Overcoming Cognitive Dissonance

"Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”

Martin Luther King, Jr.

In 1956, Stanford University psychologist Leon Festinger heard about a group of doomsday cultists who were predicting that the Earth would be destroyed by aliens at midnight on December 21st of that year. Festinger and his students decided to infiltrate the group and covertly study what happens to people when their strongly held beliefs are disproved. What he discovered lead to the powerful and life enhancing theory of Cognitive Dissonance.

So what did happen, in the minutes and hours after midnight, when the prophesied destruction and the predicted appearance of alien spacecraft to save the faithful didn’t occur?

Initially there was shock and disbelief by the members of the group; many had left jobs, colleges and spouses to prepare to escape on the flying saucer supposed to rescue them. Within hours however, people began to deny they ever believed in the doomsday prophecy. They were saying things like “I didn’t really believe it, I was just going along for the adventure.” Or, “Because of our strong faith, the aliens chose to save the planet”. Basically, they said and thought anything other than the truth which was that they’d all been duped.

Based on this research and thousands of subsequent laboratory and real-world studies, Festinger posited that the unconscious mind does not like what he called ‘dissonance’ and will do anything to remove it. Dissonance is the disagreeable feeling we get when faced with mismatching cognitions or beliefs. Our mind likes harmony and congruence between our thoughts and beliefs and will utilise a number of unconscious strategies to remove cognitive dissonance. The tension of cognitive dissonance leads people to change either their beliefs and attitudes or their behaviour.

The importance of this is that it leads people to denying reality and deleting or distorting their cognitions and perceptions. Cognitive dissonance can be incredibly life denying if it leads to denial of reality and un-sane distortions or behaviours. Of course, cognitive dissonance is like any tool or process, it can be used positively or negatively.

For example, you can use cognitive dissonance and the unconscious mind’s response to it to assist you in a life enhancing way to positively align your thoughts, values and behaviour. However, when cognitive dissonance occurs outside your conscious awareness to minimise your life and lead you into ignorance then it is a dangerous enemy.

The key to using cognitive dissonance constructively is to be aware of what are known as ‘Dissonance Signals’ and track for them in your life. When you notice them, you need to pattern interrupt the typical dissonance removal strategies and replace them with more useful strategies and behaviours. To do this you need to know about Dissonance Removal Strategies and your own Dissonance Signals.

Typical Dissonance Removal Strategies

There are a number of unconscious strategies that people’s minds normally use to remove cognitive dissonance.

• Avoidance – people avoid information that is likely to lead to dissonance
• Distortion – people delete and distort facts and beliefs to reduce dissonance
• Confirmation – people are attracted to or perform selective bias on information that confirms or bolsters their cognitions
• Reassurance – people look for reassurance from others that their cognitions are correct and ok
• Re-valuation – people change the importance of existing and new cognitions to reduce dissonance

You should also note that research has shown that the more effort and time invested in a decision or the forming of a belief, the larger the potential dissonance created if mismatching evidence is discovered. Therefore, the more important the outcome the more likely your unconscious mind is to perform the above strategies. For example, if you purchase a low cost item, you are unlikely to experience buyer’s remorse. However, for an expensive item that you spent a lot of time evaluating, you are more likely to experience buyer’s remorse and therefore more likely to go seeking confirmation and reassurance after the purchase.

By being aware that your evolved animal brain doesn’t like negative change, that it doesn’t like things that don’t match, you can begin to transcend this potentially un-useful pattern. The facts are our friends and knowledge is power. Denying reality and ignoring facts just because the evolved patterning system of the brain desires congruence, is dangerous and crazy. Use the following success strategy to learn about and track for cognitive dissonance signals and then support yourself in facing reality, in looking at all the facts and evidence. Don’t let your unconscious mind seduce you into the enemy of ignorance. Instead, build life enhancing patterns in your life of overcoming cognitive dissonance and using valid, valuable feedback and knowledge to gain greater happiness and meaning in your life.

Thinking Tools:

The facts are our friends!

Success Strategy – Tracking Cognitive Dissonance

1. Remember a time when you experienced cognitive dissonance. A time when you were faced with facts that challenged one of your beliefs, or a time when your behaviour didn’t match your values or self-concept. Role-play and re-live that situation. Fully access what you were feeling then, seeing then, hearing then and thinking then. Totally associate into re-living the experience now. Once you are totally in the dissonance state, track for and note what feelings you are doing in your body. Track all of the pressures, movements, flows, temperatures, textures etc. of the experience. Many people experience dissonance in the gut region or heart region. Notice also the submodalities of any pictures and sounds. Write these onto a piece of paper for you to remember.

2. Pick two other cognitive dissonance experiences/times and note the dissonance signals for these. You should find that the three experiences have similar signals and components.

3. Determine what the main indicators are for the state of cognitive dissonancing. Think about how you can now remember the signals so that in the future you will know when you are doing dissonance and be able to become more aware of your own unconscious processes.

4. Think about what you can do to overcome cognitive dissonance in a positive way, without giving in to it. What can you say to yourself? What can you do to support pushing through the dissonance to face reality and not deny it?

5. One very powerful way to overcome dissonance is through humour. By laughing at the dissonance feeling, by seeing it as humorous, you can shift your cybernetic loop to one of positive feelings. Anything that helps you overcome the negative emotions of dissonance will help you push through and stop the typical dissonance strategies.

6. Finally, by being aware of the possibility of cognitive dissonance and knowing your dissonance signals you can float above the dissonance feelings by just acknowledging them and telling yourself “Oh, that’s just cognitive dissonance – I can ignore and transcend it, it’s just an animal response, I’m better than that!”

Well, there you are, a quick primer on the powerful process of Cognitive Dissonancing. I hope you found it interesting and useful. It can be truly life enhancing to be able to track for and control dissonance in your life, your mind and your world.

Want to learn more, get a copy of my book: Avoiding the Enemies to HAPPINESS!

life enhancing thoughts and wishes,

Grant

Appreciating your Life

"Joy has nothing to do with material things, or with man's outward circumstance... A man living in the lap of luxury can be wretched, and a man in the depths of poverty can overflow with joy.”

William Barclay

In this week’s post, we continue to explore ideas and distinctions for overcoming patterns of greeding and for ‘wealthing your life’ with true inner and outer wealth.

Accepting and appreciating your self

According to the father of Cognitive Psychology, Dr Albert Ellis, psychologically healthy people are usually glad to be alive and accept themselves simply because they are alive and have some capacity to enjoy themselves and appreciate their lives. “They refuse to measure their intrinsic worth by their extrinsic accomplishments, materialistic possessions and by what others think of them.”

This ability to appreciate your life circumstances and situations is a life enhancing adaptive coping strategy. It helps you overcome obstacles and buffers you against greed, stress and difficult life circumstances.

Sometimes patterns of greeding are a futile attempt to cope with stress or problems in life – “when the going gets tough, the tough go shopping” syndrome. But as we’ve seen in previous blog posts (e.g. Overcoming the hedonic treadmill), the satiation of desire never feels as good as the desire itself, leading to a vicious cycle of wanting more and more. Alternatively, by accepting and appreciating your self and your life and focusing on gratitude and appreciation you can overcome the life denying enemy to happiness of greed and selfishness.

The Blessings of Gratitude

Dr. Robert Emmons, a psychology professor at the University of California-Davis has spent the last decade studying gratitude. His research has shown that people who regularly practice grateful thinking are more than 25 percent happier, suffer lower levels of stress, are healthier and even sleep better. And I think you'd agree that these are all incredibly life enhancing things.

The practice of gratitude has also been found to be incompatible with negative emotions, and can inhibit feelings of envy, bitterness, anger, and greed. You simply can’t do greeding and other negative emoting while focusing on gratitude and appreciation. The expression of gratitude also stimulates moral behavior, such as kindness and helping, and increases social bonding.

What can you do?

So to increase gratitude in your life, use the easy and very beneficial Positive Psychology exercises covered in earlier and upcoming blog posts. For instance, make a practice of counting your blessings via a daily Gratitude Journal. In this process you write 3 or more things each day that you feel blessed with in life and really savour and appreciate them. Keep it beside your bed and fill it in each evening before sleep. Review it each morning.

Or use a Gratitude Rock or Item as a trigger to remind yourself to remember things you feel grateful for. I use a small beautiful rock I found on my favourite beach. I’ve placed my Gratitude Rock on my kitchen bench and every time I see it, I make a habit of using it as a reminder and trigger to think of something I truly appreciate about my life. It’s such a life enhancing thing to do, it feels great and I highly recommend it.

You can also send Gratitude Letters, emails or messages to those who have helped you and you appreciate. Just imagine how life enhancing receiving an unsolicited message of gratitude or appreciation will have been for one of your friends, family, mentors, colleagues or loved ones. And the wonderful thing is, giving gratitude has as much benefit and positivity for those who send it as for those who receive it.

Inner Wealthing - A spirit of generosity

In a sense it’s about creating and evoking a spirit of joy and generosity in your life and your interactions with others. There’s always something or someone you can feel grateful for or towards.

Generously celebrate your blessings, savor them and focus on the positives in your life. Even in the midst of the worst of life’s challenges, you can always choose to place your focus on past blessings and future possibilities. And truly, isn’t that incredibly life enhancing!


Awareness Questions – Savouring Gratitude

Ask Yourself:

• What are the blessings in my life? Who and what can I show appreciation for?
• What positive aspects of my life and my self can I fully savour and appreciate?
• How can I focus more on the delights and abundance of the simple joys in my life?

with appreciation and joy,

Grant

Savoring your life

"We've been raised to compete, to want more! More! More! It's a way of life. It's about greed.”

Sandy Duncan

Greed, excessive materialism and hedonism are addictive behaviours that are definitely not life enhancing and can destroy inner peace and happiness. We are challenged daily by a world that encourages and supports these addictions. They’re insidious and deceptive. And once you’re on the treadmill of escalating desires, it’s not easy to get off.

By understanding the natural processes that lead to these destructive emotions and behaviours, you can learn to control your desires and re-balance your life. Happiness is created, not by satisfying greed, but by truly savoring and appreciating what you have and do in life. True wealth involves more than money and true joy needs more than the satisfying of desires.

Addiction to Greed

It’s becoming exceedingly obvious we live in a world filled with selfishness and greed. The evidence surrounds us. Take a look at the state of the world! The media is filled with stories and images that are testament to the greed that has stealthily overtaken society.

We are living well beyond our means. The planet cannot support so many humans living such rapacious lives. We are destroying our world and our future. Our economy is in massive disarray. Our ecosphere is in massive decline. We are raping our world in the name of greed, desire and avarice.

This has all come about due to the craziness and un-sanity of following an economic model of infinite growth in a finite system. Yes, an infinite growth model… For hundreds of years our society, politics and economics have been managed using a year on year growth imperative. Our businesses and financial systems have been measured and directed by expectations of year on year growth – that’s growth on previous growth.

This is an infinite growth model. It relies on exponential growth, of continuous and never ending expansion on top of previous growth. And as we are now experiencing, it is unsustainable. We live in a finite world. We cannot keep digging and siphoning up limited resources and expect that to continue forever. It’s unsane!

And I’m sure I don’t have to convince you of that… However, we may have more of a challenge getting you to see your own addictions to personal patterns of greed, desire and selfishness that are feeding this unsane system and are ultimately so life denying.

Why is that?

Because many of these patterns, the very patterns that have created our current world issues, are naturally evolved and inbuilt propensities. They are normal. And in controlled amounts they’re even useful and appropriate. They have largely driven the successes we all enjoy and are highly valued in society. But they’re also insidious, addictive and lead naturally ever onwards to more and more and more of the same.

So while en-masse and globally they are now evidenced as crazy and destructive, in your own life they’re often still accepted, overlooked or even applauded. Tracking and changing these insidious greed and selfishness patterns can be challenging.

The first step of course is awareness. You need to be aware of the patterns and processes of ‘greeding’ in your life. The next step is to interrupt the patterns. Then finally and continually you need to practice emotions and behaviours that oppose these negative greed patterns and inoculate yourself against them.

The biology of greed

The primitive emotion-driven biological circuits of your brain become intensely aroused when you anticipate greed behaviours.

Research at Stanford University has shown that anticipation and desire for money during behaviours such as financial investing and gambling cause the same areas of the brain to activate as those responsible for sexual desire. In one study, the brains of young adult men were scanned with magnetic resonance imaging while they viewed sexually arousing pictures and also when they made risky financial decisions. The study found the same areas of the brain light up during financial gambles as during sexual desire.

This is something to be aware of: Greed utilises many of the same biological circuits as hunger and sexual desire. Greed feels good. It’s quite an insidious trap.

The other important thing to note about the biology of greed is that satiating desire does NOT feel as good as the greed itself. One study found that the hot state of anticipation cools down as soon as you gain the financial reward, yielding lukewarm satisfaction.

As Jason Zweig, author of the book ‘Your Money and Your Brain’ describes it, "Making money feels good, all right; it just doesn't feel as good as expecting to make money. In a cruel irony that has enormous implications for financial behaviour, your investing brain comes equipped with a biological mechanism that is more aroused when you anticipate a profit than when you actually get one".

Contentment versus Greeding

According to the Dalai Lama, “The true antidote of greed is contentment” and a reliable method to achieve inner contentment is “not to have what we want but rather to want and appreciate what we have” (The Art of Happiness by Dalai Lama and H. Cutler).

These deep and ancient insights from Buddhist philosophy have been recently supported by research in Positive Psychology. The studies show that savoring and appreciating what you currently have can significantly increase levels of joy and happiness.

Savoring involves relishing and paying special attention to the pleasurable and meaningful things and events in your life. It’s about truly appreciating and celebrating your experiences, including those occurring in the present, those that are now fond memories and those you are looking forward to with positive anticipation.

The studies also show that savoring positive experiences is correlated with a greater sense of well being, increased happiness and better physical health – All great life enhancing benefits and wonderful antidotes to greeding!

By shifting your attention to a focus on contentment, you’ll have broken the vicious spiral of wanting more and more. You’ll have allowed your multi-mind to experience and enjoy the life you have right now. You’ll overcome the enemy to happiness of greed and never-ending desiring.

Remember also that the mind/body is a patterning system, so the patterns you put into your mind and life create the patterns of results you get back from life. I liken the practice and focus on savoring and contentment to the Native American story about the wise grandfather talking to his grandson. He tells the young boy we all have two wolves inside of us struggling with each other. The first is the wolf of peace, love and kindness. The other wolf is fear, greed and hatred. "Which wolf will win, grandfather?" asks the young boy. "Whichever one you feed" is the thoughtful reply.

So make sure you feed the life enhancing patterns you want in your life, and stay tuned for more ideas and distinctions in up-coming blog posts on ‘Wealthing your life’.

"The doors we open and close each day decide the lives we live.”

Flora Whittemore

Want to learn more, get a copy of my book: Avoiding the Enemies to HAPPINESS!

life enhancing thoughts and wishes,

Grant

Mirror Self-Awareness - Self image, Self talk and Self esteeming

The Guy in the Glass

 

When you get what you want in your struggle for pelf,

And the world makes you King for a day,

Then go to the mirror and look at yourself,

And see what that guy has to say.

For it isn't your Father, or Mother, or Wife,

Who judgement upon you must pass.

The feller whose verdict counts most in your life

Is the guy staring back from the glass.

He's the feller to please, never mind all the rest,

For he's with you clear up to the end,

And you've passed your most dangerous, difficult test

If the guy in the glass is your friend.

You may be like Jack Horner and "chisel" a plum,

And think you're a wonderful guy,

But the man in the glass says you're only a bum

If you can't look him straight in the eye.

You can fool the whole world down the pathway of years,

And get pats on the back as you pass,

But your final reward will be heartaches and tears

If you've cheated the guy in the glass.

The Guy in the Glass by Dale Wimbrow, 1934

Believing in yourself

Self-believing and self-esteeming are such vital and life enhancing skills and unconscious competencies that I think it's definitely worthwhile exploring them in today's post and sharing with you a powerful technique, backed up by neuro-science, for how to do greater self-esteeming.

In NLP, we know that 'self-belief' and 'self-esteem' are not 'things' that you have... those words are nominalisations (disguised verbs) for processes and skills that you do! You don't have self-esteem, instead you do self-esteeming. And the processes of self-esteeming and positive self-imaging (which are linked) have a structure and can be learned and improved.

The first thing to know is that the more you do positive self-believing and self-esteeming, the easier and more streamlined and automatic the process becomes. You are re-patterning your heart, gut and head brains.

At first, only your head brain gets it, but over time the heart and gut brains come into certainty and alignment with your new inner knowing, and when you feel it deep in your heart and gut, you know you'll be able to do great self-esteeming for the rest of your life, effortlessly. In esoteric traditions this is called 'centering yourself'.

Mirror Self-Awareness - the power of the mirror

Research in the neuro-sciences has shown that the process of self-awareness is mediated by the pre-frontal lobes in your head brain, and that looking at your self in a mirror and talking and reflecting on your self increases activity in the pre-frontal lobes. Negative emotionality on the other hand is mediated by the limbic system and the amygdalae, which are much more primitive structures of the brain closely aligned with autonomic fight and flight responses.

So, by looking at yourself in a mirror and reflecting positively out loud about your self and your positive outcomes and goals, you cause your brain to switch into much more positive and creative pre-frontal activity. And in doing this you also interrupt any negative or limiting emoting patterns. As you do this, you also send powerful messages to the heart and gut brains, and bring your autonomic nervous system into coherence, harmony and balance.

In addition, when articulating out loud about positive emotional aspects of your self, it is virtually impossible to at the same time do negative internal dialogue or negative self-talk. So this technique guarantees you are pattern-interrupting any negative or limiting patterns of selfing.

There are many components to the connected skills of high self-esteeming, positive self-imaging and supportive self-talking, and we can't cover them all in one blog post. However, the technique that follows is so incredibly simple yet amazingly powerful, that as you do it, you'll be positively surprised with the results. The key is to do it repeatedly over a number of weeks to build an unconscious part (an unconscious competency) that will continue to do the positive self-imaging and self-esteeming automatically and streamlined outside of conscious awareness.

Doing this exercise consciously for (say) 21 days is like installing a new piece of software in your brain(s). As you put in the effort and work upfront, you reap the life enhancing rewards for the days and years to come. And the results echo and reverberate into the relationships and patterns of your life.

Interrupt any old un-supportive patterns in your life by:

1. Stand in front of a mirror and look yourself in the eyes.
2. With passion, positivity and conviction say positive things about your self, your life, your goals and outcomes out loud to your self.
3. Each day, as part of your morning and nightly routine, develop a habit of looking at yourself in the mirror, repeating the following self-affirming statements –

• I give myself permission to love and approve of myself
• I deserve to take care of myself, I do take care of myself
• It is okay to love and accept myself
• It is okay to think well of myself
• I am worthwhile
• I am valuable
• I accept and love myself
• I do the best I can with my current awareness
• I am courageous and accept responsibility for my thoughts, actions and feelings
• I own my strengths
• (Your Name) you are capable of learning
• (Your Name) you deserve to achieve your outcomes
• (Your Name) you can grow and increase your awareness, skills and strengths
• I accept where I am now and enjoy the process of achieving my outcomes

Create and repeat your own positive and encouraging scripts. Remember to include your strengths and positive character traits. Look yourself in the eyes, deeply, as you say these heartfelt statements and really feel their truth in your mind, your heart and your gut.

And remember:

For it isn't your Father, or Mother, or Wife,

Who judgement upon you must pass.

The feller whose verdict counts most in your life

Is the guy staring back from the glass.

life enhancing thoughts,

Grant

Overcoming the negativity trap

I've been reading a fascinating novel called "Generosity: An Enhancement". It's about a woman ostensibly afflicted with hyperthymia — an excess of happiness. The book poses the question: What if there were a happiness gene and it could, through genetic engineering, lead to treatments that make us all forever positive and filled with an abiding happiness?

It's superbly written and provides a deep social satire of the issues of temperament, social acceptance, human generosity and the scientific commercialization of our genome.

Halfway through the book, one of the characters describes a thought experiment on loss aversion:

"Imagine you are in a deserted parking lot and a twenty dollar bill blows right in front of you. There's no one in sight you can return it to." "How do you feel?"

"Now imagine some time later, you are in a store. You approach the cash register with a purchase, reach inside your pocket for the twenty, and find it's missing. You accidentally threw it away when disposing of some crumpled tissues." "How do you feel now?"

The character Russell feels the difference.

"The freebie was fun; the lost panics him... The bad is crazily out of proportion to the good, and it's the same twenty bucks."

Our brain bias towards negativity

Unfortunately, we have a Brain bias towards negativity. Wikipedia describes it as: "A psychological phenomenon by which humans pay more attention to and give more weight to negative rather than positive experiences or other kinds of information."

This negativity bias shows up in many aspects of our society and our lives.

I've blogged before about how we have more negative words than positive words in the English vocabulary and therefore in our ability to make distinctions and discriminations in our world. It's easier to express yourself negatively than positively.

Negative things are more attention-getting than good or positive things. They affect the Reticular Activating System more strongly. That's why the News is filled with FUDGE (Fear, Uncertainty, Disaster, Greed & Envy). You rarely see news or movies based on positivity, love, kindness and joy. Happiness does NOT make interesting news.

Research on negativity bias has also shown that:

• If a person has a good experience and a bad experience close together, they will feel worse than neutral. This is true even if they would independently judge the two experiences to be of similar magnitude.
• Negative information in the simple form of negation has greater impact and creates more attention than similar positive information in the form of affirmation.
• When put in an environment with a variety of information to pay attention to, people will immediately notice the threats instead of the opportunities or the signals of safety.
• Negativity is 'sticky' - our minds naturally and quite spontaneously tend to fixate on the negative and overlook the positive, especially when under stress.
• Loss aversion is a related process to negativity bias and involves the innate tendency to be more impacted by the negative experience of loss than by the positive experience of gain - we fear loss more than we appreciate gain.

An evolved predisposition


You see, the brain has evolved with a greater sensitivity to negative, threatening or unpleasant news. The bias is so automatic that it can be detected at the earliest stage of the brain's information processing. As an example, studies done by Dr. John Cacioppo at Ohio State University, showed people pictures known to arouse positive feelings (a Ferrari, or a pizza), negative feelings (a mutilated face or dead cat) and those known to produce neutral feelings (a plate, a hair dryer). During this process, researchers recorded electrical activity in the brain's cerebral cortex indicating the magnitude of information processing taking place. The results showed definitively that the brain reacts more strongly to stimuli it deems negative. There is a greater surge and spread in electrical activity throughout the brain. In this way our attitudes are more heavily influenced by bad news than good.

Need to track for and overcome the negativity trap

Knowing that your brain has a bias towards negativity puts you back in control. You have a choice. Millions of years of evolution may have wired in a predisposition towards negativity, but learning and behaviour can change the structure and wiring of your cortex. You can learn new responses. You can build unconscious competencies that change your evolved patterns. You can overcome the negativity trap!

Pattern interrupt and focus on positivity

The key to overcoming the negativity bias is in the following steps:

Knowledge >> Awareness >> Pattern interrupt negativity >> Replace with positivity

Through repeated practice of this strategy you will build new parts in your multi-mind and can overcome and transcend negativity bias. Using this process, you will have stepped out of the trap and created patterns that continue to enhance your life.

Amplifying the positive

You'll notice that over the course of the last year this blog has introduced you to many, many tools for focusing on and amplifying positivity in your life, behaviour and mind. We've explored the power of positive words. We've encouraged skills and a passion for delight, compassion, forgiveness, generosity, savoring positivity, gratitude and appreciation, amongst others. All life enhancing skills. You might like to revisit some of those blog posts to refresh your mind about them.

Start today to notice whenever you are celebrating or amplifying the negative and immediately replace that emoting with a more positive, optimistic and fun loving attitude.

Positivity is life enhancing. Build it as a key focus into every day, all your relationships and every life enhancing moment.


great wishes,
Grant


Positivity: Groundbreaking Research to Release Your Inner Optimist and Thrive

Daily Dose of Positivity: Mental Supplements for Better Health

The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want

We are what we know!

In today's blog I want to introduce you to some powerful and influential thinking tools, and then link and combine them to make what I think is a profound distinction that is probably one of the most fundamental understandings for enhancing life I know.

All knowing is doing

"All doing is knowing and

all knowing is doing"

 Humberto Maturana

According to Dr. Humberto Maturana, an influential Systems Theorist, Biologist and Philosopher, all true knowing involves action. You don’t really know something until you can use it. This is the difference between knowledge and information. Facts are merely data you have available and don’t translate into true knowing and skill until you can use them. The key to wisdom and knowing involves using your knowledge to create positive change in your world.

The importance of understanding that “all knowing is doing” is in ensuring you stay out of the trap of thinking that data and information equals knowledge. Knowledge involves integrated understanding about using data in ecological ways -- about intentions, actions and consequences of the data. Knowledge is powerful, but only when it involves successful doing. The saying “with a little bit of knowledge we’re dangerous” is a reflection on the difference between facts versus an integrated mastery of knowing.

To support happiness and meaning in your life, ensure you put knowledge into action. Apply your learnings to your life and the lives of others. Make a positive difference and integrate your experiences through self-reflection and a focus on feedback and choice.

We are what we do

"We are what we do"

Robert Ornstein

Dr. Robert Ornstein, a noted Psychologist and Neuro-Scientist, makes the point in his many pivotal books, that we become what we repeatedly do. Our personalities and identities are influenced by repeated behaviour and experience. The insight from Ornstein's work and research is that we are made up of a 'multi-mind' of relatively simple and autonomous processes -- a society of mind -- that is created and influenced by our actions and experiences in the world; by what we do. Our actions modify the neural networks of our brains and create lasting 'parts'.

According to Ornstein: "We think our conscious mind, 'the self', is in control, but in fact it is a small isolated part of the mind, sometimes called into play by consciousness, most often on the sidelines. We have many minds that shift into place, and 'we' are not the same person from moment to moment, not the same 'self' at all". Our self is in large measure generated by what we do and what we learn to do. The import of this deep insight is that we need to be careful what we do, since behaviour alters and influences the mind in lasting ways. We also need to learn to communicate and negotiate with the various parts of our multi-mind in order to guide and direct our lives. I'll blog more about this in coming entries.

Now lets combine and link these thinking tools

If it's true that 'we are what we do'  and 'all doing is knowing and all knowing is doing' then it is an obvious extension that:

"We are what we know"

Read that again... 'we are what we know!'. Surely this is a BFO (Blinding Flash of the Obvious), but let's examine this and it's import in detail, as it has deep links to the notion of Life Enhancing.

Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.

Aristotle

We are what we know!

This statement claims that our identity, our sense of self, who we 'are' is entwined and determined in large measure by what we know. Our knowledge, learning, skills and processes of 'knowing' make us who we are. Our knowledge and knowing changes the structure of our brains and the connections in our neural patterning systems.

Extreme cases such as 'wild children' - feral children who have been brought up by wild animals, or who have been locked away with no human interaction for the first several years of their lives - show how crucial the early years of learning are on the formation of the human self.

According to Wikipedia: "Feral children lack the basic social skills which are normally learned in the process of enculturation. For example, they may be unable to learn to use a toilet, have trouble learning to walk upright and display a complete lack of interest in the human activity around them."

The evidence shows that wild children are never able to be fully integrated into society or be taught and socialised to become 'normal'. As we grow up, in the normal social and cognitive world of our society, we learn what and how to act and operate. We learn norms of behaviour and appropriate responses. We learn myriads of skills that form our unconscious competencies. And we learn the stories and roles that define us.

At the heart of this, what makes us human are the underlying processes of languaging and learning - the embodiment and instantiation of knowledge and knowing and how we bring this forth in the world. As the field of NLP highlights, each of us operates, not off the world itself, but off a map or model of the world - a reality tunnel, that is a deleted, generalised and distorted representation of the world.

Through the active process of 'knowing' - exploring and expanding our models of the world - we come to 'be' more, we expand our identity and the scope of operation of our consciousness. We get more life and are able to do more enhanced living through increased knowing.

When looked at from this perspective, it's obvious that 'we are what we know' and therefore knowing is life enhancing. The more you learn and know, the more you can be and do in the world. Knowledge really is power.

"Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”

Martin Luther King, Jr

Ignorance is NOT bliss, Ignorance is Dangerous

Let's for a moment look at the flip side of knowing -- ignorance, self-deception and stupidity. It might seem obvious, but ignorance and stupidity are dangerous. They can kill you. At the very least, they severely impact your success and happiness.

If ignorance is bliss, why aren't there more happy people?

Ignorance is NOT bliss! Ignorance is risky and dangerous. Ignorance can kill you! Lack of knowledge, stupidity and deception of yourself and others are all life denying and serve to diminish meaning in your life.

Some of the dangers of ignorance are:

• You can’t prepare
• You can’t see what’s coming
• It limits your choices and power
• Amplifies consequences
• Leads to more mistakes and greater costs

While most people would agree with this, nevertheless, the majority of people are largely ignorant of the most important things and processes in their life. They don’t know how their mind, brain and body works. They don’t know how they unconsciously generate their own reality and happiness. They don’t know the enemies to their success and happiness. They can’t even articulate their values and core beliefs, let alone improve and refine them for greater success in their life.

Such ignorance means they end up living average and unhappy lives. They make stupid mistakes that cost them peace of mind. They bounce from failure to failure in their relationships, finances, careers and health.

The outcome of this blog

This blog and the skills you’ll gain from following and reading it are designed to combat that ignorance. The outcome of this blog is to bring forth awareness, expansion of knowledge, and the development of new skills and mastery. Knowledge and choice provide power and control. By instilling in your unconscious mind a desire for learning and a passionate move away repulsion from ignorance and self-deception, you will make an incredible and life enhancing difference to your happiness, your life and the lives of those you care about.

Law of Requisite Knowing

Remember the ‘Law of Requisite Variety’ from previous blog entries? This is a mathematically provable theorem from Systems Theory that says that the element that has the most requisite variety or flexibility will be the controlling element of a system. This can be summarised as the thinking tool: Choice = Control. What this means is that if you want more control in life, you have to have more choice and flexibility.

There is a sister theorem to this known as the ‘Law of Requisite Knowledge’. This related theorem states that as the requisite variety and complexity increases in a system, you need more knowledge about which choices to use in order to control the system. What this is saying is that in any system, to gain more control you need both more knowledge and flexibility. You need the choice to act along with the knowledge and skill to act appropriately.

What these theories tell you is that knowledge and skill are incredibly important for control over your life and your environment. Learning and knowledge increase your power in life. Ignorance is dangerous and life denying. Wisdom and knowledge are the keys to creating life enhancing happiness, joy and meaning.

Thinking Tools – Requisite Knowing:

Knowledge + Choice = Control
 

We are what we know!

Knowledge Provides Choice and Power

In summary: To enhance your life, you need to fill yourself with a desire for knowledge, wanton curiosity about the world, and an ever increasing store of wisdom and skill. Knowledge brings freedom, choice and control. We are what we life enhancingly know!

So inspire yourself to learn and do more. Never stop learning! Read more books. Take up short courses. Become a voracious learner. Share your knowledge by teaching others. Write a blog. Research continuously for new and life enhancing knowledge and skills on the internet. Connect with other learners.

Make knowledge, learning, wisdom and understanding the highest values in your life, and they will enhance your life immeasurably.



Want to learn more, get a copy of my book: Avoiding the Enemies to HAPPINESS!

life enhancing great wishes,
Grant

Highly recommended books by Humberto Maturana:

Highly recommended books by Robert Ornstein:

Set high minimum standards

"Life gives you the minimum you are prepared to accept... so set high minimum standards!"

Grant Soosalu

Here's something I'd like to share with you. It's an insight that has made an enormous difference to my life over the years. And whilst it may appear to be a BFO (Blinding Flash of the Obvious) I do think it's worth bringing to conscious awareness and using as a life enhancing thinking tool.

Dreams vs Minimum Standards

You know, it's vital for success to have dreams, goals and outcomes. I've blogged before on the power of dreams and outcomes here. If you want a great life, you absolutely have to aim for the stars and dream BIG dreams. These things are important!

And... there's something that I've discovered in life, and it's encapsulated in the aphorism I coined and shared above. In the everyday cut and thrust of our busy lives, in the paying of the bills, working full time jobs, running a house and family, getting the car, the dog and the mortgage serviced... life tends to give you the minimum you are prepared to accept. If you are willing to work for $10 per hour, guess what... you'll end up earning around $10 per hour. If you are prepared to let people push you around, guess what... you'll end up being stood over and pushed around. It's inevitable.

On the other hand, if you are truly prepared to only accept $200 per hour, to never be pushed around, to really set high minimum standards, then life falls into line and delivers on that. At least, that is my experience and it's backed up by the experience of those I've shared this rule and philosophy with. Every time I've decided that regardless of the outcome, I'm only prepared to accept a certain specific level of income, or particular behaviour or results, then I've amazingly gotten what I've expected and demanded. It almost seems like magic. It isn't of course, there is science and logic to why this works.

Most importantly, the take home message is...

Set high minimum standards in every area of your life!

Why does this work?

I think the reason that this insight is true is due to a number of factors. A key one is the self-fulfilling prophecy effect. Your beliefs and attitudes are expressed non-verbally in your behaviours and communications and picked up by other people who then act in ways that fulfill your unconscious expectations. There is a ton of research from the fields of cognitive and social psychology to back this up.

In one classic experiment, known as 'the late bloomers study', researchers Dr. Robert Rosenthal and Dr. Lenore Jacobson, gave children in an elementary class an intelligence test and told teachers that a small group of these children were unusually clever 'late bloomers', though in reality they were average. The researchers then returned at the end of the school year and tested the same class again, and not surprisingly, the children singled out as intelligent 'late bloomers' had improved their intelligence scores far more than the other children, showing that they had responded positively to the teachers unconscious beliefs and expectations.

"Psychological research shows that beliefs and expectations

are the strongest predictor of the future"

In a more recent example, a group of researchers from Iowa State University examined whether mothers’ and fathers’ beliefs about their children’s alcohol use had cumulative self-fulfilling effects on their children’s future drinking behavior. Analyses of longitudinal data showed consistent synergistic cumulative effects of parent's negative beliefs and these beliefs predicted the greatest degree of confirmatory behavior from children when both mothers and fathers overestimated their children’s alcohol use. The results show that beliefs and expectations really are powerful and send out unconscious messages that have real effects on peoples behaviours over time.

Another factor for why the rule works is that much of life involves negotiation, and people and society tend to be good at working out your bottom line and offering that to you. If you are time pressured or feeling a bit insecure or distracted by all the other things going on in your busy life, then you'll tend to accept the initial offer, or at least, not hold out to get your ideal result. Thus over time you tend to end up accepting and receiving the minimum you are prepared to accept, rather than your ideal outcomes and dreams.

Living an enhanced life

The way I see it, to live an enhanced life, you need to design your life by creating clear and well-formed outcomes, that link to big dreams and inspiring purposes. You motivate yourself by having meaningful outcomes and goals and filling your life with intentions and behaviours that link to your highest values. You also absolutely need to work out what your minimum standards are in every key area of life and hold firm to those. Set in concrete, in your mind, what the minimum standards are that you are prepared to accept in yourself and others. Then stick to them.

Your goals, dreams and outcomes will set the direction for your life. They'll inspire you. Your minimum standards act like a platform and springboard. They'll be the base from which you support yourself to live a wonderful life and achieve your dreams and outcomes.

Your turn

Get specifically clear about what your minimum standards are for:

• how much money you will work for
• what sort of loving behaviour you want from yourself and your beloved
• how fit you'll be, how much exercise you'll do
• what sort of language you'll use both externally and in your internal dialogue
• how you'll spend/invest your time
• how much stress you'll put up with
• how much pampering you want in your life
• how much learning you'll do
• what you'll eat and what body mass index you are happy with
• how healthy you are
• how successful you'll be, by your own definition of success
• how you'll treat your friends and how they'll treat you

The more specifcally you can define what you'll accept and what you definitely won't accept, the more you'll find your life magically improving. You won't even have to negotiate about these things. People will read the messages in your life language and your unconscious responses. Life starts to get better and better as it delivers to your expectations and high minimum standards. And stick to those standards. Don't accept anything less!

"Life gives you the minimum you are prepared to accept... so set high minimum standards!"

Grant Soosalu

Yes, definitely dream BIG dreams and set lofty goals and outcomes; but truly, take the time to clearly and firmly set high minimum standards in your life, you'll find that they are incredibly life enhancing and will support your ongoing happiness and success.

Want to learn more, get a copy of my book: Avoiding the Enemies to HAPPINESS!

life enhancing wishes
Grant


PS Please note that setting high minimum standards is not a recommendation to indulge in perfectionism or to focus on unreasonable expectations and unobtainable standards. Research in Cognitive Psychology has shown that setting unrealistic goals can contribute to depression. So set achievable and obtainable outcomes and high realistic standards.


And here's the inspiring story of Sabriye Tenberken and how she set high minimum standards and goals to achieve her dreams:

My Path Leads to Tibet

The true and very inspiring story of how one young blind woman bought hope to the blind children of Tibet. As Sabriye says in the book "That day was the first of many where I simply refused to take no for an answer. I decided to find some way - there had to be one., I was sure - to help the blind in Tibet. On my own. And today, several years later, thanks to my persistence - or my obsession, you might say - i have developed techniques and methods that facilitate those very studies in Tibetan." Sabriye is a glowing example of someone who refuses to give in and who sets high minimum standards and then sticks to them.