Personal Development: Who’s The Next Most Important Stranger?

Think this through – the people who are currently most important in your life were at one stage total strangers to you. Whether by coincidence or what Carl Jung might call synchronicity – or, indeed, what a quantum physicist might consider as a type of quantum entanglement – you are where you now are as a result of apparently random events at the core of which are people who were, when you met them first, complete and utter strangers.

When I was growing up I was told, as most children were and still are, not to talk to strangers. There may well be some sense in that from the point of view of protecting little children from the undoubted presence of some very strange people in this world. But, unfortunately, the subliminal subconscious message that follows us into later life is that we should avoid getting involved with people whose path we might casually cross in the course of everyday life.

And, in the course of those normal daily adult lives, the fact is that we wouldn’t really notice a stranger anyway – because, during our formative years, we developed a self-preservational psychological capacity to categorize new people that we meet without giving any attention to who they actually are or how important they could be to us on the journey of our lives. As a consequence of this facility of ‘categorization’ and, indeed, our pre-programming, we pay no attention to people that we don’t know. The next time you’re on a tube, subway, train or bus or in an elevator, observe how diligently people avoid making any kind of contact at all.

What are these people missing? Potentially the next most important total stranger in their lives. You have no idea who might change the course of your career, who might become your most important customer ever, who might become a life-long friend and mentor. You simply don’t know who might be the next person to change your life. But you’re not going to find out if you don’t take of your blinkers.

Get your act together. Opportunity abounds – but is totally missed by the automatic normal mind that’s too closed and blind to see anything. Psychology asserts that the normal person only perceives what they expect to perceive and only experience what they expect to experience. What a death sentence we all are given – by our programming and by our laziness and unwillingness to take the small leap of faith that making personal contact with a total stranger requires.

You’ve got to open your eyes, you have to smell the roses, experience life’s opportunities and go with the flow of a world that is just waiting to respond to you. I am not proposing that you start behaving irrationally and outrageously in public places! I’m suggesting that you put up your antennae, start tuning into the here and now, let yourself off the lead of your normal outlook. Because, until you do, you normal life will continue to be mundanely, repetitively and boringly normal – and it will be your own fault.