No matter which smartphone you have, in my experience almost everybody changes the factory settings the phone came with to the settings of their liking. Whether it is colour scheme, home screen, widgets, icon style, notifications, ringtones, shortcuts, and several other customization and preferences. & we keep doing it from time to time as our likings evolve.
Isn’t it true that no matter which phone we buy, we would still do it?
Despite knowing that the manufacturer (considered expert in making phones) makes the phone after thoughtful & elaborate considerations and findings from the extensive research on customer experience and preferences.
No matter what they make as a user we all have our own preferences that satisfy us.
Exactly like a phone, our thinking, our beliefs, our values, our standards, our boundaries, our attitudes, our fears, and several other settings were set into us during our years of growing up with our parents, teachers, family, society, colleagues, and friends. These become our default settings.
Imagine this stage as like that where the manufacturer set your phone to a setting what they think would serve you. Similarly, in majority of our cases, everybody involved in our making taught us what in their belief would serve us.
Now, once you are grown up, you start to notice, feel, sense that some of those settings are not serving you.
But majority of us do not change our default settings. There are several factors that are at play here which is the subject of many books you would find. However, let me try to try and summarize in nutshell, what goes on here?
When we sense something is not feeling right because it is not serving us, we do feel a bit of discomfort within us however, we tend to ignore it because of several reasons 1) due to lack of our awareness what to change?, & on top we often don’t know how to deal with what we are feeling, 2) when we see others are fine we doubt ourselves and ignore the discomfort, 3) at times we share with others around us, however, we are often discouraged because most of those around us also lived, brought up and exposed to pretty much the similar settings and conditioning.
With such interactions and experiences with our own thoughts and with others our default settings get cemented.
One core belief that gets cemented is that we can’t change. We start to believe lack of power within us to change those default settings. We start to accept the factory settings even though we don’t like some of them.
This in summary sounds like we start to live a ‘disempowered life’. With more & more people around us living such life, we accept that as a way of life. We build narrative to rationalize them. Do you notice it is very common to hear beliefs like ‘we cannot get everything in life’, ‘we have to accept life’, ‘we get what is in our destiny’, ‘we can’t get more than what is in our destiny’, ‘be happy with what we have’?
Consequently, a lot of us pretty much end up living the rest of our entire life with these default settings they don’t like them.
However, feelings around things that matter to you don’t go away.
Like the phone manufacturer provided an option to change the factory settings, we all have the option to change our default settings.
& also know that once you change your default beliefs, values, thinking patterns, mindset to something else, you can change it again if that does not work.
Unlock your mindset to know and claim your power to change your default settings to what serves you.
It might be challenging journey to know your inner-self, to know missing pieces because you know what you know and you don’t know what you don’t know. However, it being challenging should not stop you because it is worth it!
