Confirmation Bias

Confirmation Bias Stops Us Seeing Our Potential. Because our belief system cuts out what doesn't fit. There are millions of bits of information available each second. We can only be aware of 50. So we see more of what we believe is wrong about us. We don't see how amazing we truly are. Join me as I explore this topic from a new perspective.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Calmcast,

A time to feel calm and think clearly.

I'm Claire Downham,

The Queen of Calm,

A Transformational Life Coach.

I was a burnt out headteacher who finally made the journey to calm after years of trying and I want to prevent you from having to do the same.

The Calmcast is a series of short explorations gently guiding you back to your natural state which is calm and clarity.

Just listen like you would listen to music with an open mind and curiosity.

There's nothing else to do.

Now let's relax into today's episode.

So today I'm going to talk about confirmation bias but I'm first of all going to tell you about where my thought to talk about this came from and it came,

If you've been listening to me recently,

On one of my silent walks because a little while ago I shared about how I'd always gone for walks with my headphones in and decided that I should go without my headphones in to walk in silence because a little voice keeps saying you need to do that and when I started doing that took a little bit of persuasion to get me to do that but since I've been doing that I've been seeing,

Well,

Just I keep saying to people it feels like the game of Tetris where every single block is falling into place and it all feels like I don't know,

Life is sorting yourself out without me needing to be overly involved which is nice and so this broadcast came from me just suddenly thinking that when I work with somebody I want them,

I don't want them to think I'm an amazing,

I don't want them to come out of a session and go oh Claire's amazing,

I want them to come out of the session and say I'm amazing because for most of the people I talk to that's one of the biggest problems is that they don't see their own potential,

They don't see how wisdom is with them all the time guiding them and that's sad because and I know how that feels because I've been there,

I've been there with not feeling good enough and not feeling like I'm very emotional this week,

Is there a moon doing something,

I think it's an emotional week,

Done a lot of crying this week,

Just little tears but yeah some stuff bubbling up which is cool but I didn't see my own potential.

I was in a talk the other day and the lady said it was a talk about beauty and about the beauty industry and the lovely lady Lugner who was delivering the talk she said who thinks they're beautiful and my arm just went straight up,

I didn't even,

There was no doubt like years and I was one of the only women in the room who did that,

There was not many but years ago,

Not that long ago,

I say years ago but not that long ago,

There's no way I would have done that,

There's no way I would have put my hand up,

No way,

There would have been first a layer of me not believing I'm beautiful but then there would have been a layer of oh I don't want other people to think I think I'm beautiful,

It's just quite comical when you think about it.

So anyway I've gone off a bit of a tangent there but that's all good,

I'm sure it's all useful in some way too but it's just what's happening so who cares.

So what I want when somebody comes in to see me that's the issue,

They don't see how beautiful they are,

They don't see how amazing they are,

They don't see that they're being guided by wisdom all the time,

They miss that and the reason we miss that as human beings,

The reason we tend to not see how amazing we're doing is because we have this thing called confirmation bias and what that does is that means that every little rubbishy,

I was going to say a rude one,

Every little rubbishy thing that we think about ourselves,

Everything we think is not okay about us,

Every label that we've been given by society or by ourselves such as anxious or stressed out or depressed or whatever else or even those you know neurodiverse labels,

Everything that we think to be true,

Every belief we have about us and the world and everything else creates a filter.

It's you know are you looking through,

What colour glasses are you looking through,

You and I see the world differently.

So when we go out into the world with some beliefs about ourselves and we'll focus on those today,

There are all the beliefs we have about the world out there too which create our reality,

Everything we think about ourselves creates a filter so there are 50 million or something ridiculous,

It's millions anyway,

It's in the tens of millions of bits of information,

Even if there's just a million,

It's a lot isn't it,

Trying,

Well not trying,

They're available to be aware of,

Millions and millions and millions of bits of information.

Your little brain,

Bless it,

And your sensory system and everything else that creates what you see in the world can only handle 50 of those bits of information in any second.

So can you immediately see there,

There has to,

You know our brain can't do all of that,

It can't take on board all that so it has to use a filter and the filter it uses is your belief.

So if you believe that you are anxious for example then you are much more likely to notice your anxious response to something than the times when you calmly respond to something and you're fine and you know you don't have any sense of anxiety even though life's being a bit topsy turvy or whatever and it's just because your brain doesn't have any other way to filter stuff out other than through your belief system.

Now that's where a conversation with somebody like me is helpful because that's what I can do,

I can start to point out where you're doing amazingly well.

I often say to people wow that's,

That sounds like wisdom coming through you what you did there and they're a bit like oh I didn't realize that,

I didn't realize that was wisdom,

I didn't see my own resilience and we you know like resilience is a great example because we put loads of wrap things around resilience.

You are resilient,

I mean you can't get through life,

You can't be still standing if you're not resilient because you've fallen,

Literally fallen down and got back up hundreds of times when you were learning to walk but in your life you've been knocked and shoved and things have happened and it's,

It's that's just what happens and that's how life works and you get up,

You keep getting up but of course if you believe you're not resilient,

If you believe you're a person who can't handle things then you won't even notice yourself doing that.

So in our conversations that's what I do,

I point out to people how amazingly well they're doing.

That's my job a lot of the time.

Now what I also do is obviously tell people how it all works.

I teach about confirmation bias and tell people that's how it works because what happens when we know that's what's at play is we,

We can start to just,

Well I don't know,

Something seems to reset when we start to know that there is something filtering out.

We start to open up our willingness almost to see something else,

To see the times when we're not anxious,

To see the times when we are resilient,

To see the times when there's wisdom coming through and we're feeling guided because when we know how the system works that is what happens,

It just happens automatically.

Now the way,

The way we are often being guided that we don't always see is through us,

Us,

Our feelings.

You know you're feeling,

If,

If you're feeling awful about yourself then that's a pretty good sign that there's some old belief at play there and you're feeling that thinking about yourself.

Like if you just feel,

Oh I'm a bit rubbish,

Don't feel very good.

Like as soon as I started saying that did you see how my whole body just went down?

You know I,

I'm,

I don't feel very good about myself.

Even just saying those words you can't not,

You can't go I don't feel very good about myself.

It just doesn't work does it?

It just looks ludicrous like you're somehow crazy and drunk.

So you can see that you know it drags you down.

Physically you go down.

So that's how you can be alerted to a belief that's in the way of you seeing your potential.

That's how you can notice them because you,

They feel awful.

So often when people talk to me they come into the session feeling awful and,

And luckily they usually go out feeling a lot better about themselves because that's what I want people to experience.

And we can experience that more,

More just by knowing that there's this system at play.

This system is creating your experience.

Thought in every moment is deleting you know the old NLP stuff delete distort generalize that's what it's doing all the time.

It's making up rules and applying them to your life without you knowing.

Once you know it's going on you can start to experience that really differently because you can see it at play.

And as I say your feelings are going to let you know it's at play because when you are thinking things that are not pleasant and not nice about you,

You feel terrible and you see the world through that lens.

It's not nice.

So confirmation bias just knowing it's happening is really helpful and I hope you found that helpful.

Lots of love.