Psychology Simplified Regarding Our Blindspots

There are many quirkish features to the way we are wired up, cognitively speaking. You must have mislaid a letter only to find it where you have looked five times! And I bet you have lost your car keys only to find them just where you left them! The latest lost and found item to test our sanity is our mobile phone! How easy it is to mislay that: then look for it and not see it right under our nose! But there is an explanation!

Mislay your keys or your phone and what happens on the back of that realisation? We tell ourselves with conviction that we have lost them. Most likely, there is our other voice within trying to convince us lamely that we have merely mislaid them, But the trouble is that it is not strong enough and gets shouted down by the voice asserting we have lost them.

What then would happen if we were to suddenly find them, remembering we have convinced ourselves that we have lost them? And we’ve done more than that! Now our head is fast filling with the realisation of the inconvenience and problems resulting from the inevitable loss!

What ever would happen if we found them right now? Wouldn’t we feel pretty foolish, because self-evidently we hadn’t lost them when we were certain we had?

So why is it we can we look in all the places we could have left them, not see them, only eventually to find them staring at us in one of those self-same places? Aren’t we all guilty sometimes for even feeling convinced that someone must have slipped them back there - when we weren’t looking - just to make us feel more foolish still!

But foolish or not, why did we have this blindspot in the first place? How could we have actually looked straight at the very lost item on each search and still not seen it?

The reason is depressingly simple - as well as disturbingly revealing on how we are wired up.

What happens is this: first, the keys we don’t have; next the dominant voice tells us we have lost them; then the subconscious part of our brain accepts the message unquestioningly and does its utmost to convince our conscious mind of that reality; then, worse, it convinces our whole psyche that to find them would not be a good idea, because it would not be believable to us! So quite literally, we don’t see them for looking at them!

So how do we find them eventually?

  

Don’t we tend to stop finally and challenge our current thinking? Don’t we, shake ourselves and tell ourselves as convincingly as we can, that we really can’t have lost them. ‘They must be there somewhere!’

In consequence we now go looking to find them, but without that dominant wish to prove we have lost them! And Hey!Hoe, we find them where we left them!

Oh! You might say, but some just give up and don’t go on that final search. What about them?

Yes I would agree. But it is amazing to me how – after a day or two, or a week, or a month later, many of those who did give up, then find them, you know, this time, when they weren’t looking!

Psychology Simplified on Success and Failure

We can do very strange things around our life’s successes and failures. Yet with the minimum of change and self-discipline, we can transform our lives. And it involves two simple and opposite thinking tricks for it to work wonders for us.

With successes, which can be frequent if we are a champion sports star, but for most of us such achievements stand out in our lives as unique and especially rewarding memories – that is, if we let them stand out at all.

There is a weird affliction surrounding success from which many of us suffer. What are its symptoms?

Memory loss when it comes to remembering the success, when one would have thought we never would have forgotten it. .

Another symptom can be an adopted delusion that the success was a freak or a stroke of luck and therefore cannot somehow be treated as a real success after all. Worse, we can compound this reticence on the odd occasion we are actually reminded by someone about our previous success, by denying it happened, or by seeking to change the subject, lest our embarrassment at the reminder of our being successful gets the better of us - not the other person, who seems to want to talk about it..

Yet, to feed our sense of effectiveness, to enhance and grow our self-esteem, we should be doing the very opposite and reminding ourselves of every success we have had and even every near-success.

We are a very impressionable species, far too easily conditioned in our thinking. Underplay or understate the significance of the successes we have had in our life and effectively we are undermining our own image of ourselves..

We should remind ourselves daily to feed our impressionable minds with positive reminders of how well we did; how we prepared for the success; how we actually achieved the success. This not only sponsors our sense of self-worth once more, but it puts us in a much more effective frame of mind to succeed again tomorrow, next week and next month.

Vital is it, if we are an employer that we benefit from the positive efforts of our staff. Yet it is just as important for them, that we remind each and any one of them of their successes in their work or in their life generally - and keep reminding them.

If we are parents or grand-children, then congratulating children and grandchildren, itemising the traits and elements of their success, reminding them on an on-going basis builds their opinion of themselves.

We should do it with our partners too.

So – in handling success, does this give us a clue on how most of us handle failure? I wish!!

Don’t we forget, play down and change the subject on our life’s failures, just like we do with success? Wouldn’t that be consistent behaviour?

NO! NO! Most of us don’t do that at all. We remember our failures. We burnish their memory onto the very fabric of our minds. We recall the sense of failure we felt at the time, the anguish, the embarrassment, the loss of self-respect.

And we do it repeatedly, often for years after, when we are still alive to tell the tale and had other lesser dramas which tested us but somehow we got through.

So what we do here then? Do we try to blot the whole episode and all its aftermath out of our minds?

It’s “No!” to a lot of that that too!  What we need to do is to forget the failure itself and pledge to ourselves that we will give it no time in our thoughts in our lives ahead. But it is fundamental at the same time that we should focus on how we got over the failure; how we recovered and re-established ourselves.

Better still we should go a stage further and remind ourselves that while success cannot be guaranteed, getting though and past failure can. This is true particularly if we adopt a mentality which makes us search for ways out of a dilemma, rather than wallow in it..

There it is then. Too many of us forget our successes when we should remind ourselves of them constantly – and remind others of their successes. Equally, too many of us waste time and emotional energy reminding ourselves of our failures, when we should blot those memories out by recalling how we recovered from the disappointment and re-established ourselves.

Good luck and don’t hesitate to keep doing this to restore your sense of self-worth and self-esteem.

Becalmed

Psychology Simplied: What is Our Reality & Where Does It Take Us By Sir Gerry Neale

There are a few pretty disappointing and even scary facts about the way we define reality. The first is that while that first sentence of this article implies we all define reality in the same way, the truth is we most definitely do not. We each define our own! And research shows, most of us only see what we want to see to establish our sense of reality.

And it is either helping us move forward or it is holding us back.

Only when, and for some people it is a very big Ask, we each accept full accountability for what we will find in our search for reality, will we get near to what it is. Otherwise we stay nearer to what we want to feel our reality is or to what we want to think it is.

As we stand in a town square or in a city station, we can let our senses take in the scene we are part of. We can and should remind ourselves that what we judge to be going on around us can only be based on what we ourselves recognise or have had some previous experience or knowledge of. Most of what we see and hear is familiar.

To prove the point, imagine yourself in a very different city with a very different culture of values, dress, and behaviour. See yourself in a country somewhere quite unrelated to our own. Much of what we see will seem very odd, even unacceptable.

Our senses tell us it is a very peculiar place. Yet the truth is that the perceived reality of that foreign place is only weird because first we do not know the origins of activities and behaviours we can see acted before our eyes. But second , and far more significantly, we consciously and sub-consciously search our entire memory bank to give us something to compare it with and we can't find it. So what do we do then! We tell ourselves these are very odd people we are amongst!

We ignore the truth that the conclusions we are making are much more a reflection of our own culture where there is no point of reference, than it is a helpful assessment of the place in which we suddenly find ourselves.

We can even feel the activities there to be so odd we want to get back to the "reality" we are familiar with. Alternatively, we can of course prefer what we see and immediately want to adopt this new reality, and forsake our previous one.

Why can this be so important to the way we think and behave?

If we feel that the reality we live in represents a reassuring comfort zone in which we feel happy and safe, then I guess we can just continue to make sure that we do nothing to question or endanger that interpretation of reality.

If on the other hand we want to be shot of that form of existence, to leave it, to shed it as some sort of oppressive cloak over us, then there is a fundamental advantage to be had if we analyse that unpleasant sense of current reality from every angle.

Questioning how things seem to be, however displeasing, and analysing what has caused the unsatisfactory state of affairs to be will soon stir a real change of heart within us.

If we have known in our heart, we are not in a good place and we have visualised a new, different and preferred place which is where we want to be, then a strange and positive desire will be unleashed within us to get to the new place or new life.

Oddly, the more we check out and become crystal clear about our current position, the more our desire intensifies still more into a force of unbridled energy. It seems designed to carry us forward until we arrive in the new guise or new place or role we have fixed in our minds.

To state it simply, the mind cannot hold two contradictory notions or pictures. The strongest mental picture will always win out over the weaker. Having a really vivid picture of where one wants to be is one key part of the motivation puzzle. But critical also is that we should have the clearest picture of the undesirable position we are in.

The mind cannot cope with the contradiction and provides us with the drive to correct it.

Psychology Simplified: Creating Want To’s and Not Have To’s! By Sir Gerry Neale

The Psychology of Want To’s rather than Have To’s is well known to some but still unrecognised by many. Yet it governs not only what we do and how well we do it as adults, but it should dictate the psychology of the response we seek to get from our children and grandchildren, from those we employ or from those we ask to supply us with a service.

If we ourselves really want to do something, then look at what happens to our resolve. Obstacles in our path are minimised in our mind, any inconvenience is tolerated and frustration stifled until we have done it. We drive on wanting what we seek.

On the other hand, if the required task is imposed on us as a “Have To”, then there is a different psychological dynamic which gets to work. Our resilience level drops. We will probably give up the moment we experience any obstacle. We will show a low tolerance level and we will verbalise any frustration we feel in defeatist terms.

This “Have To” Psychology can give rise to some odd cognitive reactions within us. Wittingly or unwittingly we can develop personal psychological strategies apparently to strengthen our goal or mission, but in unhelpful ways for ourselves.

In its simplest form, we can so easily make a list of to do’s and we can notice how we will will gravitate first towards the want to’s before we deal with the “Have To’s, the unpleasant ones which are left until last.!

We can then see so clearly even then, how with the Have To’s that we can continue postponing them. Only when they become an absolutely Have To do will we actually do them.

Acknowledging this feature of ourselves, consciously or sub-consciously, Let’s look at the strangest trick we can play on ourselves. We play it knowing that we enjoy and do most Want To’s. We do it knowing that we can leave Have To’s until the very last minute but they always have to get done.

Supposing we fix a major goal which we know we want to achieve. But at the same time, in our hearts and minds, we doubt we can achieve it if left to our own devices. We let negative thoughts and doubts nibble at our resolve.

So what do we do? What strange perverse game do we play actually against ourselves? Instead of keeping the goal a Want To; Instead of keeping it secret, we tell others who are influential in our lives? We tell figures of some sort of authority over us. Why? Because we sense it will turn the goal from a Want To into a Have To. Why so? Because we know that now they all know, they will make us do it, or at least they will think less of us if we don’t achieve It.
So now we have put this extra pressure on ourselves. And we have thrown all our cognitive machinery into confusion. Our sub-conscious senses our will and determination coming into play for us on the one hand, but on the other hand is presented with a Have To which its natural instinct is to avoid.

Of course certain things in our daily lives have to be done. The secret of enjoying and succeeding in getting something done is converting everything into a Want To and most definitely not a Have To. How do we do that? We do it simply by comparing the preferable results of doing it now with the unpleasant effects of all that can occur if we don’t do it. We work up the preferable effects in our minds doing everything to covert it into a Want To.

The dividends from such psychology can be great if we get really good at doing it. We can use it to encourage children, grandchildren, employees, partners and others in our lives to create and live by Want To’s not Have to’s

Psychology Simplified: Improving Self-Esteem By Sir Gerry Neale

That anyone of us can think ourselves out of the game, unable toi accomplish something and therefore all in all to want low esteem, is not earth shattering. We all know people who have a lower self-esteem than us and ones with higher.

However many of us making any assessment of self-esteem, whether our own or someone else, can make a significant mis-judgment. If they assume that our calculation of our self-esteem level should be the sum total of all our abilities and disabilities and somehow averaged, they would be mistaken.

In fact, each of us is a walking bundle of self-esteem assessments, often arrived at very arbitrarily.

Let me explain. Ask a golfer what his or her handicap is and most will tell you quite authoritively what it is. They are aided of course by a well tried formula which enables them to assess their current performance level or effectiveness

Not many activities have this feature. Suppose we are given a list of activities and asked to assess our effectiveness. What do we do! Actually what we do is to call on our sub-conscious to give us the rating on each one!

Let me explain! If your good at golf your handicap might be 1 to 10, moderate 10 to 20, Ok 20 to 30, and glad to have someone to play with 31 to 36!

So imagine this. You are given a list of 10 activities and ask to give yourswelf a rating (1 being really good and 36 needing a lot of improvement. I would like you to do score yourself in your mind as you read and note what happens. Ready?

Ball room dancing - cooking Thai style – Tennis – Drawing - Writing short stories – Singing - Eating sensibly - Using the Internet - Remembering birthdays and anniversaries - Public Speaking.

Do you notice how some you score highly; others you are pretty down on yourself and the remainder you are damning of yourself. Why? Either because you are good or because you never done them or your parents or teachers told you were wasting your time even trying!

If when we think about it, we can’t do much well then we could assume we should have low esteem to match our assessment of our low overall level of effectiveness. Yet so often our lack of ability is not just because we haven’t done it before, but because frankly we don’t much want to!

But some fascinating scientifically proven facts about us and the psychology behind self-esteem have emerged in recent years.

First, look at something you are good at, and then recall what character traits we employed to get so good at acquiring that skill. Invariably we would find it was something we wanted to do and presented with tuition necessary, we applied ourselves and did it.

So we can rightly deduce that if we get good skill tutorials for another activity and apply our proven character traits, then hey presto we can excel in the new skill too. But it is so much easier if we actually want to. (See another article I have written called The Psychology of Have-to’s and Want to’s.)

The consequence is, just we have skills now, apply ourselves in the same way to new skills and up will go our self-esteem.

One final feature of this is worth mentioning on the psychology behind self-esteem. A scholarly book by Albert Bandura, an eminent Psychologist called “Self Efficacy” and published in 1997 (ISBN No 0 -7167 – 2850 – 8 ) would turn any reader into an expert on psychology of self-esteem and self-efficacy.

But interesting proof is recorded in the book. Whether or not we have the ability to carry out a certain task to a certain skill level, it seems that if our self esteem tell us that we can do it well and a prior test says we cannot, we still do it to our assessment. But the contrary is true too. Assess ourselves low when objective testing suggests we should success, then low self esteem wins again!


Sir Gerry Neale has lectured and trained under-graduates and graduates at the University of Westminster in cognitive thinking and has mentored courses for corporate strategic planning and how to position the organisation’s and the individual’s thinking in relation to them. He has conducted counselling and life coaching programmes with individuals in person and on-line.