Most of us tend to look at the negative, especially in situations where we want things to go well and that is important to us.
This is due mostly to our inner ‘negativity bias’ - a form of cognitive bias where your mind keeps selecting the negative parts and puts more focus on them than on the whole story.
This tendency is good when you try to find errors in a report, but not so great when you are evaluating yourself.
With this tool, focus on a social situation (a presentation, a date, a meeting with friends) that you think didn’t go that well and try to broaden the focus so that you capture the whole story, not just the negative view.
Let’s go:
The situation: what happened
→ ex. presentation in a team meeting with managers & peers.
The negative. What made that situation so bad
→ ex. I stammered while I was presenting my data, I had sweaty palms, I messed up the ending of the presentation, and people seemed bored, probably it was my fault.
What’s the whole story? What would a camera see in that situation, without the bias?
How would a person you trust describe the same situation? How would a co-worker who was present describe the situation?
→ ex. My results were good, I managed to structure the information; we made decisions based on my work.
I strongly recommend doing this in writing so that you have a better grip on what happened.
So there you go - imagine that you see a stage and the focus is on just one character or object. Now, you might think that that is the whole story. But if you zoom out, you will notice other characters and objects.
See you next week, when we talk about how not to think about everything you think.