"The range of what we think and do 
Is limited by what we fail to notice 
And because we fail to notice 
That we fail to notice 
There is little we can do 
To change 
Until we notice 
How failing to notice 
Shapes our thoughts and deeds" 
R. D. Laing

Our vision: better decisions for a better world

Every day, each of us acts on hundreds of items. Choosing what to wear, going to work, going to the gym (or not), picking up a new hobby, yelling (or not) at someone irritating on the tube – no matter if we realize it or not, these are decisions we have made when facing a choice. We always have a choice and we are responsible for our choices for they determine how we live our lives and how we impact others around us.

At SubtleWays, we believe in the power and the responsibility of every single one of us to make better choices and decisions. “We are what we consistently do”, Aristotle said a long time ago, and only through our acts we enliven and give meaning to what we believe in. The decisions and choices we make have the power to enrich our lives and to make us better versions of ourselves – better humans if you will. Yet, our vision is not for a world in which we make perfect decisions. Our vision is for a world in which the decisions every one of us will make tomorrow are better than the ones they are making today. It is a world in which every one of us makes steps towards achieving their goals every day.

Our modest ambition: contribute to your thinking

Our actions don’t happen in a vacuum. We are all embedded in a web of personal relationships, communities, histories, memories, physical environment, abstract knowledge, and many many more forces that shape us. The bigger factors are relatively easy to spot, but there is a myriad of them that simply go unnoticed. This doesn’t make them less powerful though, as R. D. Laing’s poem beautifully shows.

Our goal is modest. We contribute to your thinking by making explicit the things that shape our actions and decisions, from the minor and mundane, to the large and highly consequential ones. We offer you what we know about the forces that impact how we see and act in the world. We will explore the subtle ways in which everything around us communicates to our minds. And we hope this will enable and empower you to become a better version of yourself.

Our values

Three signposts will guide us on this journey.

Personal responsibility: we believe that if we want to change the world, the best place to start is changing ourselves. And we believe that this is a responsibility not just to ourselves and our dreams and ambitions, but to the others as well. For we shape the world of other people as much as they shape ours. Make it good. Make it count.

Change and learning: our brains, and minds, and bodies never stop changing. The question is, do we want this change to be imposed on us, or do we want to own it. Do we want to nudge ourselves to make better decisions or we’ll wait for others to do it? Do we want to reframe the way we think about things or we’ll just carry on as we always did? Do we want to sit in our comfort zone or we will ‘dare to be vulnerable’ (Brene Brown) and go try new things?

Knowledge is power: everything start with knowledge, goes through how we manage it, and ends with how well we apply it. We talk about creativity, curiosity, doing our best, raising the bar, resilience, and many other concepts that will become more and more important. They all rest on how well we know ourselves and the world; on how open we are to reconfigure what we know; on how active we are to gain new knowledge; on how we build new connections between things we know; and on how well we translate what we know to actions.

Tell us what you think:

subtleways@outlook.com