How cognitive illusions prevent you from building the life you want (part 2A)
In the intro to this series, I told you how cognitive illusions systematically prevent people from building the lives they want…
By causing them to make decision after decision based on faulty thinking.
And how, once you know what these illusions are, you can combat them with signposts that let you know when you’re in the cognitive illusion zone…
And external structure to help you navigate through the illusion.
And in Part 1, we talked through the one cognitive illusion: Anchoring to the negative.
Today, we’re going to dive into Cognitive Illusion 2.
I’m going to be honest — this turned into a monster of a piece and I’m breaking it up into smaller chunks so it’s not too overwhelming.
Over the next three days, we’re going to cover:
How the illusion works and why it leads you to create the life you don’t want (that’s today)
How to combat the illusion (that’s tomorrow)
Some potential objections and pitfalls you might run into while trying to combat it (that’s on Thursday)
Let’s dive in.
Cognitive illusion 2: Trying to do it “right”
Let’s do a thought exercise.
Let’s say you took a college class with an amazing professor.
They were engaging. They were kind. They were inspiring. They made complex concepts simple.
They were always available for extra help when you needed it. They provided career advice and mentorship. They helped you get an internship in your chosen field.
They were the best teacher you’ve ever had.
At the end of the semester, you want to give them a gift as a token of your appreciation.
I want you evaluate how appropriate these two options feel.
Option 1: Does it feel appropriate to to buy them a $50 gift?
Option 2: Does it feel appropriate to walk up to them at the end of the last class and hand them $50 in cash?
Chances are, you had a visceral reaction to these questions.
Option 1 probably felt appropriate.
Maybe you wanted to spend more or less, or you weren’t sure exactly what you would buy them, or you feel a bit shy about giving people gifts.
But it feels socially appropriate to give a professor a gift.
Option 2 probably felt horrifying inappropriate.
It’s the same amount of money. But handing a college professor cash at the end of a class feels WRONG.
And you could probably articulate WHY it feels wrong if you wanted to.
(It’s probably something like: Handing them cash feels like you’re giving them a cash tip. Cash tips are for service workers like waiters or valet parkers. Giving a cash tip to a college professor feels like an insult, like you’re implying they’re a tip-based service worker or like they don’t have enough money.)
But here’s what’s amazing about your response to this thought exercise.
You’ve never thought about this scenario before.
And yet, you instantly, viscerally felt that Option 2 was inappropriate.
You didn’t come to that conclusion through logic. You didn’t have to draw out a flow chart or think deeply about the question.
You had an instant, inarguable feeling that this is just WRONG.
(You could explain the logic later, but the logic is retroactive. The feeling comes first. The logic explains the feeling afterward — it doesn’t create the feeling.)
And if I told you to go hand $50 in cash to your college professor, with no explanation, you would feel horrible and awkward and just plain WRONG before, during, and after.
Here’s what this thought exercise demonstrates:
Your automatic brain constructs detailed rulebooks without you even noticing.
You never consciously created “the rules of gift-giving.”
Your automatic brain created them for you, without any conscious intention or effort on your part.
You’ve just observed all the different ways gifts are given in your specific society and culture, and your brain created the rulebook.
And your brain didn’t just create “the rules of gift-giving.”
It’s also created a LOT of other rules.
Things like… (These are some of mine.)
“If you’re a woman, shave your legs before wearing shorts. If you’re a man, don’t.”
“Don’t leave the office before 5 pm.”
“Long silences in a conversation are awkward.”
“Have 2 kids. Not 0. Not 1. Not 3. But 2.”
For every area of your life and every environment you step into, your brain is ready with its automatic rulebook telling you what’s the appropriate, safe, correct thing to do.
When you break these rules, your automatic brain feels BAD.
Think about how painful it would be to walk up to your college professor and hand them $50 in cash as a gift.
Or how painful it would feel (as a woman in the US) to walk around with visibly unshaved legs.
Or how guilty you feel leaving the office early, even when you have a valid reason for it.
Or how awkward it feels to let a silence stretch out in a conversation.
Your automatic brain genuinely believes that it is dangerous for you to break the rules in the automatic rulebook. So it works very hard to prevent you from doing that.
Just like how your brain sends you physical pain signals when you do (or even THINK about doing) something it thinks is physically dangerous…
It sends you mental & emotional pain signals when you do (or even THINK about doing) something it thinks is socially dangerous.
Nothing is going wrong when this happens.
This is how your brain is supposed to work.
Consciously, manually figuring out the rules in EVERY scenario would take a massive amount of time and energy.
Creating the rulebook automatically and unconsciously saves us a ton of time and energy, which we can put toward other things.
And having strong negative feelings when you break those rules (or even THINK about breaking them) helps our groups and societies stay cohesive.
If everyone could do “inappropriate” things without any internal alarms going off and stopping them, our groups would fall apart very quickly.
So what’s the problem?
Why does trying to do it “right,” according to these automatic rulebooks, lead to you creating a life you hate?
First and most obviously, it kills your authenticity.
If you have any desires that go against the automatic rulebook, you just have to shut them down.
They’re wrong and bad and stupid and impractical and everyone would laugh at you, so just don’t do them.
In fact, you may not even know what your authentic desires are, because you’re so busy asking “How can I do it right?” that you never stopped to ask, “But do I WANT to do this? What do I think?”
It also shuts down your creative thinking.
The automatic rulebook is very black-and-white. This is right. This is wrong. End of story.
And when you’re busy trying to follow the rules, there’s very little room for creative thinking.
How can you leave before 5 pm…AND be a high performer at work?
How can you not have kids…AND have love, connection, and family in your life?
When you’re focused on doing it “right,” you don’t ask these kinds of win-win “how can I have both?” questions.
You’re so focused on winning inside the box that you don’t figure out how to break the box open and reconfigure its parts.
Meanwhile, the rules you’re so busy following are totally made up.
It’s not appropriate to hand someone cash as a gift…unless it’s Chinese New Years.
The appropriate time to leave work is 5 pm at some companies, 7 pm at others, and 2 am at others.
Some cultures believe you should be married by 30. Others don’t think marriage is that important at all, and lots of people live and have children with their long-term partners without ever marrying.
The rulebook your brain has constructed is based on a tiny, tiny corner of the world, in a tiny, tiny window of time.
It does NOT represent the entire world or any kind of objective truth.
And if you’re too busy trying to do it “right” according to one arbitrary rulebook, you’ll miss out on the chance to find (or create!) groups that live by different rules.
And there’s a high chance the rules are conflicting, nonsensical, and completely unfair.
I won’t spoil it for you in case you haven’t seen it yet, but the pivotal monologue in the Barbie movie caused me to instantly burst into tears because it named all the conflicting, impossible rules for women that I’ve absorbed from the society I live in.
All these conflicting, nonsensical, and completely unfair rules cause me to always feel like I’m doing something wrong because I can literally never fulfill all of them at once.
(You can read the monologue here.)
Women aren’t the only ones subject to conflicting, nonsensical, and completely unfair rules. Men are too.
(My pet theory is that any system that oppresses people without power oppresses the people in power too.
Because if you’ve built a group or a society with “better people” and “worse people”…
Everyone in the “better people” category now has to do all this shit to maintain their status, lest they risk becoming one of the “worse people.”
This is true whether your better & worse groups are men & women, white & black, rich & poor, productive & lazy, etc. etc.
It’s a trap for everyone.
And human brains are wired to create in-groups and out-groups ALL the time, so chances are, whatever society or group you’re in has this better people/worse people dynamic in it somewhere.)
So to summarize…
Trying to do it “right”…
Aka blindly believing the rulebook your brain has automatically constructed and then trying to get an A+ on those rules…
Kills your authentic values and desires AND the creative problem-solving required to live in accordance with them…
All for the sake of rules that are, at best, arbitrary and, at worst, impossibly unfair.
Which is why the cognitive illusion of “If I can just do it right, I’ll belong / be safe / be liked / be loved / be good enough / etc.”…
…leads people to create lives they don’t want.
How to actually combat this illusion is coming up tomorrow.
And if you’re reading all this and going “Oh crap, I totally do this. And it’s totally causing me to build a life I don’t want.”
You might be wondering…
How do you stop?
And if you’re not trying to do it “right” all the time…what ARE you trying to do?
Those are questions we can tackle together in coaching.
In the Barbie movie (slight spoiler ahead), the Barbies just had to gain awareness of the conflicting rules of the patriarchy.
As soon as they SAW it, they didn’t feel confined by the rules anymore, and they knew exactly what to do next.
The real world (in my experience) doesn’t quite work like that.
You can be AWARE of how conflicting and messed up the rules are…
But you still need to REPLACE them with something else.
And you need to PRACTICE operating by your own playbook instead of by the automatic rulebook — which can be pretty scary until you get the hang of it.
That’s what we do in coaching.
We’ll work together to develop YOUR personalized playbook — the one that can replace the automatic rulebook your brain picked up from society.
We’ll address all the fears and concerns your brain brings up in a structured, thoughtful way — so they go from vague feelings floating in your head to resolved, DONE, and you never have to think about them again.
And most importantly, we’ll strategize on how to create a safe way to put your new way of being into practice.
No jumping off the deep end and shocking your system. One small step at a time, in small, safe arenas, until you’re ready for the next step.
And when things go sideways (which they inevitably will at some point), we troubleshoot what happened and figure out what you want to adjust.
And we get enough reps of this process that, by the time we’re done, you know how to keep doing it for yourself, for life.
So let’s go :)
⬅️ Part 1 || Part 2B ➡️
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