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NOTE: As a thank you for reading this blog post, we are providing you with a free excerpt fro Dan Castro's book CRITICAL CHOICES THAT CHANGE LIVES.

Fifth Law of Critical Focus: We tend to filter out what we’re not expecting to see.

One morning, I was getting ready for work, looking for my casual shoes that I wear with my khaki pants on Fridays.  I couldn't find them anywhere.  I looked where I always look—in the closet, next to the bed, under the bed, in the living room.  I couldn't find them.  I looked in all those same places again, thinking I had just overlooked them, but they were nowhere to be found.  I thought, maybe I was just a little sleepy.  I would look again, slowly and carefully.  Not there again.  I expanded my search.  I looked in the kids' room, in my office, in the bathroom, in the kids' bathroom.  Nowhere.

Now I was getting desperate.  I was going to be late for work if I didn't find them soon, or - Horror of Horrors!  I would have to wear dress shoes (and a suit to match) on a day when I did not have to be in the courtroom!  It was a crisis.  But I was strong.  I thought I would look in the usual places one more time.  And then it hit me.  If I kept looking in the same places I had already looked, I would never find the shoes.  I was only wasting time, frustrating myself, and making myself late for work.  The shoes clearly were not in the places I had been looking.  I was in a bit of a dilemma because I had no idea where to look if the shoes were not where they were supposed to be.  What were my realistic alternatives?

Something told me that if I wanted to find my shoes, I had to look where I had never looked before, even if it made no sense to look there.  When I made the decision to change my pattern to include the out of the ordinary, the first off-the-wall place I could think to look was the garage.  I never put my shoes in the garage because I don't take my shoes off before entering the house.

Nevertheless, out of obedience to my inner voice, I opened the garage door and looked around.  I was right.  My inner voice was wrong.  The shoes weren’t there.  But sitting there as big as day was the car I drove only on weekends.  I had driven that car to see my folks the previous weekend.  Then I remembered I had taken my casual shoes with me.  I opened the car door, and there they were, sitting on the back seat, staring at me as if to say, “I told you so."  My inner voice was right after all.

It was then that a light turned on in my head.  I stood there staring at my shoes, pondering the lesson that life was trying to teach me.  I was overwhelmed with one question.  In my life, had I also been looking in the same places over and over for things that I already knew weren’t there?  Was I ignoring the messages life was sending me?  Was I going in circles in my life, hoping that the next time I passed that way, what I was looking for would suddenly materialize?  Was I hoping my same pattern of behavior would somehow produce different results than they always had before?  I had actually convinced myself that the things I had been dissatisfied with for years would suddenly improve if I just improved my attitude, gritted my teeth, and kept going.

I suddenly realized that if I wanted to change the results I was getting, I had to change not only the decisions I was making, but also how I went about making those decisions.  I had to change my actions if I wanted different results.  I had to change my pattern of behavior to include things I had never tried before.  This, of course, would require considering options I had never considered before—even if in my mind they had previously been inconceivable, illogical, or even forbidden.  I had to get out of my mental and emotional rut, my regular way of making decisions.

I also learned that my expectations of the way the world ought to be don’t always reflect the way the world really is.  The lesson of the missing shoes is that what we’re looking for in life isn’t necessarily where it’s supposed to be.  Our preconceived notions don't always work.  They aren’t always consistent with reality.  Is it possible that what you’ve been taught all your life isn’t necessarily correct?  We need to adjust our attitudes to factor in what life is trying to teach us.  We shouldn’t blindly and ignorantly keep repeating the same patterns of behavior over and over, oblivious to the results.  We need to listen to life's wake-up calls.  One thing is true:  When you start looking in places you’ve never looked before, you will start seeing things you’ve never seen before.  

The military has developed “smart bombs” that have internal maps of where they are going and how to get there.  But they only succeed by surveying the territory over which they are traveling and constantly giving themselves feedback to correct their movements.  Have we progressed to the point that the weapons we have made to destroy each other are smarter than we are?

Steve Andreas and Charles Faulkner introduced the idea that, “The map is not the territory” in their book called NLP: The New Technology of Achievement.  The concept is simple, but profound.  The map is only a piece of paper.  The territory is the actual earth, which you are experiencing as you walk through this life.  The map is never 100% accurate because the earth is constantly changing.  Also, a map is only a perception of what someone else remembers having seen, which you have adopted and have chosen to believe.  What mental “map” have you been following all your life?  Is what you’ve been taught working for you?  Have you stopped to check the “map” against your actual experience?  Are you communicating with yourself like a smart bomb to adjust for what you are actually experiencing?

Things happen or don't happen in our lives for a reason.  Perhaps something or someone is trying to send us messages.  For me, the message was, "You will not get what you want out of life if you keep repeating this same pattern of behavior.  Isn't it about time you tried something different?"

Laurence Gonzales has studied why accidents happen in the wilderness among hikers, kayakers and mountaineers.  In his profound work, Deep Survival, Gonzales, explains why otherwise intelligent people miss obvious warning signs that could have prevented the accident and fail to see obvious escape routes and sources of food and shelter.  Gonzales explains that, because of how the brain works, if we are searching the house for a red hardback edition of Moby Dick, we are not likely to see a blue hardback copy of Moby Dick even though it is staring us in the face.  Our mind literally filters out things we are not expecting to see.