Trainers and experts in creative thinking are always speaking of the importance of changing people’s paradigms or their so-called worldview.

For me personally, travelling to other countries and reading outside my discipline helps. That’s why once a week I try and visit a local bookshop, with the aim of just browsing through those areas that I seldom visit.

It is when this happens that new ideas are blooded.

Like the following story, which by the way comes via the book Power Yoga by Beryl Birch.

The poor frog – always in stories, even used in The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche.

“Confined in the dark, narrow cage of our own making which we take for the whole universe, very few of us can even begin to imagine another dimension of reality. Patrul Kinpoche tells the story of an old frog who had lived all his life in a dank well.

One day a frog from the sea paid him a visit.

“Where do you come from?” asked the frog from in the well.

“From the great ocean,” he replied.

“How big is your ocean?”

“It’s gigantic.”

“You mean about a quarter the size of my well here?”

“Bigger.”

“Bigger? You mean half as big?”

“No, even bigger.”

“Is it . . . as big as this well?”

‘There’s no comparison.”

“That’s impossible! I’ve got to see this for myself”

They set off together. When the frog from the well saw the ocean, it was such a shock that his head just exploded into pieces.

The moment we change someone’s worldview – be it through knowledge sharing or direct confrontation things happen!

In the book A Whack on the side of the Head, Dr Roger von Oech says that sometimes we all need a whack on the side of the head.

What will you do to change your own world view BEFORE someone has to hit you over the head?