I was going to start breaking out the acronym of Mindset in this blog however the current news frenzy is too rich to pass up…

The most recent has to do with Dr. Gates, Harvard professor, being arrested for something… be it breaking in to his own home, being argumentative with police, or being profiled (I do not pretend to know what occurred).

What was apparent to me and some talk show guests I watched a couple days ago is that there were assumptions made regarding race, specifically black verses white and white verses black.  Although the main players in this situation, Dr. Gates and the arresting police officer, are both educated and familiar with diversity and appropriate approaches to situations… the interpretation to date of the situation indicates that both reverted from their intellectual knowledge to cultural reactions.

We have all been immersed in cultural prejudice and judgements. That immersion began in childhood in the home, within our earliest education and through media influences. We may have been taught divisive ideas about other races or we may have been taught to accept all individuals as an equal representative of the human race.

The critical point is that this early exposure becomes a defined mindset or set of beliefs about people who are different from ‘us’. Once this mindset is locked in, which often occurs prior to age 12, then no amount of diversity training, preaching or demands is going to change it.

Once a mindset is defined it is part of the subconscious which is like a hard drive storage unit. Yelling at the hard drive is not going to change the program! Just using intelligence will fail more often than not because it takes focused effort to override our ingrained attitudes that result in reactionary behaviors. And when stressed, we do not have the energy for focused effort and thus revert to ingrained habits.

Discover your own mindset… What is your first thought about something, before your intellect kicks in and you change to what is ‘right’?

To create lasting sustainable mindset change, the program must be upgraded by using a process designed specifically to address the subconscious. If you want to know more about this, go to www.InnerActiveBeliefs.com