Two Powerful Ways to Create Better Beliefs
One of the meta-moves of personal growth and psychological development is to break an old belief and replace it with a more sophisticated one; one that contains the previous belief but also contains more of the truth of the world.
We transcend and include what we used to believe and make it more true, more reflective of reality.
I know of two particularly powerful moves to do that:
Proof By Exception
To prove a belief isn’t true, you actually don’t need to prove a new belief or say what is true. You just need to demonstrate one place where the belief is false.
Here’s one I noticed during the two years when I was immersed in the 12-Minute Method: focusing on helping people take the lessons from that piece of work and build their own small habits that, over time, create something magical.
Occasionally I’d hear something like this: that’s all well and good, but I’m just not someone who can be that diligent.
That sounds sensible.
We know there are some people to whom discipline seems to come much easier.
We know in fact, from research, that conscientiousness seems to be one of the ‘big five’ psychological traits that vary across humans.
But it is a very black and white story and wherever there is black and white, likely there is a belief that can be transcended and included in something more true.
The world is too complex for black and white.
Here’s how I would break the black-and-white certainty of that belief:
Do you brush your teeth every day?
(Of course there are some people who don’t, but in that case their problem is really likely to be their teeth in ten years, not whether they can create a good writing or exercise habit.)
Proof by Scales
Stories of certainty happen elsewhere, too.
A speaker on a leadership programme I facilitated was once talking about managing his email and saying No as tools to get more done. A participant on the programme complained that this was a man talking and essentially implied that it was easy for a man to be like that, but not for a woman.
Now, again, there seems to me to be some truth there. In fact, the same Big Five psychological traits, for example, seem to show that on average men are more ‘Disagreeable’ than women, and that’s the kind of trait you need to just ignore emails for a few days or kindly say No to someone.
And, the participant had a simple, black-and-white story. I have to say I wasn’t sure what I was going to say if it came back to me and so I was relieved that the speaker gave a beautiful response.
He said, ‘Yes, there could be some gendered things here. But what I know is I used to be worse at this, and now I’m better.’
He gently opened up possibility: it may be more difficult for you than for me, but my ability at this isn’t fixed, and so I suspect yours isn’t either. And wouldn’t you rather be a little better at this?
Using a scale to remind us that it isn’t as simple as the binary Yes or No, Black or White, again invites us to transcend and include an old belief.
The phrase transcend and include comes from the philosopher Ken Wilber, and the first time I was really aware of someone using Proof by Scales was in his book, A Brief History of Everything.
He broke for me the belief I had that it was sensible to believe that all life has equal value.
This felt so completely true then and was so completely broken by Wilber that I almost can’t remember why I believed it. But I can remember the he broke it, which was essentially this:
If you had to kill an ant or a kitten, which would you choose?
And there’s really only one choice there.
That opens up space: suddenly it is impossibly clear that not all life is equal. I don’t even need to know why or how the scale works to know that I have a new belief that is more true.
We can go further: probably I’d kill a kitten over a human. Even a chimpanzee over a human. But would I kill five chimpanzees or Adolf Hitler?
Gets interesting, eh?
But what is most interesting is that no longer do I believe that all life is equal. In fact, that is so obviously too simple.
Even without knowing how to scale the value of a life, I now have a belief that more closely fits the truth of my experience.
So beware your black and white thinking.
And, where you can, break open your beliefs.
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This is the latest in a series of articles written using the 12-Minute Method: write for twelve minutes, proof read once with tiny edits and then post online.
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