Five Ways to Embrace Change and Enhance Personal Well-Being at Work & Beyond

“In any given moment, we have two options:  to step forward into growth, or back into safety.” – Abraham Maslow

One doesn’t need to look very far to see how fast our society has been changing. No doubt, we are in an innovative age with technological advances and changing geo-political forces dictating new rules for how we do business, how we communicate, how we obtain and process information, and ultimately, how we organize and plan our lives.  Along with the benefits often associated with change, there can be risks and an uncomfortable learning curve that demands of us patience and mental paradigm shifts.  There are pre-requisite thinking patterns that comprise the extent to which someone is adaptable to change, and they manifest themselves in and out of the workplace.  Considering how many of us have difficulty adapting to change, either at work or due to loss and personal tragedy, it is worth evaluating our relationship to change and identifying ways to improve it!

Adaptability and Our Economy

In this dynamic economy, employees who are highly adaptive to change are in demand.  Indeed, one of the most sought after qualities by recruiters in the 21^st Century is a candidate’s adaptability to change. (1)  To meet this demand, educational institutions and business leaders have been deliberating at a fever pitch in an effort to identify the most effective ways to improve adaptability and the qualities associated with it in the current and future workforce.  (2) Employers don’t want people who simply comply with changes thrown at them, rather, they want people who will initiate changes and provide innovative solutions to problems.  Employers increasingly identify highly adaptable people as those who will advance their success, increase their ability to compete, and drive innovation in our global market. Adaptability is an approach to life that generates success that extends beyond the workplace.  As per research, highly adaptable people have a mindset that positively affects all areas of their life.  (3)

What does a Change Mindset Look like?

People who are highly adaptable to change don’t just “deal with change” as a spectator and “go with the flow”.  Highly adaptable people are strong in a series of other characteristics, such as critical thinking, open mindedness, optimism, self-regulation and empathy. 

Consider all that goes into adaptability as it relates to problem solving. 

• First, problem solvers gathers objective data and decides that change is a desirable course of action.
• They identify a problem to solve, use information to assess the extent of the problem and do a cost-benefit analysis to determine which options increase the probability of fixing the problem.
• In the workplace, this process may encompass analyzing data, seeking opposing viewpoints, assessing the competition and geo-political forces, identifying future market trends and needs, and putting old ways of thinking aside to make room for new and fresh ideas.
• The process entails empathy, being able to see reality from another’s perspective, whether it is future clients, colleagues or the executive team.
• With an opened mind, one can navigate office politics and manage resistance in an effort to perpetuate the changes they identify.
• Additionally, they possess an amount of confidence and optimism, allowing them to handle rejection and drive forward in another direction, finding a new means to advance their goal.
• They regulate their emotions, minimizing distracting emotionally-driven behaviors, allowing them to focus on new ways to advance their goal despite their feelings about the challenges and obstacles they meet along the way.

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Adaptability refers to the extent we use our skills to effectively process information, deliberate how we should or should not respond to it, and the mechanisms we use to reconcile our feelings about the changes.  Our degree of adaptability to change and uncertainty is a symptom of the way in which we approach life in general. The more adaptable we are, the more emotionally resilient we are in the face of experiences others may deem negative.

 Why Change our Relationship to Change?

In response to perceived changes, we often find refuge in predictable routines, habits and patterns of thinking.  While often desirable to do so,  there are times we “over correct” and employ these defenses when change is the most appropriate course of action. A pre-requisite to embracing change and increasing our adaptability rests on our ability to be opened to new information, think critically, use evidence to test our assumptions, and create an internal narrative that motivates us to keep moving forward instead of keeping us stuck.  Changing our relationship with how we process changes can have a positive impact on our health and welfare, personal relationships and careers.

Advancing your Inner Change Agent 

According to the Center for Creative Leadership, adaptable people exhibit three kinds of flexibility that allows them to employ a wide range of behaviors that enable them to shift and experiment in response to change.  Highly adaptable people rate high in all three types of the following:

1. Cognitive Flexibility – the ability to transition thoughts between multiple concepts or perspectives and process multiple concepts simultaneously, such as opposing viewpoints.
2. Emotional Flexibility– the ability to vary one’s approach to dealing with emotions and those of others.
3. Dispositional flexibility– the ability to remain optimistic and at the same time, realistic. The ability to simultaneously visualize a better future while acknowledging a bad situation.

While we have a predisposition toward personality traits making some of us less willing to embrace changes, there is mounting evidence that with practice, people can increase skills that will make them more flexible and subsequently, experience the benefits of an adaptable mindset. (4) By incorporating the following five habits into your daily routine, the negative emotions often associated with change can be managed.  This “change mindset” will enhance your ability to adapt to most of what life throws at you in the most emotionally peaceful and successful ways.

 1.  Redefine  How You Define Yourself

“When we deny the story, it defines us.  When we own the story, we can write a brave new ending”.                         -Brene’ Brown

 The way we define ourselves can be one of the greatest obstacles to embracing a mindset that allows us to make changes that advance our interest.  There is nothing inherently wrong with living according to how one defines themselves unless doing so maintains behaviors that are harmful or inconsistent with their values.  For example, a person who defines themselves as one who “has a bad temper”, may be leaning on this as an excuse to continue displaying behaviors that negatively impact their personal behaviors.  A person whose health is dependent on a specific diet would be hurting themselves if they lived according to a self-prescribed definition of themselves as a  “meat and potato” kind of person.  Getting trapped in self-prescribed definitions of who we think we are sometimes becomes our excuse not to change, and albeit, an invalid one.

Dr. Marshall Goldsmith’s recent book, What Got You Here, Won’t Get You There, is predicated on the idea that much of what we attribute to our successes in life may be despite our personal behaviors, qualities, and patterns of thinking, not because of them.  In my experience as a leadership coach, it is often the case that leaders are reluctant to examine and change their leadership style,   even if evidence abounds that in a specific context and time, their particular style is not favorably advancing their goals.  Sometimes, they are under the illusion that the traits and quirks that got them to where they are, are the same ingredients that will propel them forward.  They have incorporated how those traits “define” them, as if they are set in stone and not elastic.  They create excuses to be inflexible.

If the way you define yourself is used as a crutch to maintain behaviors that negatively impact how you interact with the world around you, then it is worth redefining yourself.      The starting point for a “change mindset” is to accept that we can change, even if it means getting out of our comfort zone to do so. Highly adaptable people hold themselves accountable for how their behavior affects themselves and others and make adjustments in response to new situations.

Points of Reflection:

1. How often do you use your self-identity as an excuse for not changing your behavior? Ie. “I’m the type who has a bad temper, everyone knows I don’t mean anything by it”. “I’m the type who doesn’t have to express appreciation, my employees know I appreciate them”.  “I just act on my emotions. I was raised this way.”
2. How does this self-identity affect your work or personal relationships?
3. What behaviors are you maintaining by living according to your “self-identity” and how do those behaviors serve you?
4. Are the messages you send congruent with the messages you intend to send?  If the answer is no, then making an effort to redefine the way you define yourself may be a worthy endeavor.

2. Evaluate Your Relationship with Emotions

“An emotion is only an emotion.  It’s just a small part of your whole being.  You are much more than your emotion.  An emotion comes, stays for a while, and goes away, just like a storm.  If you’re aware of that, you won’t be afraid of your emotions”.  Nhat Hanh

There is a science to how emotions came to be and the role they play in perpetuating the human species.  Humans are hard-wired to feel emotions and respond to them.  Biologically, our neurological system evolved to alert us when there is trouble and to reinforce bonds with loved ones which serve to perpetuate preservation of the human species.  Despite all of the functional ways our emotions protect and serve us well, we risk placing too much value on how reliable they are in determining how we should think or behave.

It is estimated that the human brain allows us to consciously process only about 40 pieces of information per second relative to the 11 million pieces of information our subconscious is exposed to in the same amount of time.  (5)  Thankfully, our brains spare us from information overload by allowing us to efficiently process information subconsciously.  The brain develops shortcuts on a subconscious level via neurological pathways that connect our emotions with various stimuli in our environment.   Unfortunately, the same neurological mechanisms that make emotions help us adapt to our environment can also prevent us from adapting when the situational context calls for us to do so.

Emotions elicit physical responses from us, which can make them powerfully motivating and physically painful at times.  Research shows how prone we are to misinterpreting the meaning behind our emotions in our haste to make sense of our world, therefore, it is worth scrutinizing how much we should lean on them to determine how we should think and behave.  We are prone to take mental short cuts in the form of cognitive biases and other reasoning errors.  Research into our propensity to misinterpret our emotions predominated the field of social and personality psychology from the 1920’s.  Numerous studies show that people can misinterpret their physiological response to fear as romantic ideation of another person.  Since we have limited data at our disposal, we attempt to make sense of emotions by connecting them to whatever is most tangible to us at the time, such as a recent memory, object or person we are in close proximity to.(6)  Our response to emotions impacts how we interpret information as valid or invalid.  For example,   the great life lessons  taught by loved ones are often valued, subconsciously,  because of the affection toward those giving us the advice, versus the merits of the advice itself.

Our emotional responses to situations don’t have to be fixed.  With self-awareness we can use our current state of emotion to catalyze new connections between the emotions and stimulus in the environment.  Over time and numerous trials in some cases, this process is one that helps people overcome phobias and PTSD, and is the paradigm that enables people to transition from unhealthy abusive relationships to healthier ones.

To exemplify how flexible our emotions can be, consider the girl who gets bit by a dog as a baby.  Whether she recalls the incident or not, she may have a physical response indicating fear every time she sees a dog.  Her brain is doing it’s job, alarming her through emotions that the stimulus (a dog) is something she needs to stay away from in order to avoid another bite.  The consequences of avoiding dogs is rather benign, since she can happily go through life avoiding dogs.  However, if she has a blind son dependent on a “seeing eye dog”, her aversion to dogs may not be the most functional for her in that context.  With a heightened sense of awareness of the cause of her fear and the use of cognitive reasoning skills, she can challenge the premise of her fear, accept the fact that all dogs don’t bite and develop a new more functional response to dogs by building new emotional connections reinforced by positive experiences.  In effect,  she can physically change her brain by replacing old neurological connections with new ones.  Emotions are not set in stone, nor should they consistently be relied upon to determine our behavior.

Since our emotions, gut feelings and hunches often serve us well, we are vulnerable to assuming they are a reliable basis for decision making and equally vulnerable to discounting the times that they don’t serve us well.  Not only does science prove that we are not as in tuned with our emotions as we think we are, we all have had personal experiences  where we “let our emotions get the best of us”  with unfavorable results.  Despite this, we are still prone to considering our emotions a valid compass for how we should or should not think and behave.  To overcome emotions that keep us “stuck” in poor habits, it is helpful to evaluate our relationship to the emotion itself, seeing it as a “que” from the body that prompts us to process it before responding to it.  By evaluating our relationship with emotions, we are more apt to tear down the emotional blocks that keep us from adapting to our environment effectively.

Points of Reflection:

1. Reflect on a time you regret responding to your emotions without processing them.  What could you learn from that experience? How would you have acted different if you took time to learn more about the situation?  What assumptions were you basing your emotions upon and were they true?
2. What characteristics in others bring out a strong emotional response and how can you respond to them more effectively?
3. How does it affect your relationship when people don’t respond to your emotions the way you think they should? How can changing your assumption about the way others should respond to your emotions change your relationships?   What would it cost you to change your expectations of others?  (ie. fear of getting hurt, not acting consistent with values you were brought up with, pride, etc.).   Are these valid excused for not changing your emotional response?   
4. Identify incidents that your emotions dictated your future behavior.  Identify times that this served you well.  Identify situations when it did not.  Practice seeing emotions as a “caution sign” that prompts you to reflect on the source of the emotion, the way that emotion motivates or demotivates us, and the extent to which it makes sense to generalize a prior emotional response to a new situation.
   

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5. Amplify Your Voice of Reason

“Our emotions have a mind of their own, one which can hold views quite independently of our rational mind”.  – Daniel Goleman

There are a number of personal characteristics that make some people better able to peacefully adapt to their environment and life challenges than others. Gratefully, research shows that we have potential to increase these qualities within ourselves.    Highly adaptable people exhibit a high degree of  “emotional intelligence”, which is comprised of self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management, empathy, emotional self-control, and conflict management.    Although researchers differ on the neurological means by which these qualities manifest themselves, there are numerous studies that show that these characteristics are associated with success in relationships, job performance, leadership, mental and physical health as well as overall happiness.  (7)

Emotional intelligence is the capacity to recognize our own feelings and those of others, to manage our emotions and to interact effectively with others. The higher one’s degree of emotional intelligence the more likely they optimize use of reasoning and critical thinking to process and mitigate responses from the emotional messages in the brain.  Emotional intelligence keeps emotions from driving us in “auto pilot”.  Optimizing use of our reasoning to mitigate emotions takes a high degree of self-awareness since many of our emotions work subconsciously.   People with low levels of emotional intelligence tend to be more guarded, critical, inflexible, more willing to speak their minds and disagree openly, leading to the erosion of relationships and alienation of others.  In sum, they don’t leverage their emotions in ways that are likely to advance their personal and professional success.

While cognitive intelligence, or IQ, remains generally stable over the course of the lifetime, emotional intelligence, or EQ, can increase with practice and self-awareness. (7)    The more emotionally intelligent we are, the more we employ cognitive thinking and reasoning to sort out our emotions and responses to them.  These traits lead us to gain greater clarity of our motives and the motives of others.   They allow us to amplify our voice of reason,  challenge the premise of our emotions,  and prime the way to adopt more effective means of interacting with our environment.  Highly adaptable people mitigate emotional responses that can distort their perception of the world by actively amplifying their voice of reason and employing characteristics associated with emotional intelligence.  

Points of Reflection:

1. There are many resources free of charge that allow you to evaluate the strength of your traits associated with emotional intelligence. Incorporate goals into your life that will allow you to build on them.
2. When presented with a very strong response to an emotion, pause before responding. Ride it like a wave, trying to assess the reason for your emotion and alternative ways of responding to it.  For example, are you emotionally worked up about something you believe to be true, but that you don’t have evidence is true? Is there evidence to support the fact that your assumptions are not true?
3. Is the risk of responding to an emotion based on an untrue assumption a risk worth taking?
4. What is the cost to you if you changed your response to your emotion? What role does your response play?  For example, does it protect your pride or self-image?

4. Don’t Believe Everything You Think

“The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them”.  – Sir. William Bragg

A large body of research has been devoted to identifying the most effective means to optimize critical thinking and mitigate cognitive biases that limit our problem-solving ability. (8)  Cognitive biases trick us into thinking that we are seeing the world as is and that which we think is “common sense”.  Although functional at times, our biases can impede our ability to accept new information thus distorting our perception of reality.  Accepting our biases without scrutiny can cause us to be anxious about situations that are not a reflection of the way things actually are.  Sometimes, when we respond to our biases, we create self-fulfilling prophesies that reinforce their validity in our own mind.  The increased need for a workforce that regularly employs critical thinking has triggered movements to change teaching practices in classrooms and corporate training rooms alike.

Critical thinking is all too often confused for intelligence; however they are two different constructs somewhat independent of each other. (9)  One can have a high IQ, and not systemically employ a habit of critical thinking.   Critical thinking is not a measure of our capacity for retaining new information, but rather the process we use to analyze, assess, and synthesize information, systemically making an effort to minimize the impact of cognitive errors that can impede an ability to draw accurate conclusions.  In essence, it is a self-driven process more analogous to playing a “full contact sport” than to being that of a spectator.   Critical thinking skills call upon us to use reasoning in a deliberate way to make sense of the world around us.  Studies show that people who consistently use critical thinking to assess themselves in relation to their world are more likely to experience wellness and longevity compared to those who don’t, independent of how intelligent they are.  (9)  Critical thinking is one of the most easily accessible tools in our personal arsenal that can help us mitigate cognitive biases and change an inner dialogue fueled by negative thoughts.  

Our neurological system makes us predisposed toward cognitive biases and errors in reasoning.  Our biases notoriously interfere with how we interpret the behavior of others and make us prone to draw inaccurate conclusions, even when presented with information that proves otherwise.  This is exemplified by numerous studies showing that if someone exhibits a “bad” behavior, (according to our own standards) we infer that their behavior is caused by their character, personality, effort level and values.  If we ourselves exhibit the same behaviors, we are likely to blame the situation we are in.  This primal tendency toward “correspondence bias” causes us to make “personal attributions” for the behavior of others versus “situational” ones for ourselves.  (6)  Left unchecked, these kinds of biases, and many more like them,  can lead us to draw inaccurate conclusions about the motives of those around us.  The belief that others are not as “value driven” as ourselves can lead to unnecessary pessimism toward other people, groups of other people or human nature itself.  This can be further exacerbated by our tendency toward “confirmation bias” as we seek and retain information in our environment that reinforces and solidifies our belief about others relative to ourselves.

Society is inundated with messages from those advancing notions of “us” versus “them” and thus capitalizing  on the human neurological processes that preempt our desire to  oversimplify our complex world.   Marketing and other propaganda campaigns, in positive and negative forms, are perpetuated in such a way that is meant to optimize an emotional response and suppress critical thinking.  To propagate messages supporting their product or cause, they successfully pair  emotionally provocative messages with evidence that only supports their idea.  They may present a disproportionate amount of evidence, without equal or more evidence to the contrary where such evidence exists, giving the impression that the issue at hand is more pervasive than it is.  They may give accurate information out of context, leaving people with the impression that there is a causal link between points of data, where only a correlational link exists.  The most effective propaganda is designed to protect our ego from seeing ourselves as “irrational” or in an otherwise undesirable light by giving us “psychological cover” that justifies our conclusion, belief  or behavior.  Biologically, one can imagine that cognitive biases and the neurological mechanisms that empower them might be functional if we had a need to strengthen tribal allegiances to promote self-preservation, but in our daily lives, these biases can hinder problem solving processes, cause us to distort reality, and respond like puppets to fabricated emotions that negatively impact the way we relate to our loved ones, coworkers, customers, clients, competition and any one else other than ourselves.

Although we all use critical thinking skills in many contexts, social media magnifies how prevalent our suppression of critical thinking is in response to information that validates our pre-conceived notions. Social media platforms have become a Petri dish for scientists studying the phenomenon, partly due to the vast amount of statistical data at their disposal in the form of “likes”, “shares”, “traffic”, “impressions”, and “comments”.  This same data is a valuable and inexpensive tool used by businesses to improve the effectiveness of their advertising and to target markets through algorithms.  Viral videos and stories with catchy headlines luring people to click on them has become a major source of “per click” revenue.  This “click bait” tactic has also propelled the advancement of fake news stories and misinformation, such as “fake celebrity death” stories.  While misinformation campaigns have been launched throughout human history, current technology and economic incentives allow it to travel faster, further and strategically targeted.   Social media has become  the preferred mode of operation for those with  sinister motives to drive, create and capitalize on ideological wedges by the spread of misinformation.

In response to sinister actors using our social media to undermine the goal of having an informed electorate for which a functioning republic depends, society will debate about how to solve the problem of misinformation internet campaigns.  To that end, we will debate the intended spirit of the First Amendment and grapple with ideological and ethical issues regarding the rights of private companies to protect their client’s data as well as their rights to maintain revenue sources they have come to depend upon.  Despite the numerous questions raised as we struggle to balance freedom and protections, there is a non-partisan consensus that the first line of defense to misinformation campaigns is the ability for the consumer to employ critical thinking to the greatest extent possible as they digest information.  All of us can use social media as  to practice our critical thinking and research skills.

Social Media & Misinformation –  Critical Thinking is the First Line of Defense:

Science is seeking to unveil the personal characteristics that make one vulnerable to believing misinformation and those compelled to spread it.  We are only just beginning to understand the scope of misinformation and its effect on our behavior.   Social media use has increased exponentially from 2008.  Facebook alone had 1.8 billion active users per month in 2016 while  Twitter reached 400 million, making them prime targets for misinformation  campaigns.  According to a Pew Survey,  62 percent of US adults get news from social media. (10)  Alarmingly, numerous studies show that fake news stories outperform real news stories on Facebook, Twitter and other platforms  and that most people who are exposed to them believe them, especially if exposed to similar information reinforcing it over time.  (11)  One study showed that a small sample of false news stories  circulated in the final months leading to the 2016 Presidential election in favor of one candidate’s political ideology  was shared 30 million times on Facebook alone and for another candidate, 8 million times. (12) Preliminary evidence shows that the average person was exposed to distorted or fake news stories one or more times in months leading to the election.  (13)   There are many variables that need to be controlled for in order to determine the extent to which repeated exposure to misinformation motivates or demotivates us.  Regardless of the outcomes of such studies, critical thinking skills can mitigate our emotional response to misinformation and keep us from spreading it.  By doing so, we would be less prone to being victims of those whose only motive is to optimize an emotional response and capitalize on our biases and predisposition toward cognitive errors.  (See the CRAAP method in the Points of Reflection for advancing information literacy – American Psychological Association).

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There are many other cognitive errors beside correspondence and confirmation biases.  One of the most common ones that negatively impact people’s adaptability is their tendency to “over-generalize” by drawing  broad inferences based on relatively small sample sizes and in the absence of supporting evidence.  Like other errors, over-generalizing causes us to form a distorted perception of reality that can, in some instances, create negative emotions and behaviors.   For example, in 2018, my community will face the  consequences of a large local company having to layoff 30% of their local workforce, affecting thousands of people directly and indirectly.  Although I know quite a number of people personally affected by this,  I  know that I would be remiss and guilty of poor cognitive reasoning skills if I drew a conclusion about the entire state of the American economy based on my close proximity to a situation and my emotional attachment to those affected.   To do so would be to ignore data from many geographical areas as well as favorable economic statistics.  Despite this,  humans are prone to over-generalizing and drawing incorrect conclusions about the general state of the outside world based on their personal experience all of the time.  This cognitive error can result in a negative perception of the world as well as negative emotions associated with that perception.   Over generalizations can be overcome by employing scientific reasoning as we process information.  

There are many factors that cause us to over-generalize including our emotions, our tendency toward confirmation biases, etc.   If you listen carefully, you will hear people commonly draw conclusions about entire industries, professions, public policy, geo-political forces, etc. based on a small sample of data that may not be representative of the issue at hand.  We unknowingly incorporate other people’s biases into our own viewpoint, suppressing critical thinking and failing to take into account data from various sources.   We overly rely on sources we deem credible, perhaps because of the person’s proximity to the issue at hand, accepting their perspective as “commonly held” across many other people when it may not be.  Just because we “know someone” in the health care field, law enforcement, military, teaching field, Human Resource profession, construction, insurance, etc. doesn’t mean that their biases aren’t conveyed when they make definitive statements to you about how they perceive a topic relative to their profession.  It is unscientific to form an opinion solely based on the opinions of others without getting a wide sample and data where possible.  When we lean on the opinion of a relative few,  we suspend critical thinking and risk forming an opinion out of “blind loyalty” to those we deem credible.  This loyalty makes us vulnerable to propaganda campaigns from that profession, which seek to optimize our emotions and distort our perceptions of reality in support of whatever cause is being propagated.  By employing critical thinking, we could identify the biases in those who convey their opinion as well as our own biases in wanting to confirm our preconceived notions.   Those who are highly adaptable employ scientific reasoning when drawing conclusions and testing theories, making them more innovative and pragmatic problem solvers, grounded in both optimism and reality and inoculated from numerous biases, including those stemming from “blind loyalty”.

History is wrought with examples of how humans wrongly infer conclusions based on the limited knowledge and experience at their disposal.  Historical accounts of such errors can serve as inspiration to challenge our preconceived notions and biases.  For example, it took someone having a theory that the world wasn’t flat to gain the courage to jump on a ship and explore.  It wasn’t that long ago that people attributed epileptic seizures and schizophrenia to demon possessions.  Many a religious movement was accelerated by fears associated with natural benign events, such as solar eclipses, which were wrongly concluded to be rare.   Knowing the limits of knowledge at our disposal should be enough to make us question the validity and reliability of the conclusions we draw without considering alternative possibilities.

Just being aware of our biases and cognitive errors may be enough to thwart off our knee-jerk responses to them. Evidence of our biases are observed in how we speak about and behave toward others and groups of people.   Our need to oversimplify a complex world sustains our cognitive errors.  They also serve as a defense mechanism.  They shield us from seeing ourselves in a negative light, by justifying thoughts and behaviors that might otherwise be unjustifiable and inconsistent with our self-professed values.   One of the ways to improve our ability to adapt to the world is to overcome the mental walls that maintain our behaviors by challenging ourselves to not believe everything we think.   Everyone employs these skills sometimes,  but highly adaptable people employ these strategies as the way they process events across numerous contexts.

Points of Reflection:

1. Identify the assumptions you make when you refer to a whole group of people as, “They all…”. The group of people may be comprised as supervisors, an ethnic group, people of a political leaning, the younger generation, religious affiliates, geographic regions, etc.
2. Find evidence to support your assumption. Identify the sources of that evidence.
3. Find evidence that does not support your assumption. Identify the sources of that evidence.
4. Identify the assumptions are you making about the motive of others and how those assumptions affect the way you perceive them and respond to them. After assessing the evidence, are you being true to your values if you generalize based on inaccurate information?
5. If your response to assumptions is negative, can you convince yourself to be more positive based on further assessment? Is the situation less fear or anger invoking?
6. Be mindful of the power of your words in affecting your beliefs.  With a heightened awareness, you can practice using words that reflect reality instead of your untrue assumptions about reality.  If it is not true that “all people” in a given group possess a specific characteristic, then don’t refer to them as if they do. Be more specific when you talk, acknowledging the caveats and limits of your sample size.
7. How often have you tried to persuade someone and based your argument on a small sample?   
8. When assessing news content on social media, apply the CRAAP Test:
   1. Currency (When was it published? Has it been updated?)
   2. Relevance (Does it relate to your needs? Who is the audience?)
   3. Authority (Who are the author and publisher? What are their credentials?)
   4. Accuracy (Is it reliable and truthful? Is it supported by evidence?)
   5. Purpose (Why does this information exist? Is there a bias?)
9. Base business decisions on data from various sources whenever possible.
10. The next time you accept an opinion as fact, identify your relationship to the source? Is it a family member or someone in a highly respected position?  Does this prevent you from being opened to additional information that can disprove what they say as truth? Are you excluding a wider sample for the sake of validating a preconceived notion?
11. Sometimes, we over-personalize the motives of others which leads us to be hurt based on assumptions that are not necessarily true. While assessing the motives of someone’s behavior toward you, challenge yourself to consider various motives.  If someone hurt you, challenge yourself to look at their behavior in the context of a situation, instead of a personality predisposition.  The effect may be decreased anxiety, guilt, sadness and feelings of victim-hood associated with the actions of another person.
12. Identify an opinion or position that you feel strongly about. Research, using data where available and various sources to obtain pros and cons of the perspective, careful not to base your opinion on others interpretation of the pros and cons.  Are all of the assumptions you made about the issue true?  How did that affect your view of those who held an opinion opposite of yourself?    Can you correctly argue for the opposite opinion, without the use of propaganda, as if it were your own?

5. Challenge Your Inner Voice

“The mind is everything.  What you think, you become”.  – Buddha

People who are highly adaptable possess optimism and confidence, fueled by an inner script that tells them to move forward in the face of defeat and rejection.  The inner script is that dialogue we have in our mind as we talk ourselves off of the proverbial ledge.  Our inner dialogue can be an inner cheerleader at best, or at worst, a “Debbie downer”, leading us to be overly cautious and averse to needed disruptions to our status quo.  It is the voice that sometimes tells us “we can’t” or “we shouldn’t”  when in actuality, “we can” and “we should”.  Our inner scripts are not fixed, and can evolve as we make a concerted effort to create new ones.

When we consider how the scripts in our mind came to be, it is with good reason we should question the degree to which we lean on them from time to time.  Our inner voice is shaped by our culture and interactions with the world.  It is comprised of the values our loved one’s imprint upon us, both good and bad.  We have confidence in the inner voice we develop because generally, these internal narratives serve us well.  Despite this, we don’t always discern when our inner voice leads us in directions counter to our interest.   Our allegiance to loved ones who shape our inner voice can create rigidity in our thinking that manifests itself in self-defeating ways, but fool us into thinking that we are entitled to self-righteous, subjective opinions and indignation’s of right and wrong.  We are at risk of accepting our inner voice as an absolute truth, the way things are, the way things should be, which can unnecessarily disrupt mindful peace and perpetuate a sense of victimhood, in a world we can’t control.

When our inner voices is the result of faulty assumptions, errors in thinking and cognitive biases we are at risk of drawing inaccurate conclusions that form our opinions and hinder effective problem solving.  (14) By invoking critical thinking we can change our inner dialogue, which can change our perception and give rise to new emotional and behavioral responses.  The following is a small sample of common cognitive errors and how critical thinking can be used to overcome them.  Although these errors can be pervasive among people with some disorders, such as Bipolar Personality Disorder, we all experience them from time to time.

1. Dichotomous thinking, referred to as “all or nothing thinking” is the tendency to evaluate personal qualities about oneself and others in extreme, black or white categories.  When this error is applied, unreasonable expectations are set up for ones own behavior or the behaviors of others.  It manifests itself in the following way: “If she doesn’t visit me in the hospital, she must not care about me”.

By invoking critical thinking, one would change their inner voice so that it doesn’t drive our behavior and emotions based on a false perception of reality.

• Is there other evidence to show that the person does care?
• What other reasons may cause the person not to visit and that have nothing to do with how they feel about you? What might prevent the person from telling you the actual reasons they don’t visit?  Consider that people don’t always share their personal business with others.
• Even if it is true that the person doesn’t care, is the fact they didn’t visit enough evidence to support that? Are you contributing to their pattern of behavior causing you to see evidence?
• How does this thinking affect you? Does it protect your ego by keeping you from being hurt by others?
• How does this assumption affect your behavior toward this person?
• How might your response to people create a pattern of how they interact with you? Are you at risk of creating a self-fulfilling prophecy, in which you respond to the person’s response, effectively validating your preconceived notion?  Do you risk making people want to not visit you?
• Are you unnecessarily invoking “litmus tests” to create unreasonable expectations?
• How can you respond in a way that helps your relationship?

2.  Selective abstraction is a tendency to focus on a single negative event or condition at the exclusion of more positive ones.  For example, “My boss hates me because he walked by without acknowledging me” (despite numerous interactions to the contrary).

By invoking critical thinking, to change the inner voice, one might ask the following questions:

• What is the ratio of positive to negative interactions with the boss?
• What other reasons might the boss have responded the way he did?
• Do you think you know everything the boss is thinking?
• Have your interactions ever been misinterpreted and thus led to hurt feelings? In that situation, how might you have wished the other person responded?  Do you wish they gave you the benefit of the doubt?  How did that affect how you felt toward the person who made a poor assumption about your motive?  How can that experience help you process the interaction with your boss?

3.  Arbitrary inference is the tendency to draw a broad conclusion in the absence of supporting evidence.  It can lead to negative thoughts and emotions based on untrue assumptions.  For example, “Times are so much worse in America than they ever were?”

To challenge this assumption, one can invoke critical thinking by exploring the following questions.

• Can you think of positive aspects of American culture that were not prevalent before current times? For example, healthcare advances, less drunk driving, less fatalities due to seat belt use, less fatalities due to damage to homes from flimsy construction, less pollution and generally better air quality, less preventable diseases, increased communication with geographically dispersed relatives, the invention of the air conditioner?
• Think back to a time in America you thought was better. Are there particular groups of people in particular circumstances that would not think so?  Would you want to be them during those times?
• What information are you omitting as you form the opinion that America is worse today? How does that affect your mood or disposition toward the current state of America?  How does that affect your behavior?  How does that behavior affect the way you interact with your environment?  How might others around you respond to the fact that you are discounting their experience?

Our inner voice is not always “the voice of reason”, and what we believe to be “common sense” is often times nonsensical.   By invoking critical thinking skills, one can explore the roots of their inner voice and test their assumptions.  This is one step toward knocking down the mental blocks that keep us from being mentally flexible to positively adapt to changes.

Points of Reflection:

1. How does your inner voice motivate your or demotivate you?
2. Does your inner voice lead you to automatically discredit new information? Do you use other people’s values to justify discrediting new information?    the people who raised you, etc.
3. Is your inner voice the source of insecurities?
4. Assess the extent to which unfavorable responses to your environment are based on assumptions about the world, and further, assess the extent to which those assumptions are valid.
5. When your inner voice is negative, practice reframing it in a positive way.
6. When you have recurring negative thoughts, based on assumption, it helps to “Talk it out” with someone you trust or “write it out” in a journal.
7. Assess the extent to which your response to an assumption affects how others see you and interact with you? Can you hold yourself accountable for that effect?  What new assumptions can you make that would change the way you are perceived?
8. At what cost is it to you to “let go” and give the benefit of the doubt? To what extent does pride play a role in maintaining faulty thinking?

Conclusion

Although we all employ the aforementioned habits in various contexts, we don’t always employ them when they will have the most favorable impact in our lives.  Highly adaptable people don’t just invoke these habits and apply them to only those situations they deem critical for them to do so.   Highly adaptable people have a systemic and deliberate way they process their ongoing interactions with the world, whether those interactions are expected to highly impact them or not.  They possess a “change mindset” which, as per research, can be learned despite genetic predispositions and our traditional comfort zones.

The tips highlighted throughout this article are certainly not all-inclusive, since there are many ways one can optimize cognitive, emotional, and dispositional flexibility to bring about a change mindset and improve adaptability.  I highlighted  the five most recurring themes I’ve spent over twenty years coaching people through in order to successfully facilitate workplace and personal changes.  Consistent with research, my experience as a professional coach has shown that when these five themes are explored systemically, clients experience exponential benefits in both their personal and professional lives.   By redefining the way we define ourselves, evaluating our relationship with our emotions, amplifying our internal voice of reason, and questioning the validity of our thoughts, we  minimize the errors in thinking that keep is stuck in old habits that are counter to our best interest.  We see reality for what it is, instead of cynically confusing a more positive perception as a naive’ one.

Each day we have opportunities to  practice these skills, whether in our relationships, how we process current events, and in our professional and volunteer work.  In time, the mindset will “become who you are” and not be something “you do” only in certain situations** .  Emotional resiliency is often a function of changing our mental relationship with that which we believe to be fixed.   The human mind is so much more powerful than what I can testify to in the limited scope of this article.  There are thousands of studies reinforcing the power of the mind.   Once we are aware of how powerful the mind can be in limiting our perspective, under the guise of protecting us,  we are able to harness that power  to favorably affect our lives.  We can make deliberate changes that will make us more adaptable to whatever future challenges will inevitably come our way, regardless of the personal tragedies and triumphs we have already endured. 

Leaning on these five strategies and using the “Points of Reflection”  I weaved throughout the article,  you can favorably alter the way you interact with the world around you and improve your overall quality of life, emotional peace and well-being, both in and out of the workplace.

** People faced with extenuating circumstances such as substance abuse, head injuries, physical and emotional abuse, as well as other disorders may warrant additional mitigating strategies to overcome self-defeating thoughts and behaviors that impede a “change mindset”.

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©Denise Scotti-Smith 2017.  All Rights Reserved.