It is a common knowledge that an iceberg only shows ten percent of its actual size. What’s not immediately apparent is huge underwater mass that’s hidden under the surface. This should be an analogy that we can use to consider our lives along with its complexities, including mindsets, decisions, behaviours, beliefs and attitudes. What people see is our outer appearance and they don’t see our urges, motives, memories, thoughts and others. There are more than three billion brain cells inside our skull, where trillions of individual chemical reactions occur every minute.
What people fail to consider is how the hidden parts of themselves could impact their exterior lives. For this purpose, we may device iceberg into three portions, the 10 percent visible part, the 30 percent middle section and 60 percent bottom part. While these numbers may seem arbitrary, they should provide us with better understanding about ourselves. What people may see at the top 10 percent portion is usually our real choices, communication patterns, emotion expressions, actions, behaviours, attention, decision and personality.
The middle 30 percent portion could be consisted of our intermediary components, such as feelings, thoughts, awareness, desires and other things that can be potentially shown on the outer layer. However, the bottom 60 percent of us could things that people find it difficult to see, such as dreams, beliefs, prejudices, mindsets, experiences, memories and motives. It often has all the conditioning influences that we have since we were born. To better understand ourselves, it is important to take a much broader look on ourselves and find how they could change the quality of our relationships, career and life.
In general, the top ten percent is the slave to things that lie beneath. When an iceberg moves, we only see the visible part of it, but it is actually driven by the current that pushes the hidden portions. This means that when we interact and perform our daily functions, people could easily see our decisions, actions, behaviours and personality. But these factors are just essential responses to the bottom parts of us. We may think that we have a good control on our behaviours, feelings and actions; but this may not be the case. We usually do things based on any information stored in our 90 percent portion.
The middle 30 percent section of our mind filters the bottom 60 percent, before it reaches the top. Unfortunately, it doesn’t only filter the negative things; but many of our positive qualities too, due to erroneous thoughts and awareness. However, we can adjust, amplify, reduce and alter this portion depending on our requirements. As an example, if our 30 percent section says that we are procrastinators, than any positive urges to complete any task ASAP can be immediately stopped. In this case, we need to understand our deepest minds and how our “middle section” filters any positive and negative qualities. The outcome should be our ability to act now!