Why Poor Thinking Can Lead to Disaster

Objectives

The reason for this lesson is to bring it into context by showing you why poor thinking patterns can be dangerous to your health and wellbeing, why learning better ways of thinking can really help you change, and also, therefore, why it’s so important for you to commit to finishing the rest of this course. 

A Disaster Waiting to Happen

The story goes, as we all know, that the titanic sunk when it hit an iceberg, that iceberg wasn’t seen until it was too late, and then as the story goes, nothing could stop the catastrophe that followed. One of the learning points here in this disaster is the fact that 90% of an iceberg’s mass is said to hide under the water, and this is what makes icebergs so dangerous because they’re so hard to see. 

Our Mental Icebergs

We talked in a previous lesson about Dual-Process theory and how most of our decision-making is unconscious, in that it happens under the surface of our conscious thought. We don’t consciously notice most of the decisions we make each day. Luckily, most of the decisions we make are the right ones, yet sometimes we don’t realise we are also making some bad ones too. 

If most of the decisions we make in life are automatic, consider what would happen if some of your automatic thinking patterns are defective, and then using the story of the Titanic as a metaphor, maybe we too have these mental icebergs under the surface of our conscious thought that are also ready to scupper us because we just don’t see them coming.

I don’t need years of experience to tell you that some people make the same mistakes time and time again, they don’t see where they are going wrong, and they just can’t navigate through some of the problems life throws at them. Often they are affected by poor thinking that makes their problems all too difficult to navigate.

Avoiding Bad Thinking

I want this course to alert you to these ways of thinking that are harmful, your mental icebergs so that you can see some of the problems coming your way. 

With more knowledge, you can learn to see potential disasters, and by knowing where others have gone wrong, you can also learn to avoid the same pitfalls.

Psychologists and sociologists will tell us that most of our behaviour is predictable, so being aware of how we think and what’s going on under the surface of our conscious thought can help us gain the insight needed for us to think more critically, make better decisions, avoid making wrong decisions, and help us bring some change into our lives.

Learning Points

• You just don’t always see the errors in your thinking
• Poor thinking leads to poor decisions
• Poor decisions can lead to disaster