Don't Believe Everything You Think: The 6 Basic Mistakes We Make in Thinking

When we believe everything we think, we commonly make these mistakes:

Mistake #1: We remember the bad feelings we have about experiences, and forget the good facts.

We prefer stories to statistics. Even a bad story is preferred over great statistics, and this shouldn’t be surprising. We’re social animals, so whatever seems to connect us to others will have a bigger impact than cold, impersonal numbers. This leads us to making decisions based upon a single story which may not be representative of larger trends while ignoring the statistics that tell us about those trends.

Mistake #2: We seek to confirm what we know is wrong about ourselves, find the conformation and believe it, and ignore the good things.

We seek to confirm, not to question, our ideas. Everyone wants to be right and no one wants to be wrong. This may be the primary driving force behind the fact that when people look at neutral evidence before them, they almost invariably focus on what seems to confirm what they already believe while ignoring what might count against their beliefs.

Mistake #3: We struggle to believe the impossible to be possible.

We rarely appreciate the role of chance and coincidence in shaping events. Odds are that any randomly chosen person has no idea how odds, chance, and randomness affect their lives. People think that unlikely events are very likely while likely events are very unlikely. For example, people forget how large the numbers around them are — an event with a million to one odds against it will happen given a million tries. In New York City alone, this means that several such events could happen every day.

Mistake #4: We don't have an accurate view of the good work we do.

We sometimes misperceive the world around us. We simply don’t perceive things happening in our vicinity as accurately as we think or might like. We see things that aren’t really there and we fail to see things that are. Even worse, our level of confidence in what we have perceived is no indication of just how likely we are to be right.

Mistake #5: Although it is important to accept responsibility for self, it is important to not take responsibility for things that are not ours to own.

We tend to oversimplify our thinking. Reality is a whole lot more complicated than we realize. Indeed, it’s more complicated than we can deal with — every analysis we make of what goes on must eliminate lots of factors. If we don’t simplify, we’d never get anywhere in our thinking; unfortunately, we often simplify too much and thus miss things we need to take into account.

Mistake #6: We believe what we think!

Our memories are often inaccurate. To be fair, this isn’t a mistake because we can’t help the fact that our memories are unreliable. The real mistake is in not realizing this, not understanding the ways in which our memories can go wrong, and then failing to do what we can to make up for this fact.

Mike's lesson today is.... don't believe everything you think!

Find out more about Mike at http://www.reachfamilytherapy.com/

Encopresis and Enuresis in Stress Disordered Children

This is an excellent article. Mike

Encopresis and Enuresis in Stress Disordered Children

Find out more about Mike at www.reachfamilytherapy.com