Disclaimer: I am not an expert or a guru and don’t intend on being seen as one. My intention here is to share my thoughts which I have been wrestling with in my headspace over the years as a consumer, as an earthly citizen and as a keen observer processing the meta in everyday life.
In listing the shifts below as one liners I am trying to respect the fact that most of us no longer have patience for long sentences and to also effectively allow room for individual reflection. For ease of reading, I have split the shifts in 3 major categories: Individual, Organizational and Collective.
Some points may appear to be repetitive in spirit but not in prose and that is by design. Although these are grouped in 3 categories, each of these are fluid in nature and can be applied in any other category.
Reading time could vary between 2 to 20 minutes depending on whether you are busily scrolling while you multi-task or choose to process what is offered here.
Paradigm shifts we need as Individuals:
- From an isolationist self serving to a systemic collectivist perspective
2. From idolizing/worshiping big money makers to celebrating community builders
3. From crowding our mental/emotional space with over-stimulation to mindfully choosing what we let influence us
4. From reacting to symptoms with a quick fix band aid/pill to preventive balanced lifestyle choices
5. From being enchanted with egotistical displays of power to expecting humility, servitude and integrity from those we place in an overt position of power
6. From living in ignorance and seeking to enjoy life from the periphery to bearing the burdens of being aware
7. From resigning our fate to someone else to whom we assigned power to voicing the power that lies within the ordinary, within us
8. From creating anxiety around wanting everyone to look/think/behave the same to understanding that we as humans are 99% same & 1 % different
9. From viewing ourselves as separate from the whole to being a responsible part of the whole
10. From degrading our sacred attention span with constant bombardment to valuing our mental space enough to give it a meaningful pause
11. From solely relying on ‘experts’ to give us tips/advice to using the power our own power of discernment
12. From a neurotic sense of perfection to loosening our brokenness
13. From having to choose between the head and the heart to giving ourselves permission to harness the power of both
14. From viewing the world in a linear(step 1, step 2 etc ) fashion to appreciating the non-linear/interactionist effect
15. From believing that we need to be saved to knowing that we need to be served
16. From wanting and consuming more/faster to consuming less that stays longer
Paradigm shifts we need as Organizations:
17. From short term profits to long term sustainability
18. From maximizing shareholder value to holistic/shared value generation
19. From being cost/efficiency driven to impact driven i.e. providing humane working conditions, providing fair wages, accounting for environment impact etc.
20. From humans and nature being a means to profit to living breathing beings that absorb impact
21. From measuring our reach in a global conquest to real impact in the local community
22. From encouraging hyper focussed specialization in skills to broad ranging generalization
23. From economies of scale geared at becoming bigger to qualitative scaling using smaller groups geared at considering impacts on all involved
24. From obsessing on growth in numbers to progress in qualitative standards of living/welfare
25. From fast presumptuous thinking to slow/deliberate thinking
26. From creating token departments in organizations responsible for ‘ethics/social responsibility’ to creating checks and balances so unethical/irresponsible behavior/intent does not slip through the cracks
27. From decisions based solely on impersonal sanitized data points to decisions involving personal stories
28. From STEM to STEAMH
29. From mindless/fear based competition to thoughtful abundance oriented cooperation
Paradigm shifts we need as a Collective:
30. From laws/systems built to protect business interests to laws protecting consumer, human and environmental rights
31. From a focus on extraction of natural and human resources to one’s advantage to a focus on regeneration of human skills/thought and preserving the balance in natural resources
32. From assuming technology can do no harm to openly studying the unintended consequences and changing course as needed
33. From being hungry for unlimited growth to recognizing there are limits to growth
34. From wanting to conquer/rule the world to be of true service to the world
35. From an optimal productivity mindset to reflective creativity
36. From a simplistic compartmentalized masculine dominated worldview to a more complex, nuanced, integrative feminine coexistence
37. From simply caring about convenience to making conscious everyday choices to care for the environment
38. From talking about peace and harmony with guns in our backpockets to fighting and correcting our limiting mental maps
39. From treating all beings as commodities that serve the human race to respecting all beings who make the entire eco-system
40. From saying ‘ends justify the means’ to waking up to the consequences and saying ‘means matter equally or perhaps more than the end’
41. From a mentality of getting/providing jobs to providing/making a means of ‘living’
Should we fail to raise ourselves up to the occasion, it will be a collective failure of our human species to evolve.
Sounds audacious? Overwhelming?
Let us take it one day at a time, not leave it to any single individual or a select group of individuals.
Let us recognize that it will rightly take a village & a noisy village at that where everyone speaks their minds and hearts, where one doesn’t have to resort to extremes to be heard.
Would you like to add to this or start a dialogue? Write to me at pooja@poojajoshi.com.
Image Credit: Wall Art Drawing I bought from FaiCai art on amazon.com
Reflections, Affirmations and Randomness 
This article is fantastic. Very well written. I can resonate well with almost all of them and feel the urge to pay attention to these areas. Often times, we tend to think about a lot of these things but don’t take actions. We should take baby steps and start working towards making this change 🙂
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Thanks for taking the time to write your comments down here. I like the work you are doing as well, keep it going!
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