The fleas in the jar story is a great analogy for how we create paradigms in our lives and end up limiting our potential. If you don’t know it already, the story goes something like this…
When fleas are placed in a jar, they try to jump out – but after the lid is placed on, the fleas stop attempting the escape – as they learn the boundaries of the new environment they’re in.
Even when the lid is removed, the fleas never jump out.
Their thinking has created the ‘lid’ as the boundary, so has conditioned them to limit their jumping. We’re all a bit like those fleas – our thinking conditions us.
It creates imaginary boundaries and limited ways of thinking that keeps us stuck in a certain way of operating.
Our view of reality is created by our thinking and we don’t even realise we’re doing it.
Layers of our thought create the various paradigms (fixed ways of thinking) that we live in.
We have paradigms about the market, about the people that work for us, about our business and about everything else in our lives.
Now some of those paradigms help us be successful in life, but many just limit us without us realising it.