Alexander Green is traveling out of the country and immersing himself in the local culture!
So in the next two Liberty Through Wealth columns, we’ll be featuring articles from frequent contributor Dr. Joel F. Wade.
Longtime readers should be familiar with his endearing words and thoughtful perspective…
Keep scrolling to learn about confirmation bias – and how you can use it to increase your awareness and understanding of the world.
– Nicole Labra, Senior Managing Editor
A healthy relationship with the truth is essential for a happy and successful life.
But this is not a simple task…
The ability to see, acknowledge, and accept what’s true – about our circumstances, relationships, strengths and weaknesses, and the challenges we face – is actually much harder than it may seem.
We all have known people in our lives who are smart, self-aware, and curious, but they keep making the same mistakes over and over again.
While it may look obvious to others, that individual doesn’t seem to see the problem at all.
I remember discovering a new approach or technique that seemed to do wonders as a young psychotherapist in my twenties. (I’ve been doing this for a very long time!). All I could see and focus on was the success, and it was exciting.
What I wasn’t seeing was my own confirmation bias. A bias that would minimize where things didn’t work very well – and maximize where they did.
It took some time and experience to see that every approach has its strengths and weaknesses, and every client I work with is unique. What’s helpful for one person may do nothing for another.
We are made for learning and growth. To a significant extent, our success in life depends on increasing our awareness and understanding of the world. Yet we have a tremendous array of biases that color our interpretation of what we perceive, what we experience, and what we think we know.
Don’ get me wrong. These biases are not flaws in our system…
They exist because they are functional. The automatic nature of these functions allows us to live and not be continually overwhelmed with bringing consciousness and willpower into every tiny aspect of our lives.
We generally work very hard to confirm our existing beliefs, stories, and biases because the familiarity we live within gives us a sense of security and constancy. It’s comforting to feel that what we think we know is true, that what we believe is true, and that our sense of the world is true.
Even when it’s not actually true.
By holding tight to the stories we already believe, we can be blinded to essential information and feedback that we need to make our best decisions.
Time for a Reality Check
Let’s discuss a few examples of this in action…
- If our finances aren’t so good, it’s common for us to avoid looking at the whole truth. We’ll tend to fudge things in our mind just enough to avoid knowing the full extent of what we’re facing. In our minds, we’ll take our best month of income and expenses as the norm and avoid looking at the true numbers for all those other months.
- If our behavior is causing problems in our relationships, we’ll tend to deflect and focus instead on what the other people are doing. It’s much easier for us to see the faults and mistakes of others than it is to see our own.
- If our diet and exercise are not healthy, we’ll tend to underestimate how often we eat those double bacon cheeseburgers, while comparing ourselves with people whose diet and exercise are worse than our own. We’ll make a note of the days when we’ve eaten a particularly healthy diet, and gloss over all the many days when we haven’t.
We do this to avoid the anxiety, the regret, and maybe the shame we might feel if we were to look at our situation honestly. Those emotions – particularly shame – are awful. And avoiding them is understandable, but not helpful.
We also do this to avoid confronting just how much we don’t know – because facing the unknown can be a frightening thing.
But in that avoidance, we also deprive ourselves of the ability to solve those problems.
We need a clear perception of information and feedback in order to adjust our behavior. We also need the pain of our negative emotions to fuel our motivation to grow, learn, and change the habits that keep us stuck.
If you spent more than your income and went into debt, it can hurt to feel that – to see how you’re making your future-self suffer and pay for things you’ve already bought and used. But you have to feel it, and see it, so you don’t keep doing it.
If you made an impulsive investment that cost you dearly, you have to feel it and see it, so you don’t lose more money later.
If you learn about new investment principles, you may feel regret that you didn’t learn them earlier – but the regret and learning will save you from additional regret.
This can be terribly painful, but it’s how we learn.
We learn much more from our mistakes and failures, because they show us our blind spots. The key is to be open to learning from them.
And there are always blind spots: knowledge and understanding that we do not yet have… until we do. Then our field of understanding grows, and we can take in more of what had been hidden from us until that point in time.
The more we can lean into this dynamic process, the greater our potential for learning and success.
Accept that of course we all have blind spots, and it’s often painful when we first see them.
Welcome that pain as an ally. It’s there to motivate you to see what you had not seen before, to learn, and to change your behavior.
Approaching our biases and blind spots with that spirit of curiosity and discovery can make the difference between suffering and flourishing. Between failing in the same way over and over, and failing in new ways that expand our knowledge, understanding, and skills.
[Editor’s Note: Joel currently has some openings available for life coaching. Go here to sign up for a free 30-minute initial conversation now.]