change based on my transformation from an impoverished immigrant to successful entrepreneur, but more so because of my self-awareness journey. I want to help people understand that regardless of their specific situation, they have this power, too.

You have an incredible amount of power regardless of your birth circumstances or current situation. Most of it goes untapped because you operate subconsciously and you don’t realize how truly powerful you are. Your worldview and abilities are limited by your paradigm at any specific point in time. However, you can unleash a tremendous amount of power allowing you to maximize the impact on your career, your family, and society by choosing to proactively study, shape, and—if necessary—shift your paradigm to one of power.

There is high likelihood you lack personal power in one or more areas of your life based on your paradigm—we all do. If you want to unlock your hidden potential and access your definition of success, this book was written for you!

Chapter 1:

Wake Up! Acknowledge and Understand Your Paradigm

If you want small changes, work on your behavior. If you want quantum leap changes, work on your paradigm.

—Steven Covey

In the blockbuster The Matrix (1999), the protagonist, Neo, seeks the truth about life. His feelings of unease about the surrounding world eventually lead him to the famous movie moment—should he take the red pill or the blue pill? The red will give him the paradigm of truth, while blue leads back to blissful naïveté.

Which pill would you choose, if you knew your paradigm was equally limited?

Neo, of course, chose the red pill and literally woke up by being physically disconnected from a computer world, only to discover he had been in a dream state his entire life.

Wake Up to Access Transformative Power

Shockingly, our reality is not too dissimilar to The Matrix. Most humans go through their existence reacting subconsciously, as if in a dream state, to the paradigm they are born into and/or form early on in life. Very few humans are truly and fully aware of their paradigms and the potent power they have. Their personal realities are not in tune with true reality.

The difference is that most of us are controlled not by machines, but by our inability to empower ourselves. We live on autopilot, guided by our subconscious and by an insufficiently evolved mental process, which, if left uncontrolled, will lead to undesired consequences and a state of powerlessness. As Nigel Nicholson discusses in his Harvard Business Review article, "How Hardwired is Human Behavior, evolutionary psychologists believe homo sapiens still seek the traits that made survival possible when they emerged from the Savannah Plains 200,000 years ago. He states that although human beings today inhabit a thoroughly modern world of space exploration and virtual realities, they do so with the ingrained mentality of Stone Age hunter-gatherers. This blue pill" is a vulnerable state of existence, but it is not the only option.

You have the power to choose and impact your paradigm and create your definition of success.

You are in mental bondage for two primary reasons. You probably are not fully aware of the first, and think you know more about the second than you really do. First, you are biologically hardwired to live most of your life in autopilot, making subconscious decisions based on your personal, created reality (primarily guided by fear and insecurity), which is not fully in sync with the real world (true reality).

You are a prisoner of your mind.

Second, this hardwiring, coupled with the physical/social circumstances you are born into, creates a debilitating state of paralysis robbing you of your power by limiting your self-awareness. Thus, there are biological, evolutionary, and physical reasons humans lack power and live an unfulfilled life.

Each one of us can choose the red pill by deciding to proactively work to unleash the tremendous amount of power within us. That is the dangerous truth! We can truly understand reality and decide how to go proactively, purposefully, and powerfully through our journey in life, regardless of who you are, where you were born, or what your specific circumstances are. This book will provide you with a process to accomplish this.

You can literally achieve anything you set your mind to, but it will require action and effort on your part. I’m a living example. Thanks to my paradigm and my decisions/efforts to impact my circumstances, I transformed myself from an impoverished immigrant to a Harvard Business School alum and successful entrepreneur.

If I can do it, so can you. So can anyone!

You can use the power you already have at your fingertips, and that comes from your decision to increase your awareness and proactively manage your paradigm. We will discuss this in more depth later, but by power, I am referring to the ability to positively influence your thinking process and your circumstances, those of your friends/family, and of society as a whole; to the ability to choose and follow through with life-changing decisions regardless of your circumstances, and to manifest your definition of success—the power to free yourself from mental slavery and overcome your circumstances.

The Truth Shall Set You Free

Jim Baggott is a science writer and activist. He won the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Marlow Medal for his contributions to scientific research in 1989. He attended the University of Manchester for his undergraduate studies and the University of Oxford for a Doctorate in Chemical Engineering. He left his post as a tenured professor at the University of Reading, England for a career at Shell International Petroleum, but after eleven years started a business consultancy and training center. If you research him, you will find that he keeps busy as a prolific writer bent toward ensuring that scientists operate in fact and reality. He’s quite opinionated and doesn’t hold back. If he were to be described using contemporary social media parlance, we would call him a troll, because of his intentionally provocative writing. But his ideas and perspectives are fascinating, especially as they relate to human behavior!

In his 2005 book Farewell to Reality: How Modern Physics Has Betrayed the Search for Scientific Truth, he accuses theoretical physicists speaking about multiverses, super string theory, super symmetry, and other potentially revolutionary scientific theories as abstracted, theoretical speculation without any kind of empirical foundation. He describes those theories as not science and considers them in the realm of metaphysics. As a life-long science aficionado and a lover of theoretical physics in particular, I believe this is an extreme view which I do not agree with, but I respect his perspective.

During his 2019 Berlin TED Talk, Coming to Terms with Your Personal Reality, Baggott says The Matrix essentially portrays a theory that philosophers came up with centuries ago: we are prisoners of our minds. What we take to be reality is, in fact, entirely created from a sum of all of our experiences throughout our entire lives, from infancy right up to this TED Talk. He believes, like I do, that each of us has a unique and personal reality completely distinct from anyone else’s—a reality created by our paradigms.

He also believes this makes each person’s reality quite vulnerable to the control of those willing and able to manipulate it. While my goal is to convince you that you are choosing to live powerlessly, on autopilot, in your own created reality, Baggott’s aim is to warn you about the potential for you to be brainwashed by people that can manipulate how your brain works. His conclusion is both accurate and concerning, as you will learn below. Let’s first assess the three main arguments of his logic and see how it relates to our paradigms.

If everyone has a unique reality personal to them, then overall, reality is simply a construct, comprising the collective paradigms of humanity. This is an idea I came up with as well (many people have), so no argument from me here. Baggott’s point, however, is that since this is the case, then humans must suffer from an Illusion of Explanatory Depth, a term coined in 2002 by Yale researchers Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil. In a course on human behavior for the University of Edinburgh, Keil defines the Illusion of Explanatory Depth as the sense that one understands complex phenomena more deeply than one does.

Jim Baggott believes this means the societies we create are so complex that no single human brain can comprehend them. To a significant extent, we rely on the knowledge and contributions of a few members of society, but this happens subconsciously. We believe we understand much more about the world around us than we actually do. Rozenblit and Keil wrote about this in their paper The Misunderstood Limits of Folk Science: An Illusion of Explanatory Depth. Their data is compelling. This reminds me of Tasha Eurich’s findings about people believing they are much more self-aware than they really are. Taking this