Imagine a square. The square represents a supermarket car park with the bottom right hand corner being the car park exit and the top left hand corner being the car park entrance. You can only access the car park from one direction, by approaching from the bottom right hand corner, passing the exit, doing a left turn and then entering at the top left hand corner. It's been like this for years.
The supermarket decide to change the layout of the car park. About 6 weeks ago they do just that, new space markings, new lane markings, new pedestrian markings and they also decide to make the bottom right hand corner the entrance and the top left hand corner the exit, they swap them round. To help inform their customers of the change they put up a sign, brightly coloured, 6 feet wide and 4 feet tall saying "ENTRANCE" by what is now the new entrance, the old exit.
The subconscious mind is in charge of our habits and beliefs, very little of our lives is actually under conscious control, and this simple layout change in a car park proves the point perfectly.
I have now lost count of the amount of times I have seen people drive past a massive, brightly coloured sign saying "ENTRANCE", turn left and drive towards the old entrance, the new exit, just because they have done this dozens, maybe hundreds, of times before. They are then faced with two "no-entrance" signs and the appropriate road markings, which appear (upside down to the driver facing the wrong way) as Exit.
Usually one of three things happens:
1) Drivers immediately suss out that they need to turn round and enter from the new entrance.
2) Drivers sit there with bemused looks on their faces, wondering how on earth to get in the car park, eventually turning round.
3) Drivers get completely bamboozled by the situation and drive through the exit, sometime causing pedestrians and other drivers to swerve.
This simple layout change sums up, to me anyway, the power of our subconscious minds. Despite what appears to be the blatantly obvious thing to do sometimes we do something that just doesn't make sense.
Welcome to my world. I help people make sense of the things that don't make logical sense, and I don't mean showing people where the car park entrance is!
Be happy,
Dave Sabat.
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