Trail Safe Three-Pronged Self-Defense

I've never met anyone who didn't think that he or she was a keen observer of the world; in other words, that he or she was aware. Here's a quick quiz—stop where you are right now, close your eyes, and mentally write down a detailed description of your immediate environment. This exercise may remind you of those tests in popular magazines of whether, at this moment, you can remember what color shirt your boyfriend wore this morning or the style of your wife's earrings when she left the house for work. If you complete this mental note-taking honestly, you'll realize just how little we actually notice in the course of our day. We think we are completely aware of what's going on around us; in fact, we probably take in less than 10 percent of the stimuli in our world.

Why does this occur?

Well, I'm not going to delve into any deep Eastern thought about how we, as Westerners, find it difficult to live in the moment. In my travels, I've met my share of oblivious Easterners as well. Rather, I'd like to look at our lack of awareness from a distinctly Western, that is, a very deterministic perspective.

We are, as are all animals, partially products of our environment, and our environment is fairly nuts. A few years back, many stories and studies centered on the subject of "information overload"—I even wrote a few of them myself. The basic thesis stated that, thanks to our knowledge technology, our personal environments had become increasingly dense. We had simply been, and continue to be, exposed to a continually expanding amount of input. A walk down a crowded urban street generates a staggering amount of sensory input—noise, smells, sights, the jostling of other people, the traffic just a few inches away. Television, radio, movies, and the Internet all scream for our attention. Plus, we are suddenly being forced to process more information and to process it much faster. Speed, I teach in my business seminars, is the defining word of the new millennium.

Speed and overload have implications for the way our brains process information as well as for the way business is done. You'll notice that the media coverage of information overload has diminished these days, and I think that's because, for all intents and purposes, we've given up. Our over-stimulated sensory environment has won. We deal with our personal defeat through the creation of mental filters. We build these filters totally unconsciously, and we use them in the same way and for the same reason that we use telephone answering machines—to screen out unwanted "calls." So when we walk down a trail crowded with other hikers, we may be totally aware of, say, a striking member of the opposite sex, while totally unable to recall a fork in the trail that we just passed. How powerful are these filters? More powerful than you can imagine.