4 Simple Tips to Improve Your Thinking

That also pay off in your relationships

The most important thing on the journey of personal growth is that there should be progress. So long as you keep moving forward you will reach your destination; but if you stop moving you will never reach it. Not every change is an improvement — but every improvement is a change.

For instance, you can’t become stronger by holding on to the same beliefs you started out with.

Unfortunately, each of us thinks that on any given subject our thinking habits are already quite good. Our views are the product of a dispassionate, realistic accounting of the world. They are objective.

This is a thing, psychologists call it ‘naïve realism,’ and it’s a problem you have whether you know it or not.

It’s significantly slowing you down in your quest for a better you.

Being that confident in your own opinions stops you from replacing bad thinking habits with more effective ones. If they are already objective and realistic, how can they be wrong?

Specifically, your naïve realism limits your ability to learn from (a) experiences and (b) others.

In this essay, I’d like to share a few techniques I use to get better at (a) truth-seeking and (b) constructive disagreement.

In a nutshell, your mission for today is this. Your gut feelings want to make you believe that your impressions are the result of a neutral accounting of reality. You must learn to distrust these appraisals.

In doing so, the first step is to internalize one hard truth. While your way of thinking seems intuitive and blatantly clear to you, these intuitions are overselling your opinions. What pretends to be inspired by reality actually stems from your personal idiosyncrasies. What seem like unquestionable deliverances from your senses and faculty of reason are often entirely optional assumptions.

Your gut is tricking you into mistaking opinion for fact.

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