Tag: psychology
If you could answer one question, what would it be?
Focusing Your Energy
The title captures the essence of an important exercise I practice on occasion. Our activities grow from the seeds of our priorities. The most important elements of our lives drive us to take action, in sometimes courageous and awe inspiring ways. It is the motivational forces that spawn outside of our own selfish desires which can be the most powerful in driving us forward.
More Mellow, less drama
Motivation for Behavior Change, Cognitive Dissonance
The Old and New
Update
Well it looks like my marketing guru, Seth Godin just released a book dedicated towards shedding light on our instinctive reaction to resist positive change. He calls it the lizard brain, and it’s something Linchpins have learned to overcome. The good news is, so can we!
What’s Cognitive Dissonance?
Cognitive dissonance is deeply connected to our motivation and enthusiasm. Dissonance is characterized by an uneasy feeling which is brought on by contemplating contradictory ideas. A simple example, when our behavior doesn’t match our true intentions, or a conflict of our nature, and our demeanor. Wikipedia has an excellent explanation for cognitive dissonance:
Dissonance normally occurs when a person perceives a logical inconsistency among his or her cognitions. This happens when one idea implies the opposite of another. For example, a belief in animal rights could be interpreted as inconsistent with eating meat or wearing fur. Noticing the contradiction would lead to dissonance, which could be experienced as anxiety, guilt, shame, anger, embarrassment, stress, and other negative emotional states. When people’s ideas are consistent with each other, they are in a state of harmony, or consonance. If cognitions are unrelated, they are categorized as irrelevant to each other and do not lead to dissonance. (more…)
Can Awareness of Our Biases Clear Our Vision?
(please forgive the poor video quality, the only way I could shorten the video to under 10minutes was to convert and clip the last few minutes).
Previously, I’ve shared thoughts on decision making. In this instance I’ll cover an interesting neurological side effect of our conscious mind, cognitive biases.
For those unfamiliar with the concept of cognitive biases, here’s a quick background on the concept from the wikipedia: (more…)