Mind Archives - Page 17 of 23

The Illusion of Choice

May 13, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell 4 Comments

You always have a choice.

Isn’t that what everyone says? No matter what happens, you can choose how to respond. And if you want things to be different, well then just make different choices.

Making a different choice sounds so simple. And it’s appealing to believe you can do it if you really want to. But if you don’t make a different choice, does that mean you really don’t want to? Does it mean you lack self-control or will power? Does it mean you’re trying to sabotage yourself?

If you believe that you could make a different choice but don’t, why don’t you?

When we believe we could make a different choice, but we fail to do so, we’re forced to explain ourselves—at least to ourselves. So we get busy rationalizing, making excuses, or berating ourselves. It’s the start of a vicious cycle, one that can go on for years or even decades. Not only is this a waste of time, it’s also counterproductive to changing behavior.

The truth is that we don’t always have a choice. In fact, we rarely have a choice. We keep doing the same things we’ve always done because that’s how our brain is wired. It conserves precious energy by turning as many behaviors as possible into routines and habits. Once those routines and habits are in place, they’re extremely difficult to disrupt. When faced with a familiar situation, you and I and everyone else will likely as not do what we’ve always done in that situation, even if we want to make a different choice.

Minute by minute, second by second, the unconscious part of your brain is absorbing and processing an unbelievable amount of data, all but a small fraction of which you’re not consciously aware of. So at the moment you’re faced with that familiar situation, your unconscious is picking up on signals, making connections, and initiating the usual response long before you can consciously entertain the idea of doing something different. When it comes to routines and habits, consciousness is simply no match for the speed of the unconscious brain.

As long as you don’t recognize what’s going on, you’re up against an unseen enemy. The challenge is to use the brain’s labor-saving mechanisms instead of being used by them. That’s where intention comes in.

The time to decide how you want to respond in a familiar situation is not when you’re in that situation but when you have some distance from it and can think clearly about it. If you know what you’re up against, you can come up with a plan to outwit your unseen enemy and even turn it into an ally. The plan involves IAP:

Intention
Attention
Perseverance

The IAP process is based on the way the brain actually works.

(1) Plan ahead. Formulate a clear and specific intention.
(2) Don’t count on remembering. Come up with a way to keep your attention focused on your intention.
(3) Assume you won’t be perfect out of the gate. Your unconscious brain is stubborn and set in its ways. With perseverance, however, your desired response will become the automatic one.

Inside Week 1 of What Do You Want?

May 8, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell 1 Comment

This is a guest post by Jean S., who is sharing her experience of participating the 6-week What Do You Want? course. More posts by Jean will follow, on consecutive Thursdays, as she gives us her perspective on the rest of the sessions.

Nila's Mama (Left) Preforms with a Barbershop ... — Barbershop Quartet (Photo credit: Lea LSF)

I used to think there was something wrong with me because there are things I really, truly want and need to do before I die, and yet I haven’t gone after them, or even half-satisfied the need. In the first meeting of the What Do You Want? course, I learned that it isn’t a flaw in me. It’s System 1, the unconscious, doing its job, what it knows how to do, which is maintaining the status quo. That’s a biggie. As Joycelyn said, “The unconscious keeps you alive, but isn’t interested in enlivening you.”

There are always worksheets which we complete in class, and if not done in class would be harder to do on my own at home. We learn and expand our own thinking as we take turns sharing our thoughts and writing, which we could not do at home, alone. By writing in class, we are sure to get it done, or at least get the process started.

We are never asked to share things that we are not ready to, although sort of by the nature of this work, we end up sharing a lot and finding we have a strong, mutually supportive group.

The main assignment for this week was to fill out one 5″ x 8″ card per day, dedicated to completing the sentence that starts: “What I really want is…” I have gotten past criticizing my every entry. I hear when it starts to sound like a “what I don’t want is…” list. My entries can range from little things that have been bugging me in my environment, such as “What I really want is a new, hand-held shower head,” to somewhat more elusive goals such as “to be clear as much as possible about how to behave so as to be my best self.”

I don’t pay attention to whether it makes sense to put something on this list. I just keep writing. Day after day, many of the same things come up and this tells me they must really be important enough to me to do something about.

Then there are little surprises, like “What I really want is to sing in a Barbershop Quartet.”

The class is provocative, as Joycelyn has many ways to shift our thinking and our understanding about the way we work. This is a great investigation, and I see how exposing it all to light will help us make a difference in our “status quo,” even if we sometimes drag our feet in the process.

Fortitude: Don’t Leave Home Without It

April 28, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell 4 Comments

Fortitude is the mental toughness that keeps you going when the going gets tough. Fortitude helps you deal with adversity, overcome obstacles, and keep on keeping on instead of giving up. If you’re going to take on any kind of a challenge, you’ll need a heavy dose of fortitude.

Fortitude is kind of an old-fashioned concept and isn’t too popular in a lot of circles. Acknowledging the need for it implies that you’re likely to face difficulties, that things won’t always—or ever—go smoothly or quickly or the way you want them to. Further, it implies there’s value in being able to overcome and learn from the problems that beset you rather than, say, caving in, blaming others (or bad luck), or throwing a temper tantrum.

There’s an interesting correlation between fortitude, expectations, and success. The people who have succeeded in accomplishing what they set out to do generally expected to succeed. But they also expected it wouldn’t be easy. People who expect success to come easily aren’t prepared for the difficulties and even setbacks they encounter. They tend to quit and to blame the circumstances instead of recognizing their own lack of fortitude. It just wasn’t in the cards.

Unpacking this single word exposes all kinds of great qualities, including:

Strength
Courage
Endurance
Determination
Resilience
Perseverance

Fortitude isn’t showy. It’s an inner strength that rests on a belief in yourself and in what you’re doing. It doesn’t mean you don’t have doubts; it just means you don’t give in to them. It doesn’t mean you don’t get tired or temporarily discouraged; it just means you take a break and then get back to work. It doesn’t mean you don’t feel like quitting; it just means you stay the course instead.

Whether or not System 1 (your unconscious) will help you or hinder you in situations requiring fortitude depends on whether it sees what you’re doing as a mater of survival or as a threat to your survival. But System 1 isn’t really the place to look for mental strength or toughness. You have to use System 2 (the conscious part of your brain) to override fatigue, fear, uncertainty, temporary defeat, setbacks, and obstacles. If you’re clear about what you want–and why you want it–you can use your brain to keep you on the path to achieving it.

I put fortitude at the top of my list because without it, you’re hamstrung before you even begin.

The Self-Serving Bias

April 26, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell 1 Comment

It’s fascinating to explore the effects of cognitive biases on our behavior. Here’s a short video that explains the self-serving bias.

WHEN You Choose Can Impact WHAT You Choose

April 24, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell 2 Comments

People tend to favor maintaining the status quo to such an extent that it’s a recognized cognitive bias, one of many systematic distortions of thinking we’re prone to. The status-quo bias goes hand-in-hand with the loss-aversion bias, which leads us to pay more attention to what we might lose than to what we might gain. The status quo often feels less risky, whether or not it actually is.

It stands to reason, then, that when faced with making a choice between an option that maintains the status quo (the default option) and an alternative option, we’d be more likely to choose the default option. And we are—but only if we make the choice immediately. If we delay making a choice that we could have made immediately, we’re much more likely to choose the alternative option.

There have been a number of studies over the past 25 years, all of which show the same results. Simply delaying making a decision we could have made immediately decreases the likelihood we’ll choose the default option. It doesn’t matter what the options are or which option, if either, is the better choice. Delay itself casts doubt on the default option.

Failure to Choose

This isn’t hard to understand. If we could have made a choice immediately, then why didn’t we? The know-it-all interpreter—or explainer—inside our head has an answer for this, as it does for just about everything: obviously there’s some doubt as to the appeal of the default option. Otherwise, based on the status quo bias, we would have chosen it immediately.

It also turns out that being in a state of doubt about something that is completely unrelated to the choice at hand can have the same impact on our choice. Doubt, in general, influences us to choose the alternative option rather than the default option.

Delay and doubt are factors we should take into consideration when we’re faced with making a choice between a default option and an alternative option. The conventional wisdom is that taking time to make a choice leads to making better choices. That seems reasonable, but it isn’t entirely accurate. Yes, delay has an effect; it’s just not the effect we may have attributed to it.

If we’re aware that delay tends to make the default option seem less appealing, we can factor that in when choosing when to choose. We can mitigate some of the effect of delaying choice just by knowing the effect is there.

You always have a choice.

Failure to Choose

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