Prove It!

How steadfast are you on your opinions and beliefs? Do you hold strong or are you able to be flexible?

As NLPers, we know that our opinions and beliefs come from our model of the world – our own distortions, deletions and generalisations about the world around us. Our filters play a big part too – our history, family, memories, economic status, religion, etc.  Once something happens a few times, our unconscious mind starts to look for and find “self fulfilling prophecies” – that is, we start to look for what we know.

In fact, lets go one step further: Your opinions are the result of years of paying attention to information which confirmed what you believed while ignoring information which challenged your preconceived notions.

Would you like a “smart” term for this, here you go: confirmation bias.

Lets take a very simple example, if person A is very conservative in their financial views and person B is very liberal, they will see the world in different ways. Since its winter time where I am, lets pretend that both of these people (both women) see the same pair of cute boots on sale at half price for $90. There is a good chance that person A would look frugally at the boots, weigh up options, identify where $90 could be better spent and pass by the boots. There is also a good chance that person B would spot the bargain and buy the boots – maybe even two pair!

Whatever the decision they make, it is based on their own confirmation bias. Ultimately, whatever hypothesis a person has, they can prove it. Person A is right – the boots are still expensive compared to food for her family, and Person B is also right – the boots are well priced compared to the normal price.

Proving a hypothesis has always been a misnomer for me, because anything can be proven depending  on how you look at it. How this becomes interesting to me in my real life and in coaching other people is I ask a lot of Meta Model and Meta Questions to get to understand where their confirmation bias comes from – a lot of the “according to whom”, “how do you know that”, “what do you believe about that” types of questions helps me to challenge myself and others and our beliefs.

So, next time you are steadfast on an opinion, stop for a moment and identify if you are looking at all sides of the issue or if you are prone to your own confirmation bias at that moment.

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