Whenever someone talks about having greater success in life, inevitably the first area that needs to be addressed prior to any behavior or action are the strategies to think better. The fact is, we all have destructive thinking patterns that operate outside of our conscious awareness and result in negative outcomes with potentially disastrous consequences for our lives.
We all possess thinking patterns which our brains have adopted based on our past conditioning and experiences. Because our bodies need constant instruction, feedback, and response from our brains in order for us to operate and function in the world and because there are limits to the stimuli that we can be consciously aware of every second of the day, our brains need to handle a lot of stimuli automatically.
So, for example, as you read this, you may be unaware that you fidget in your chair and your body shifts from one position to another. Or maybe you instinctively scratch an itch on your arm. These simple examples highlight how our brains do much of their work to process external stimuli outside of our conscious awareness. Now, there are many reasons that could account for your body moving or for you scratching your arm (not the least of which could simply be habit) but the fact remains that your brain tells your body to act in response to something and your body obeys, often without you knowing it.
In small examples like these, the consequences of such actions are insignificant. I mean who cares if our bodies fidget when we are in a meeting other than the fact that it may be a distraction to the other people in the room if it happens too often. The difficulty lies when these “automatic” responses happen in situations where the consequences hold more weight.
As an example, we typically learn how to deal with conflict from our parents and the environments we grew up in where those conflicts took place. If Dad screamed at everyone when he was mad and mom shushed everyone and sent the kids back to their rooms until Dad “cooled down,” we may have learned that the best way to deal with an angry person was avoidance or to do our best to smooth things out.
Because of that learned behavior, now when we encounter conflict, our brains operate on autopilot and we go into avoidance or smoothing mode automatically. Or, even worse, if we learned that the only way to “win” in conflict was to lash out and be aggressive, this destructive pattern can then become a regular part of our practice when we have conflict in our relationships now.
People who have experienced this sometimes wonder why they simply “tend” toward more aggressive practice even while knowing that type of behavior is ruining their relationships. It’s because past experience and behavioral conditioning have “programmed” their brain to operate in a particular way – be it aggressive, avoiding, or smoothing – before any conscious thought can be brought to bear on the situation. These sub-optimal conflict management strategies contribute to, not only greater difficulties in our relationships, but they also prevent us from learning about ourselves, learning how to deal with conflict in constructive ways, and having more fulfilling relationships and a happier life.
In light of these kinds of thinking patterns and destructive results, it makes great sense to learn how we can think better – how to stop the dysfunction at the start. Here are 3 strategies to start improving your thinking and, as a result, experiencing a better and more successful life.
1. Use Adequate Thinking Maps as Opposed to Accurate Thinking Maps.
The words we use in our everyday language can be thought of as maps that describe the landscape of our reality. Language isn’t just representational. That is, one word doesn’t just represent one thing. Language evolves. Words have multiple nuances of meaning for describing reality. In fact,we “think” in language. As Ludwig Wittgenstein said, the limits of our language are the limits of our world.
Additionally, we readily understand that we don’t have a name for everything that happens in the world. We have words that we use in order to describe events and things but they can never be completely accurate because reality is far more than the words we can use to describe it. Think of this in two ways:
(1) We have a world of things and events, and
(2) We have a world of words that we use to describe the world of things and events.
There’s a difference, in other words, between the “territory” (the world of things and events) and our linguistic maps of the territory (the words we use to describe that world). With this in
Adequate maps (as opposed to accurate maps) are important because the territory isn’t an either-or construct. Language fools us into believing that our descriptions of the world (and the world in general) are complete and static. When we use the word “cup,” for example, it is a “cup” only when we are talking about the word itself. In that sense (in talking about the word“cup”), a cup cannot be a container because the words are not equal. But with the thing itself, the actual object in reality, it can be both cup and container at the same time, and many times it is exactly that.
The object
In his book, How To Develop Your Thinking Ability, Kenneth Keyes Jr. gives this example:
Bob had fished all day without any luck. On his way home, he stopped at the fish market and said to the owner:
“Tom, pick out five of your biggest fish and toss them to me.”
“You mean throw them??,” the owner said.
“Yes, just throw them over to me one at a time so I can tell the family I caught them. I may be a poor fisherman, but I’m no liar.”
The story shows the difference between adequate linguistic maps and accurate ones. While the fisherman can be said to be making a completely accurate and truthful map of reality by saying he caught 5 fish, we all realize that his map is inadequate for describing what actually happened.
So, to think better, learn to use adequate maps for describing reality and avoid accurate maps which, many times, can be misleading.
This is especially true in how we talk to ourselves. It’s easy to use accurate maps which fool us into believing something that isn’t necessarily true. (This is something I talk more about in this article: Should We Tell the Truth).
Employing adequate maps as opposed to accurate maps enables us to see the world better, to communicate more truthfully, and to understand more clearly how much of what we experience is colored by our perspectives.
2. Employ Your Critical Thinking Skills
Critical thinking is an important skill for success in life and we all like to think that we are good critical thinkers, but it’s unfortunately the case that many people tend to suspend their critical thinking when it comes to their own biases and values.
We all have biases that cause us to simply believe what our “people”, our authoritative figures tell us – whether it be media outlets, bloggers, celebrities, or politicians.
Attribution Theory states that we all attempt to attribute causality to the actions of other people. We act as amateur psychologists, attempting to make sense of why people do what they do.
Additionally, we place value judgments on those causes based on our particular biases. When someone who thinks like us does something bad, we attribute their actions to their behavior – “it was a mistake,” “that was an accident,” or “circumstances caused them to do that.” When the situation involves someone on the opposite side of an issue as us, we typically attribute their bad actions to their character – “they’re an evil person,” or “they’re racist.”
It’s the opposite when it comes to good actions. The people like us get the benefit of the doubt and we attribute their good actions to their character, and for the people on the other side, their good actions get attributed to “accident” or just something they did without really meaning it.
As an example, for Democrats, when Trump does something good, he “didn’t really mean for it to happen that way, ”but when he does something bad, “he’s a racist.” This happens on the other side as well and you can read Republican blogs about how either Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer is evil incarnate and even the good things they do are the result, not of their own good character, but of the circumstances created by the Republican who forced it to happen.
The problem with attribution theory for all of us is that it causes us to be more predisposed to believe what our side tells us without thinking critically about what’s actually the truth. Because we think “our people” are good and “they” are bad, we tend to give our side the benefit of the doubt and demonize the other side.
This opens us up to the power of propaganda and that’s something we should all be careful about. It can be difficult to put aside our biases but we must strive to not only examine what the other side says but to be equally critical of our side.
The polarization of the internet already positions each side at the extremes but to think better, we must find ways to critically examine every side – even our own – regardless of our bias and predisposition.
3. Realize the Infinitu de of Knowledge
One of the promises of the internet was that it would usher in an information age where anything we wanted to know would be just a click or tap away. Today, we live in a world of unprecedented access to just about anything we want and the sheer volume of information available to us creates two problems.
The first is what Neil Postman called Information Glut. The vast amount of information, while an incredible benefit, creates a problem – who can know it all?
Additionally, what do we do when authoritative knowledge is contradictory? I mean who do we believe when one medical study says eggs are good for you and the next one says they are bad?
The limited capacity of our own knowledge and the unprecedented information the internet provides can lead us to believe that Google holds the authority and that whoever ranks higher is right (we all know this is not true, I hope).
This very situation has resulted in a “fake news” culture where even authoritative sources are questioned because, with so much information out there, who can we really believe? How anyone really know, in the midst of a glut of information, who’s right and who’s wrong?
The second problem is believing that knowledge is complete. One of the consequences of living in a technological and scientific culture is that “science” and technology have been given a great amount of authority when it comes to what we know and what we believe about reality.
This makes sense. New discoveries and new information open up and give incredible insight into the world around us. But we cannot be fooled into believing that everything we know scientifically today is totally accurate or even complete.
As an example, at one time, the scientific community commonly believed in Abiogenesis or Spontaneous Generation – the idea that organic matter (life) simply arose from inorganic matter. That fleas arose out of the dust and maggots arose out of dead flesh. We look back on that and realize today – on this side of great scientific progress – how ridiculous that idea is.
In light of that, and realizing how many times in the past science has gotten it wrong, we should also realize that a hundred years from now, scientific discovery will continue to progress and some of our most cherished beliefs about life, the world, and the universe may be proven incorrect.
Maybe new elements will be discovered. Maybe new explanations for reality will be proven to be true. Maybe we will discover that there are other intelligences in the universe.
We are thankful for what science has shown us about our world and we should hold our current knowledge securely, but lightly.
In addition to this, we need to realize that NO ONE knows or can possibly know everything there is to know about something. There are authorities on subjects, for sure, but even those authorities disagree on their very area of expertise.
There are incredibly smart people out there who know a lot about things, but these people don’t know everything, even about the area that they know best. No one can.
That doesn’t mean we don’t trust them or believe them when they speak out of their expert knowledge, but we must do so with the understanding that they may be wrong and that new discoveries may prove their theories and ideas incorrect.
We need to recognize the difference between truth and speculation – and there is a difference. Experts construct theories (speculation) about many things. We need to realize when those experts speculate about something – when they theorize something which may be the case (but also may not) and when they provide definitive proven knowledge.
Many times, expert knowledge is treated as truth when it is, in fact, speculation in order to advance an agenda, persuade an audience, or gain power. In situations like this, I find it helpful to realize that if there are equally smart and knowledgeable people on both sides of the issue, then what they are debating isn’t necessarily definitive.
No one knows it all. Not the experts and most definitely not you (or me). So, to think better, have some humility when pontificating on a subject. You probably aren’t the expert and if you are, you should probably realize that there’s more about your area of expertise that you don’t know than what you do. As my professor once said, “any idiot can have an opinion – that doesn’t mean that they know anything about what they’re talking about.”
Conclusion
Thinking is absolutely critical to our success in life. It determines how we act and then, in turn, what happens as a result of our actions. Meta-cognition is the process of thinking about how you think and the first step to thinking better is learning to think about how you think.
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