How The Mind Tricks Itself

Have you ever tried to sell an idea and watched as the meeting suddenly derailed itself? 

Last week, I sat in a meeting where a junior executive tried to sell their top management team on a new idea – a change to a process. The entire room switched off when they heard, “We have to make some changes here.” Suddenly, they were all mentally jettisoned into past experiences and narratives about change. And, as we know, change often gives us a massive headache – it means more work, grumpy teams, and potentially a bushel full of new problems.

This is what happened at that meeting. From the minute the manager said “change,” he lost his audience. 

Why did it happen?

Our auto brains are wired to use mental shortcuts to process information quickly, and these shortcuts can lead to biased, faulty thinking. This leads to an emotional response and then to faulty decisions and actions.

2 Common Cognitive Biases

Confirmation bias reinforces our existing beliefs, creating a sense of certainty which reduces mental strain. Are we ignoring other perspectives or alternatives?

Negativity bias means we pay more attention to negative than positive information. It’s a survival technique.  In that meeting, everyone heard change = more and harder workloads and potential job losses, and they all began thinking about how that would affect them. That poor exec’s message got lost in the mental noise.

There are hundreds of different mind tricks our heads can play, making it hard to keep track. We can start by knowing that our minds do play tricks on us, and to watch out for:

• Emotional and/or fearful responses.
• Listener shutdown – where their eyes glaze over, and you can see their thoughts are off on a tangent.

That is the cue for you to change speed and direction, ask more questions, encourage them to share their fears, and perhaps even park the latest change idea until you have rebuilt their sense of trust and safety.

So, what could the exec have done differently?

• Get his listeners involved and engaged before using triggering words like “change”.
• Use open-ended questions to see where the audience stands.
• Invite stories and idea sharing.
• Watch the words – never start off with triggering ones.
• Paint a picture of the positives of the new idea first before inviting engagement.

Becoming more mindful of cognitive biases will help remove some mental noise and chaos.

What can you do now, today, to watch out for these mind tricks?  Message me with your answers by hitting reply to this email. I'd love to know.

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Until next time.

Mike