Cognitive Bias

*This post came from the Steve Pavlina forum before it closed down. I am not the original author.


OK, so far we've dealt with the emotions, whose blocks were placed on you by others; and beliefs, which you are the originator of, through your experiences. Now we'll talk about bias, which by definition affects all of us. These were given to you by nature, they're the artifacts of evolution. Those of us who can escape our monkey brains are afforded great power in life.

Unfortunately, this is the murkiest and least responsive of blocks. Working with them requires a great deal of ability in dealing with the meta aspects of thought. Earning lasting improvement from work in this area is an order of magnitude tougher than either of the other two levels of blocks.

If you've been posting here awhile you might have realized that only the people with clear wants and desires from their realities end up getting anywhere. Desire is a potent catalyst of growth, and some people have the desire in spades.

This is but one of the cognitive biases we must overcome. How do you fervently want to change, so fervently that you overcome lots of obstacles and get there anyway? Nobody was born with intense desire, the ability to seems to have been blessed upon certain individuals, with no seemingly easy way to get it when you don't have it.

The reality is, so much of what we feel we have no control over, we actually have so much control over that it's scary. Any one of us could gain a desire so powerful it drives us to put our most vulnerable selves, those we hold desperately on to, online, exposed to the eyes of total strangers, and gain commensurate benefits from being willing to alter those selves.

I'll give another example. That of public speaking. It might look as if my posts here are effortless and I'm immune to criticism and silent censure, but I'm not. I get almost as nervous as anybody else would when I speak authoritatively to a crowd. I'm simply better at hiding it.

This fear is a cognitive bias which affects us all. We were all blessed with personalities that allow us to do some things better than others. I spent most of my time growing up around girls, so I have no fear of approaching one and starting a conversation with her. Others, not so much.

All of these things have common roots. Nature made these things harder for us. Consequently, those able to overcome these biases gain great power in life. Those able to overcome the fear of going up on stage can become actors beloved by all. Those able to overcome their fear of approaching women end up courted on all sides by them.

To gain the ability when you don't have the natural gift for it is what this essay is about. It's not too hard to act in a way belying our natures once or twice. But to do this as if it were a normal, every day, action, like I've learned how to speak authoritatively, requires the sort of clarity of mind and vision I spoke about in my limiting belief thread. 

Your emotions simply cannot not affect your ability to act; you cannot be repressed in any way. If you have not yet released your repression on fear, then you absolutely need to go read part one and allow your fear to reach full expression, such that you reach the other side of it. Otherwise you will never gain traction. This is the stuff of powerful men and women, and if your emotions are still ruling you, then the side effects of true power will destroy you even should you succeed. History is littered with the stories of powerful people whose emotions ended up ruining them.

But eliminating your repression isn't enough to allow you to dictate your reality in this way. You must also gain the resolution of vision that comes from clearing away a large number of limiting beliefs. Without the clarity of being able to see how each individual event affects the next, you'll never gain the freedom of mind that will let you choose courses of action that gain you power. You, quite literally, won't know where to start. Your mind will require ideas that it won't be able to generate. Clearing away limiting beliefs will grant you a lucidity that will propel you to great power.

If you followed part two closely, you know now that a belief is a feeling you have about the relationship between similar events. A bias is exactly the same thing, only it affects us at a deeper level. So if you clear the higher level limiting beliefs, soon you'll get to a point where you'll be stuck. You won't know how or where to proceed. You'll make some half-hearted attempts at gaining real power, but for whatever reason, you'll fail, and instead stagnate at a level that's very comfortable for you to be in, but not passionate.

To bust through that level you need to gain an appreciation for the value of your ego. At levels before the one you're looking to enter, the ego is a source of blocks, your grand thoughts about yourself silly and childish. At this level, you need your ego back, because your ego is also your drive. You will need to validate that part of yourself that wants things for its own sake. You will need to un-repress your egotism, in exactly the same way you earlier un-repressed anger. All of your negative traits start gaining new value. You really start to become a whole person, light and dark, good and evil. You see how even the most darkest of elements end up driving people to become better.

That's when everything changes. None of your previous worries will affect you anymore, because now they're momentary lapses in judgment, to be ignored in favor of greater expression. You'll gain the willpower to do things people have always said you needed to do, but you always found excuses or just believed that you couldn't. Finding time to practice your instrument doesn't seem all that hard anymore. You'll be able to organize your life with a resolution, deliberateness and clarity that you've never seen before. When you read things, you won't care so much about what "resonates" with you or not, you'll see clearly where they're coming from and what truth they're speaking. Right and wrong will seem like concepts as archaic as slide rules, because everything you do will affect the universe positively.

Because this level is so powerful, a lot of systems and teachers will try to get you to attack these lower-level blocks before you even gain an appreciation for how debilitating the higher level ones are. The Law of Attraction is one, Steve's Subjective Reality is another. Nobody with emotional repression or piles of limiting beliefs will be able to make either of these work. 

The harsh fact is, they don't need the benefits of these systems, they need to learn how to feel good about themselves. If you can't make the Law of Attraction work for you, chances are you're emotionally repressed in some fashion. If you weren't, and you understood how limiting beliefs work, then you'd see that the Law is always in effect. You're always manifesting something, and you're currently dealing right now with everything you've manifested in your life, ever. It's not something you turn on or turn off, it's something to tune and tweak and to just keep in mind.