Covering the full semester of learning Critical Thinking - Term Paper Example

Life is understood through the perceptions people hold about how events take place, why they take place, and how much control they had over how they came to pass. Covey (2004) describes an event called a paradigm shift, which means that the way in which life is perceived shifts towards a new idea of how life can work. A paradigm shift happens when the way in which life is perceived is shifted to a new understanding. This initial concept created its own paradigm shift for me as I began to see how life could be approached in different ways from which I had originally believed.

Through learning more about what Covey (2004) presented, I began to think that possibilities were broader and more available than what I originally perceived as my own limitations. Knowledge creates new ideas and transforms the way in which something is put into context with beliefs about the world. Learning, then, is the conduit through which knowledge can create meaningful change. One can say that multiple intelligences define how that learning is achieved and perceived. The understanding that intelligence comes in many forms supports the many levels of perception that exist (Gardner, 1983).

Change comes then from how personal intelligences perceive and receive knowledge and utilizes it towards meaningful change. The way in which the individual approaches life can be seen through the centers on which they focus their lives. Covey (2004) describes the center by first stating that it is not necessarily an easy place to identify. The center of one’s life is defined by what is important, which is usually what provides security and guidance. Wisdom and power are not always derived from that center, but should be sought as a part of how one centers their life in order to elevate the nature of how life is lived.

The center of one’s life can be a bad place too, which shadows every move they make and keeps them bound by rules they have defined, but may not be from a place of truth. Epiphanies and centers can come simultaneously at times. In reading the book Left to tell: Discovering God amidst the Rwandan holocaust, Immaculee Llibagiza (2008) I discovered that Immaculee found faith in the midst of a threat against her life. Her shift occurs as she takes her life from a place of fear to that of a place of faith in which she believed that God would keep her from harm.

Her fears were so strong that they had been the center of her life, but in finding that she believed that God would hold her from harm, she shifted the center of her thoughts from fear to faith. How we see the center of our life and how our habits support that center creates effectiveness or ineffectiveness in achieving goals and outcomes. Habits, Covey (2004) writes, are “the intersection of knowledge, skill, and desire”, which in the case of Llibagiza (2008) were no longer relevant to war time existence.

Her daily habits and the knowledge and skill with which she existed were not a part of the new existence of living in daily fear and hiding. She had to shed all of her old habits and form new ones that matched her environment. Between the concepts of habit that Covey (2004) explains and the disruption that Llibagiza (2008), it is clear that habits often must be changed to promote survival, but