“My life is the complete opposite of everything that I want it to be.”

Jerry says, “Since all of your instincts are wrong, then the opposite must be right.”

George immediately realizes that this is a great idea. So, instead of ordering his usual lunch, he orders something totally different. Suddenly a beautiful woman turns to look at him. Now, instead of relying on his usual unsuccessful pick-up technique of pretending to more wealthy or more sophisticated than he is, George simply says:

“Hi. I’m unemployed and I live with my parents.”

She looks at him with a big smile, and answers in a sultry voice. “Hello.”

Later, George takes the woman to a movie. Sitting behind them are two tough looking men who are speaking loudly and kicking their seats. Instead of his normal reaction of shrinking in fear, George stands up and tells them to shut up. Stunned by this direct response, the men cower. Later, George has a chance interview with George Steinbrenner. Instead of trying to flatter him, George confronts Steinbrenner, telling him off for doing a lousy job with the team, and Steinbrenner immediately hires him. Now, with a beautiful girlfriend, new-found confidence, and a dream job, George realizes the power of his new strategy.

George’s new life happened because he identified routine patterns of thought and behavior that don’t work, and found a new way of being that allows for growth, freedom and prosperity. His path to growth includes four essential steps:

1. Objectively look at your situation and, without blame or guilt, acknowledge that there’s a problem. When we do this, new opportunities appear that we could not have imagined
2. Be honest with yourself and with others about who you are; your inclinations, skills, strengths, and limitations. As George discovered, we are most effective, successful, and charismatic when we are honest about who we are.
3. Act with courage. George tells the two loud men in the movie theater to shut up, even though his natural inclination is to do nothing, or to run away. George found that fearful things shrink when confronted head on; they appear to be threatening thugs but are, in reality, just a lot of noise and distraction that dissolve when looked at directly.
4. Speak the truth. George learned that successful people actually want to hear the truth, even when – or especially when -  it is difficult to hear.

As George demonstrated, and as all wisdom traditions tell us, we can choose how we respond to the people and events in our lives, and create new ways of being that bring about positive transformation.

Image by thinkpublic.

No related posts.

The most obvious example is the a-ha. You study a science problem from every angle, yet have no idea whether or not you really understand it; then suddenly, without any effort on your part, you suddenly “get the picture.”

To understand why our brains might have developed such a mechanism, consider how we recognize a face. You’re walking down a busy street; you subliminally see but do not consciously notice hundreds of passersby. Nevertheless, your visual system is silently looking for good matches for faces from your past. When it “recognizes” a face as being quite similar to Joe Blow, your college roommate, it notifies you that you are looking at Joe Blow. This recognition occurs at an unconscious level; the feeling of knowing that it is Joe is an unconscious visual system calculation of the likelihood that the face actually is Joe’s. Without this mechanism, all perceptions from the trivial to the urgent would be given equal weight. With this feeling of knowing as part of perception, the unconscious brain can steer us toward looking at or thinking about things that it considers important.

However, we are subject to all sorts of perceptual errors. To grasp how difficult it can be to shake an unjustified sense of correctness, look at Muller-Lyer optical illusion.

Though the two horizontal lines are exactly the same length, we “feel” that the top line is longer than the bottom one. Our intellect tells us they are equal; our unconscious perceptual processes tell us that they are unequal. Worse, even knowing they are the same length cannot dispel the clearly irrational feeling that one is longer than the other.

Take-away point #1:

Just as we cannot consciously will ourselves to see the two horizontal lines as equal, we cannot will away false feelings of knowing.

Take-away point #2:

There are two types of knowledge—that which can be scientifically (empirically) tested, and that which cannot. Whenever you have a sense of “being right,” ask yourself if this feeling can be objectively tested. For example, you can measure the length of the two horizontal lines and “know” whether they are equal or unequal. You can ask the passerby if he is Joe Blow from college.

But, for those thoughts and ideas that cannot be objectively tested, you must operate with considerable caution and due respect for the possibility that your “sense of knowing,” no matter how overwhelming, can be dead wrong.

The antidote to unjustifiable “certainty” is a healthy dose of humility. It might even be that your biology is preventing you from seeing that a contrasting view has a grain of truth.

No related posts.

It’s no surprise that people lie to others to cover up misdeeds, crimes, blunders and bad behavior. But the kind of “self-justification” we write about is not the same as lying to other people when we know we screwed up, to avoid paying the price. We’re talking about an unconscious, hardwired mechanism that allows us to lie to ourselves, that blinds us even to the possibility we screwed up. It comes into play following just about every decision we make or important action we take.

The mechanism is “cognitive dissonance”: the uncomfortable sensation we feel when an important belief, memory, or decision clashes with evidence that it might be wrong. If you smoke, and you know smoking is dangerous, you’re in dissonance, and you have to resolve it – either by quitting or by justifying your smoking (“it keeps me thin”).

But the most painful dissonance occurs when our self-concepts are challenged: when we, who see ourselves as smart, ethical, and kind, are confronted with evidence that we did something foolish, immoral, or cruel. We could reduce dissonance by admitting it: “I realize I hurt you”; “I stole from my own sister”; “we were wrong to think that Iraq had WMD.”

Yet it is easier simply to deny the evidence and justify what we did. “Sure I took my sister’s bracelet from mom’s estate, but I deserved that bracelet after everything mom gave her all those years.” We usually do not feel consciously that we are “justifying”; we feel merely that we are right – because of the brain’s need to preserve a coherent belief system and protect our view of ourselves.

Self-justification lets us sleep at night without tormenting ourselves about bad decisions, or roads not taken, or embarrassing mistakes. In fact, the people who can’t reduce dissonance often suffer precisely because they keep beating themselves up over things that can’t be undone. But if we blind ourselves to the possibility that the decision wasn’t the best, that we made a serious professional mistake, that the road we didn’t take might have been better, then we can’t change direction when we need to.

Dissonance is hard-wired, but what we do about our mistakes is not. Almost anyone can learn to let go and ‘fess up, and it usually turns out not to be as hard as we imagine. We need to separate the two dissonant realizations, and understand that “I was wrong” does not mean “I am hopelessly stupid.” Saying “I made a mistake; I’m sorry” goes a long way toward defusing anger and setting the stage for reconciliation and problem solving.

Setting down the need to pass the buck and blame others, accepting our own role in our own life story, can be liberating. It allows us to come to terms, make amends, build bridges, and improve our lives.

No related posts.