Episode 39 - How to stop confirmation bias from secretly sabotaging your life
This week I look at something that can secretly sabotage your plans to change your life and relationships: confirmation bias.
You'll learn:
what confirmation bias is
why your brain is prone to it
how it can be harmful
how to unearth it (it's often unconscious)
how to rewire your neural pathways towards better biases
Resources mentioned in this podcast:
Visual explainer of confirmation bias:
Podcast Episodes on Black and White Thinking with lots of practical tips that also help with confirmation biases:
The Work of Byron Katie - one of my favourite tools to challenge your biases and paradigms
Full Episode Text
Episode 39 - How to stop confirmation bias from secretly sabotaging your life
Welcome to this episode of the managing the smart mind podcast with Master Certified Coach Else Kramer, a.k.a. Coach Kramer.
This week I’m looking at an invisible barrier that can come between you and your goals.
Maybe you recognise this: you’ve been trying to change something in your life and however hard you try, however much you throw at it, you just can’t do it.
It could be losing weight - it works for a while but once the initial excitement wears off you gain it all back, and then some.
It could be making or having more money.
Sorting out your admin.
Getting less angry and frustrated at work.
You listen to all the programmes, try all the things and yet NOTHING WORKS.
You always find yourself back where you’re started.
Whenever you find yourself in that situation you want to check for a secret saboteur: confirmation bias.
What is confirmation bias?
Interestingly it isn’t even necessarily a bad thing. It’s just your brain being very efficient.
It’s taking one experience and then projecting into the future from that.
Ate a berry and got sick? Let’s avoid those berries from now on.
Makes perfect sense, right?
Yes…and…if left unchecked it can actually wreak havoc with your life.
If you don’t check the little seeds that get planted in your mind before they grow into confirmation biases you can get a very skewed perspective on yourself, other people and the world.
Here’s an example.
Let’s say you had a bad experience in a restaurant with someone who has a moustache. They seemed to purposefully ignore you, brought you the wrong dish, etc.
If the feeling this experience caused was intense enough, your brain is going to try and prevent you from having a similar experience. And it could do that by deciding that people with moustaches cause you to have bad experiences, and should be avoided at all costs.
Now next time you encounter a person with a moustache, you’re already primed to be apprehensive - which doesn’t increase the odds of a pleasant encounter.
Maybe the pattern isn’t reinforced - that’s always a possibility, but let’s say in this case it is. Someone with a moustache spills hot tea over your bag.
Your brain is now pretty much convinced that people with moustaches are bad - and it will start for looking evidence that this is true.
It will start noticing newspaper articles about villains with moustaches. ETc.
It’s constantly scanning your environment for moustached dangers.
And it will build and reinforce neural pathways in your brain that tell you that people with moustaches are very much to be avoided.
Now, this of course is a very unlikely scenario, but I just wanted to paint the picture in a way that is kind of absurd so it will make it easier to understand and recognise the pattern when it arises in more familiar situations.
I love to use the metaphor of tinted glasses - and I’ve created a visual explainer to go with this podcast which you can find in the show notes, so go ahead and download that if you think it might be helpful.
Basically, a negative experience puts some dirt on our glasses. If we have another similar negative experience, the dirt increases, and our experience of the world becomes coloured.
This increases the chances of having similar experiences which will make our glasses even filthier, and so on - until our experience becomes completely coloured, always.
Is confirmation bias always bad?
Not at all - instead of neutral lenses you can also look at something through rose-tinted glasses.
You can tell yourself that all humans are kind and loving, for example. That may not necessarily be a bad thing (although I’ll leave that up to you to decide).
You can tell yourself that making money is easy.
That being alive on this planet is an amazing, and very fun gift.
So confirmation bias can actively be used in a positive way, to massively improve your life experience, and I’ll talk about that in a later episode.
But a negative confirmation bias that you’re not aware of is usually something you want to clear up.
In what areas of your life can confirmation bias show up?
How you think about
Yourself
Your body
Your life
Other people
Money/wealth
The world
etc,
Let’s say when you’re young someone plants the seed of an idea in your mind that you’re unattractive.
As that seed starts to grow, your brain starts to find evidence, and the lens through which you perceive yourself gets dirtier and dirtier so to speak.
And then, with time, that single event can turn into a core story that you tell yourself about your life through becoming a well-established neural pathway.
You now 100% believe that you’re unattractive, and see that reflected around you, find evidence for it in all possible ways.
Different example: let’s say you believe the world is a dangerous place.
Watch the news for a couple of days, and this will be reinforced in a very powerful way.
Before you know it, you will start feeling unsafe.
This makes you want to keep up with local news.
Now you know about all the robberies and homicides in your area.
So fun, right?
If you let this run its course you can easily convince yourself that it’s dangerous to leave your house after dark.
And a third example, going back to money.
If you have taken on the belief that it’s very hard to make money, than that can play out in your brain MAKING IT VERY HARD for you to make money.
Because that’s the way it thinks it should be.
It will look for all the hard ways to make money - and will point out all the ways in which money is hard for you.
How can you uncover your confirmation biases?
If it’s a subconscious pattern, how can you become aware of it?
Well here are a couple of hints.
Think about one specific thing you’d like to be different in your life.
You feel you’re stuck in the same movie, like groundhog day;
You keep trying new things but nothing changes;
You feel stuck and helpless…
Then you’re probably self-sabotaging through a confirmation bias.
Start looking out for blanket statements, like:
People always take advantage of me.
My partner doesn’t care about me.
Rich people are greedy and selfish.
Permanent weight loss is impossible for someone like me.
I’ll never be successful.
These black and white statements are NEVER true - they just show you your confirmation biases.
How changing your biases?
To stay with the glasses metaphor, you want to:
Become aware that you’re looking at this thing through tinted glasses;
Challenge the thoughts and ideas that tint your glasses;
Redirect/flip the script
Keep practising until your glasses are clean or have a more fun colour
I’ve covered awareness above, so now you’ve become aware of a bias that is sabotaging you, how do you get rid of it?
You challenge it.
The simplest way of doing it is through Byron’s Katie The Work - I’ll leave a link to her website in the show notes because she has a very simple and incredibly effective process for doing this which I have been using for over 20 years.
This usually isn’t a pleasant experience because your brain will start to work VERY HARD to hang on to it. It’s invested so much in this belief, after all, it makes much more sense to keep it.
It’s a bit like getting over an ex you’ve invested years in - it takes a while to start shifting into seeing the things that weren’t so great about them.
You also want to check out the Episodes on Black and White Thinking for more tips on how to challenge thoughts.
Replacing the bias
The third step is to choose something new to believe instead
This is where most people make the mistake to simply use the opposite.
They want to go from ‘making money is hard’ to ‘making money is easy’.
Now I’m not saying that’s impossible, but for most people their brain will simply not be on board for such a massive leap.
So instead, take a first small step in the more positive direction, by deciding to believe something like ‘making money can be easy’.
And then find evidence to support THAT belief and reinforce those neural pathways.
And remember, this takes time and repetition.
If you’ve spent years building up these neural pathways it can take a while to reroute them - and that’s ok.
What if you can’t find your saboteur?
Sometimes you can’t see your own confirmation bias because you’re too much in it.
So if you keep running into the same wall and can’t seem to find a way around, hire a professional who specialises in thought work so they can help you break it down.
A coach who helps you manage your smart mind for example.
When you’re wearing a pair of tinted glasses and don’t even realise it, it can be incredibly helpful to get that pair of extra eyes.
Have a beautifully biased week,
Else a.k.a. Coach Kramer
Ready to get some help in managing your smart mind and removing your secret saboteurs? I can help. DM me on LinkedIn, Instagram or Facebook to learn how you can work with me, or email me via podcast@elsekramer.com.
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