Bill Custer's thought sphere

            No one is perfect, because everyone has a wobble. Or two.

            When children are developing their minds, each with its own uniqueness and potential, they approach every new situation with confidence and uncertainty. They have some confidence they can try it and see if it’s something they like and want to do. They have some uncertainty too, unless the new tasks involved are easy to understand, for them. Some people just get some things right away, but as a professor of mine once said, everyone can learn even if it takes some people a longer time.

What is happening in mind development processes? In every situation, including those that are primitive, we are training our minds in a certain sequence. No matter how old we are, we all go through the following sequence of mind development, whether learning to speak a language well or simply to stand straight and walk with confidence:

• creating intentions,
• orienting our thoughts and efforts in goal-alignment for success,
• spinning up our thought and animal processes for success,
• building performance strength and error-free repeatability, and
• reaping rewards or consequences.

We loop through these steps until we are satisfied that we are realizing goals. As our minds develop, our brain structures fill out to support our thoughts and actions for 25 years or so. Our knowledge grows. We have unique gifts and unique challenges in facing our situations, even those as common as walking. We share a common structure, a brain framework that evolved over millennia, yet each mind is unique because each of us has different capabilities, we learn different things, and we form unique sets of intentions due to our development environments.

Our intentions lead us into situations, and for each one, we develop unique patterns of thought, unique viewpoints, and unique abilities: to successfully execute our thought processes and reap our hoped-for rewards. For each situation, we develop a mind’s eye: the way we look at it and anyone who is involved in it. This viewpoint has a basis or base, with an orientation towards one of the likely possible outcomes – the one we want. People in the same situation have different viewpoints because they start from different bases. Everyone has a different past, and everyone has variations on what they want to do and achieve, everyone’s knowledge base is different too, so everyones’ future looks a little different – even when in the exact same situation as others.

Everyone has a different mind, brain and body, so some people are more powerful in achieving aspirations: developing new intentions, situations, knowledge and resources. Some people are more powerful in creating inspiration: developing contemplations, skilled performances and artworks, fomenting joys, amusements, and triumphs of expression. Everyone has their unique primitive animal nature and capabilities as well, so some people are more powerful in their primitive goals.

No matter what the situation, everyone has a different regard for what happened in the past and what its future might be. For every situation, everyone has different powerful and primitive perspectives, and everyone has different views of aspirations and inspirations – theirs and those of others. Our views firm up with solid orientation, pointing to a north star that guides our thoughts, words and actions. We wobble a little or a lot in our spin-up, until we have one confidently spinning stably and reliably. We train and adjust this viewpoint until it is strong and performing as intended, reliably achieving the outcomes we want. We want very little wobble: good performance, lots of stability, and great resilience from being rocked by new situation factors and changing people. We want to be on target and hit the bullseye every time. And we don’t want to spin down or give up the situation easily and waste so much.

Sometimes something does rock our world, our global view. It could be a wonderful development. It could be a tragedy. It could be a challenge. It could be a discovery. It could be a person or a family. It could be an injury or an illness, or someone else’s. It could be an unexpected gift, or a talent that newly emerged because of a new situation, and that could be someone else’s too. Our views and situations change, and no one is perfect. Change can be good.

Everyone has a wobble. Or two.