Ever Thought about how You Think?

Objectives

This lesson will help you learn a bit more about how you think and how you make decisions in your life, and simply by knowing a little more about how you do this, you will also begin to understand why our approach works and why our courses can really help.

Content

In a recent lesson, we discussed the concept of how you can mentally get stuck in your problems, and typically this can happen when your thinking process goes a bit wrong. We’ll come back to getting stuck in problems again in a later lesson, but before we do this, you need first to understand a little bit more about how you think, how you make your decision, and most importantly, your thinking processes are prone to error.

Fortune, chance, and bad luck apart, the life you live today is more often than not the combined result of all of the thousands of small decisions that you make every day.

So if where you are now is a result of the combination of all of the decisions you have made in the past, I would also propose that what lies in your future is dependent on the decisions you make today.

What I’m really trying to say is if you want to change your life, then you also need to start making the small decisions every day that will take you in that direction whilst also stopping making those poor decisions that are holding you back.

Dual Process Theory

In the world of psychology, there’s a theory about decision-making called Dual Process Theory; this theory proposes that when we make decisions, we do so in two ways;

By making either fast unconscious (or Type 1) impulsive decisions.
Or by making slow conscious (or Type 2) reasoned decisions.

If you look at all the decisions you make in a single day, some studies have shown that up to 90% of the decisions you make are due to that fast, unconscious Type 1 decision-making process, which is also made up of other conditioned responses that you do habitually.

Type 1 Thinking

Our Type 1 thinking is automatic, ‘hard-wired’, and often hard-learned. This thinking happens impulsively, instinctually, and by habit. This type of decision-making includes some of the innate survival responses that we were born with and also some of the other protective responses we have learned or have been trained by repetition to do throughout our lives.

Typically this Type 1 thinking happens just below our conscious awareness, it is fast and impulsive because, in the past, our very survival could have depended on this quick reaction.
Because our Type 1 decision-making is impulsive and automatic, it is also too easily affected by errors in how we think.

Type 2 Thinking

Our Type 2 decisions are due to reasoned thinking, it is conscious, step-wise, slow, rational and analytic. It’s what happens in our brains when we work out a problem with deliberate and reasoned effort.
The trouble is our Type 2 thinking is slow and also much more mentally tiring than the automatic response you get with Type 1 thinking, and because of this, it’s generally unsuited for most of the basic tasks we do each and every day.

Yet even with the slow reasoned thinking of Type 2 thinking, if your thinking process goes astray, you can get stuck in making decisions, or you can still be prone to making the wrong decisions.

Mental Short Cuts

To speed up our Type 2 thinking and to make it less mentally taxing, our brains soon learn with repetition of a particular task to make mental shortcuts. This process is what happens when we learn and practice something complex until it becomes second nature, and we can almost do it second nature. It’s a bit like learning how to ride a bike, something that previously seemed too complex for our conscious mind to handle becomes almost automatic and responsive.

So by doing something often enough, our Type 2 thinking starts to become quicker and effectively turns into automatic Type 1 responses. In this way, even very complex tasks are made to feel like something you’ve done so many times you could even do it in your sleep.

But when we make mental shortcuts, if we learn the wrong way to think or develop the wrong mental habits and we become prone to automatically making the wrong decisions or behaving.

The majority of the decisions we make in life inevitably employ some form of mental shortcut; these heuristics (our own mental rules of thumb) and our learned responses come into play every day of our lives.

For example, if I said to you, “what’s seven multiplied by seven” then you’d almost instantly think of 49. This is because you no longer need to add up each of the 7’s in your head, and it’s an excellent example of here a previously learned mental shortcut that can give you an almost instant conditioned answer.

These learned and conditioned mental shortcuts help us to make our daily tasks easier, quicker, and mentally far less challenging than they should be, but they can also cause repeated errors in our lives if we develop the wrong learned and conditioned responses.

When our Thinking goes wrong

When our thinking process goes wrong, we are prone to make poor decisions.

Poor decisions happen when we have constructed and used the wrong mental shortcut or because our thinking process is being influenced by something else called a cognitive bias (which we will discuss in the next chapter, but for now, think of a cognitive bias as something that causes us to make a poor decision or something that can cause our decision process to get stuck).

I watch people make the same mistakes again and again, often people’s learned responses to life situations are just not good enough for the life they want. They maybe haven’t got the experience, the training, they’ve not learned what to do, or they just haven’t got the mental conditioning needed to process a particular problem in the right way.

In this way, people make poor decisions, they get stuck, and without change, they’ll keep making these poor decisions time and again.

The Solution

Our Course will help you to improve the way your Type 1 thinking works to stop making poor unconscious decisions you don’t even know you’re making.

We will also help you to improve your Type 2 reasoned decisions so you can start to see solutions to the problems you face.

Additionally, armed with the knowledge you will learn in each lesson, you will then start to unconsciously scan your thoughts so that you don’t get stuck in the same mental traps and bad thinking habits that others do.

With awareness of the most common distorted thinking patterns, you can learn how to get unstuck from the problems that could be holding you back and also make much better decisions when confronted by similar problems in the future.

You will also benefit from overriding or decoupling (this is another word psychologists use) some of our really hard-wired and hard-learned patterns of thinking, especially the ones that are causing us destructive patterns of behaviour, and yes, we’ll go through some of the familiar these patterns later in this course too.

In short, our courses help you to think better and help you make better decisions in your life.

Learning Points

• Most of our thinking and decision-making happens quickly and almost automatically.
• Our lives are a direct result of the decisions and the mistakes that we make.
• We often make the same mistakes again and again.
• We can learn how to improve our thinking, make fewer mistakes, and make better decisions in our lives.