I was corresponding with someone recently about the Impostor Syndrome, the feeling some people have that their successes are due to luck or oversight and that they’re likely to be identified as a fraud and cast out at any moment.

It’s not unusual even for those of us who don’t have a regular problem with Impostor Syndrome to have those feelings from time to time. When I was in high school, I auditioned on bass clarinet for the All New England Music Festival, an event that accepts only the most skilled and able high school musicians. My rehearsals with my accompanyist leading up to the audition were terrible: I wasn’t practicing consistently, and the audition piece was naturally very difficult. I practiced very hard for the last couple of days, but the chance of avoiding extreme embarrassment seemed low. I obsessed about the audition, showed up at the appointed time, went in … and nailed it. I played the piece magnificently. My accompanyist looked at me as though I had grown antennae. I got the highest score of any bass clarinetist who auditioned (admittedly, not as difficult as being the best flutist or trumpet player, but not easy either) and had my pick of positions at the event.

Of course, I felt like a complete impostor. When I arrived at New Englands, I more or less held my own, but I wasn’t as good as the other bass clarinetists there and clearly hadn’t practiced as much, either. For years I regarded that audition as a fluke. It wasn’t until very recently I understood what had really happened.

The key realization was that usually when you’re credited with doing something, it’s because you actually did it. At the audition where I got the great score for my playing, I actually played that well. That was not a fluke in the sense that it is impossible to accidentally play a complicated piece on the bass clarinet well. What probably happened was that I immersed myself so much in desperate practice those last few days that I got into a flow state regarding my playing and was able to play at the very peak of my ability–whereas those who had been practicing all along wouldn’t have needed to obsess over the last couple of days. About 16 years later, I attended the New England Folk Festival (NEFFA) in Natick, Massachusetts and did barely anything but play music for two days. By the second day, I was playing far better than I thought I possibly could, because again I had reached that flow state.

So the fact that I happened to be in that flow state at the time of the audition was a bit of a fluke: I hadn’t been trying for it or even known it existed. But the fact that I was capable of that flow state was no fluke at all. I had, after all, been practicing for years, and had enough love of music to put my heart into it sometimes. Was there luck involved? Yes. In an entirely just world (which of course we don’t live in), would I have been the top-ranked bass clarinetists at New Englands that year? Heck no. But could I under the right circumstances actually play that well? Yes. The things we accomplish rarely fall into our laps.

That’s the irony of Impostor Syndrome, actually: fear of being found out sometimes drives people to work much harder to “cover” for their “shortcomings,” which means they get better and better at the things they think they’re being overappreciated at. As Geoff Colvin and others explain very well, the people who do really well at things are the ones who practice the most.

The question becomes not one of how much we deserve for what we’ve done so far, but instead how we can repeat and build on our best successes in the past.

Photo by MissTessmacher

This is the fourth in a series of articles that draw on the field of schema therapy, an approach to addressing negative thinking patterns that was devised by Dr. Jeffrey Young. There’s more information about schemas and schema therapy on a new page on The Willpower Engine here.

I don’t know about people in other part of the world, but we in America have a weird relationship with criticism. Some parents criticize their children constantly, while others are afraid to criticize them at all. While I think it goes a little too far to be supportive when a kid is merrily scribbling away on the brand new coffee table with permanent marker, the parents who are worried about criticism are worried for good reason: criticize a kid too much, and they may deal with it by developing a defectiveness schema. If you already know you’re defective, maybe it doesn’t hurt as much when people keep telling you that.

The defectiveness schema
Of course, feelings of defectiveness and inadequacy don’t translate very easily to a healthy life. Someone with a defectiveness schema might be overly defensive and never willing to hear themselves criticized–or they might go to the other extreme and always assume everything’s their own fault. Either way, there’s a basic broken idea here, namely “I’m inferior and defective.” This kind of broken idea is called “labeling” (is it weird that there’s a label for it?).

Another problem with the defectiveness schema is that people in its grip may feel that they are in danger of being “found out”–that people who get too close to them will discover that they are fundamentally flawed and leave, and that therefore no one must ever be allowed to get close.  (You might notice a trend of the schemas I’ve covered so far being ones where people are scared to let others get or stay close; that’s because we’re beginning with the set of schemas that deal with disconnection and rejection.)

Overcoming a defectiveness schema
As with any mental schema, the key to overcoming it is overturning, time and time again, the broken ideas it encourages. This means consciously replacing the thought “I don’t deserve this” with “I’m not perfect, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t have this thing that I want” or the thought “If I get close to this person, they’ll find out about all of my shortcomings and leave me” with “I can’t know for sure how someone will act in different situations; this person may or may not end up liking ‘the real me.'”

Repairing broken ideas often takes the form of acceptance, especially acceptance of the possibility of either good or bad things happening. People with defectiveness schemas will benefit from learning to accept even those things they dislike about themselves, and also from accepting that bad things may happen–or that good things can happen too, if those good things are given enough of a chance.

Photo by McBeth

Here’s a pretty easy way to see me rail against injustice: introduce me to someone who was turned off to music in childhood by some music teacher, “expert,” or know-it-all family member who said that person didn’t have the talent for it. These kinds of judgments drive me a little crazy, because even though music is just a spare time activity for me, I get enormous pleasure out of it, and I think a lot of people who don’t consider themselves musical would probably love to do the same if they had the “talent.” The thing is, they always had all the talent they needed.

If you’ve read my article “Do you have enough talent to become great at it?,” one of my first posts on this site, you already know that there’s an avalanche of scientific evidence that talent as it’s usually thought of simply doesn’t exist. (If you find yourself scoffing at this claim, go read the article and judge for yourself! Better yet, read Geoffrey Colvin’s excellent book Talent is Overrated or Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers.) When we see someone for whom playing the violin is as natural as drinking water or who can reconstruct entire chess games move by move, we may naturally imagine that their skill is a gift–but this isn’t the case. What we’re seeing is the result of tons and tons of good practice.

So if people are only good at things after a lot of quality practice, then that means that everyone who is really good at something went through a long period when they really weren’t that good at all. Oh sure, they might have been told they were good because they were screeching out “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” on a 1/4 size violin at the age of 4, but the fact of the matter is that “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” was being beaten to death, and that just because it was still struggling weakly and hadn’t yet succumbed, that doesn’t mean it was beautifully played.

I mean to say that every current genius or virtuouso was once a talentless hack. If they were clever enough to get through the talentless hack phase while they were still so young that nobody criticized them, they were lucky, but it doesn’t mean they were any less of a talentless hack at the time.

Similarly, the early work of great writers and composers is rarely original or good. Even Mozart’s first works were all just rearranging other composer’s themes. (Pretty clever, actually, since that means that he’d be learning quickly and his music would sound good even though he hadn’t yet learned how to reliably assemble a decent theme of his own.) Certainly my early writing efforts were derivative, painful drivel–although I thought at the time that they were genius, and I undertook them early enough that they at least came across as a little precocious.

If you are an artist of some stripe, you’re probably hoping even at the early stages of your development that you have some originality, and in fact you might: we all have different backgrounds and sensibilities, and possibly yours is different enough from others who have come before you that you start out with something unusual to say or an unusual way to say it. But even if you later find some of your early works weren’t as singular as they seemed, keep in mind that the road to originality and genius is paved, as it were, with hackwork.

Photo by nathanrussell. The kid in the photo might be really good by now for all I know, but you get the idea.

An article this month on the British Psychological Society blog had this to say about confidence: it can make us into suckers if we’re not careful.

The article was based on a recent paper by Loran F. Nordgren, Frenk van Harreveld, and Joop van der Pligt, which examined four studies of confidence and self-control. The process of falling prey to overconfidence goes something like this:

How to be overconfident, step by step
1. Something happens to make a person (let’s call him Daryl) feel confident about how much self-control he has in a particular area. For instance, maybe Daryl is told he’s been very diplomatic in a difficult conversation, or he has some reason to think he’s done more studying for an upcoming exam than his classmates.

2. Daryl is presented with a choice that offers different levels of temptation: for instance, as a smoker who just quit, he might have the chance to sit around talking with other smokers or to avoid them when they’re smoking; or if he’s watching what he eats, he might have the option of bringing either cookies or salad to a pot luck.

3. Feeling confident of his self-control, Daryl takes the path with more temptation. Why should he care, since he has such great self-control?

4. Taking the path of more temptation, not surprisingly, Daryl’s more than likely to succumb to temptation. By being more confident, he’s overstressed his self-control.

Willpower is something we do, not something we have
The reason that Daryl’s situation and the research that the British Psychological Society cites shouldn’t surprise us has to do with a basic misunderstanding our culture tends to have about willpower. We talk about having willpower, as though it were a basic, unchangeable trait, probably inborn or at the very least set in early childhood. If a person has had self-control in one area, the thinking goes, then they should always have self-control in other areas, too.

The problem is that willpower isn’t a basic trait at all: it’s a skill. Some elements of that skill can be applied to many situations, but many other elements are specific to each area where they apply, and they only work when used. For instance, maybe Daryl got in more studying than his classmates because he planned more time for studying in advance than most of them did. If this is the case, then the best way to get in more studying is not to be Daryl, but to plan the way Daryl planned. If Daryl mistakenly thinks he’s just the kind of guy who always gets in more studying and consequently plans less time to study than he would have otherwise, he’s setting himself up for failure by thinking of himself as a success.

How to avoid the trap of overconfidence
The practical idea we can take away from this is this: any time we’re successful at something that involves willpower, we will get the most out of that success if we reflect on it and figure out what it was we did that helped. If that success gives us more confidence, that can be helpful as long as we remember that the success was tied to doing things a particular way, and that repeating that success will require the same or comparable tactics.

Photo by swannman

The following are not my actual thoughts, I’m happy to say. However, they do demonstrate the different kinds of broken ideas. Each of them could be repaired.

So I know this post is going to suck¹, but … wait, you must already be thinking I’m a complete idiot if I say my post is going to suck². No, no, I shouldn’t be telling myself I know what you’re thinking³! And I shouldn’t say “shouldn’t!” Oh man, I did it again, I’m such a dork⁴! No, hold on, I can’t call myself a dork in my own post, that’s awful, that ruins the entire post. ⁵ It ruins the entire site⁶! And if this site sucks, my entire life sucks⁷! And this post is making me sick, which means it must suck⁸. Writing like this ruins all of my posts⁹. People may tell me they like my posts sometimes, but that’s just because they pity me¹⁰. If I didn’t suck, people would always leave comments¹¹. I think I’ll go eat dirt¹².

¹ Fortune telling
² Mind reading
³ Should statement
⁴ Labeling
⁵ All-or-nothing thinking
⁶ Magnification/minimization
⁷ Overgeneralization
⁸ Emotional reasoning
⁹ Mental filtering
¹⁰ Disqualifying the positive
¹¹ Personalization
¹² Actually, this isn’t a broken idea, because there’s nothing unrealistic about deciding to eat dirt if you really want to. However, I think personally I’ll pass.

Photo by Freekz0r

Let’s say someone has been working on losing weight, but over Thanksgiving gave up and ate way, way too much. Or they were going to write 50,000 words this November for NaNoWriMo, yet here it is a few days from the end and they’re only 28,000 words in. Or they’ve gone back on a promise, done something they had vowed to stop doing, failed to stick with a new habit that they really wanted to keep up, or in any other way completely wiped out.

Often in situations like this, we’ll start telling ourselves in one way or another that whatever plans we have are now ruined. The promise is broken, the diet has failed, the project has flopped. It’s easy to lose all enthusiasm at this point and give up, to conclude that people who are successful at achieving difficult goals don’t have these kinds of setbacks. That conclusion would be wrong.

It’s true that failures on the way to a goal can cause a more than their share of trouble. If I’m trying to build a new habit, interruptions to the thing I’m trying to make habitual will make it take longer for the habit to form. If I suffer a setback, it can often create additional obstacles, because slip-ups erode momentum in the same way that taking initiative builds momentum.

Yet it’s clearly typical–in fact, I’d hazard a guess that it’s almost inevitable–for a person to have some failures on the way to successfully building a new habit or pursuing a goal if that goal is sufficiently challenging. For example, according to the American Cancer Society, “most of those who attempt [to quit smoking] cannot do it on the first try. In fact, smokers usually need many tries — sometimes as many as 8 to 10 — before they are able to quit for good.”

Another way to put it, as strange as it may sound, is that the kind of person most likely to succeed at a goal is someone who has already been working on it but has failed one or more times.

Yet knowing this probably doesn’t make you automatically feel like a winner. What will do that is getting back to working on your goal right away. It’s easy to fall for reasoning like “I’ve blown it anyway–a little more won’t hurt” or “I’ll recharge my batteries before I take another crack at it,” but that kind of logic is usually flawed, because whenever we let a setback “give you permission” to stick with old, bad habits for a while, or to stop something we were working on, we are strengthening and refreshing the behaviors we don’t want and letting the behaviors we do want fade in our minds. The neural connections we’re building by prolonging the interruption will make it easier to make wrong choices and harder to make right choices. We’re also often doing more damage that will have to be repaired once we get back on track, making restarting even harder.

We can learn from setbacks by analyzing what went wrong and coming up with ways to act differently in future. And we can cut off failures, keeping them to the shortest span possible, so that they become just blips on the graph. In practical terms, all a setback does is take away a little progress and lower our spirits. We can gain that ground back and raise our spirits at the same time by renewing our plans to pursue our goals and not letting the problems claim any more of our lives than they have to.

Photo from Cornell University Library.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve heard a lot of advice over time warning me not to push too hard at anything: “You have to ease into it” … “Moderation in all things” … “One step at a time.” It’s folk wisdom, founded in neither exceptional experience nor careful examination of the facts, and in many cases following it will ruin your chances at making any real progress toward your goals.

That’s not to say that there aren’t ways that moderation applies. For instance, trying to pay a lot of attention to more than one thing at a time is a doomed approach to making big changes in your life. Also, it’s sometimes necessary to take things in steps for safety’s sake, like not trying to go directly from no exercise program to extremely intense workouts. Apart from that, it’s just plain bad advice, and there are five reasons that’s so.

1. The status quo likes to be kept
The habits you already have, the situation you’re already in, and the choices you’re used to making are deeply ingrained. We’ve piled on connections in our brains to strengthen certain behaviors–these are our habits–and those strong behaviors need a lot of effort to overcome. The people in our lives expect us to act certain ways and may get anxious or even interfere if we change, even if we change in a healthy way. Activities we’re not used to turn out to have complications we haven’t solved yet and requirements we didn’t know about. Even a body that’s used to maintaining or increasing fat stores has physical mechanisms to prevent losing those fat stores too easily. If we want to overcome these obstacles, the most effective approach is usually to push hard–not to try something small and see if it makes an impact, because often it won’t.

2. Habits form much more quickly when behaviors are repeated close together
I’ve mentioned in a post about habit formation that in a study designed to determine how long it took people to form new habits, the only people who were actually successful at forming new habits during the study period were those who repeated the desired behavior virtually every single day. It is possible to form a habit by doing something three times a week or every four or five days, but it will take much, much longer than if you do that thing daily, and the results will take much longer to show.

3. Intense work on a goal provides quicker rewards
One of the problems with trying to change habits or pursue a goal is that often it’s hard to see whether we’re making progress, and if so, how much. This can easily lead to discouragement and apathy. By contrast, if we throw ourselves into working on a goal, the results are faster, more dramatic, and more motivating.

4. Immersion fosters momentum, focus, and smarter choices
When we are very active with something, working hard at it, we become immersed in that activity: we think about it more, we tend to become more committed to it, and we become more aware of opportunities. We also create momentum. For example, a writer who writes every day doesn’t have to spend the first part of each writing session brushing up on what went before, getting plans back in mind, etc.: the memories of the work are fairly fresh and therefore more detailed and easier to access.

When we’re more involved in a goal and therefore thinking about it more, we also make more connections in our minds regarding the goal and think of more ways to further our intentions.

5. Hard work makes goals into rules
I’ve talked elsewhere about how rules promote better self-control. The short version is this: if you have a rule that you’re trying to follow, and if the rule is well-designed, then whenever the rule applies, your choice is both clear-cut and obvious.

Of course, having a rule doesn’t automatically mean you’ll follow that rule all the time, but it does make it much more likely than if you didn’t have a rule. Without rules, we tend to talk ourselves into sticking with the behaviors we’re used to more often, which is not an effective way to change habits or improve our lives.

Doing hard work on a goal every day takes a lot of the waffling out of choices about that goal. For example, if I decide to do 30 minutes of filing in my office every day until my files are pristine, then I never have to ask myself “Should I do some filing today? I don’t know … there’s so much other stuff I need to get done …” Instead, I simply ask myself when I’m going to start. A lot of the nonsense gets brushed aside.

Sound extreme?
Does this kind of no-moderation approach sound extreme? If so, you’ve understood me perfectly. Extreme effort has a much better chance of providing meaningful progress than trying to ease in slowly, and yes, it can be a lot to get used to at first. But if you’ve ever had trouble making real progress toward a goal, ask yourself how hard you’ve pushed. If you’ve tried taking it easy on yourself, consider trying again–and this time not holding anything back. For most of us, going flat out will result in some discomfort, but the same is true even of moderate approaches. With an extreme approach, much of the early effort will pay off even if things aren’t done perfectly, and you won’t be left wondering any more whether change is possible, because you’ll see the evidence in front of you.

Photo by renatela

I’m continuing to enjoy reading Dr. Daniel Kirschenbaum’s The 9 Truths About Weight Loss, which contains a lot of very pointed and useful information about diet, exercise, and getting fit. Interestingly, it also points out some of the side benefits of these subjects, and in one place particularly, Kirschenbaum lists 50 meaningful benefits exercise provides, most of which have nothing to do with weight loss, and some of which have a lot to do with self-motivation.

I was already aware of most of these benefits, but it had never occurred to me to list out all the ones I knew, and the effect of Kirschenbaum doing so was impressive. Taking his list for inspiration, I’d like to point out 17 benefits of exercise on mood, motivation, and willpower, many of them paraphrased from Kirschenbaum’s list.

Regular exercise …

1. can provide an uninterrupted opportunity to think
2. relieves stress, while helping to prevent future stress
3. stimulates release of endorphins, brain chemicals that promote feelings of happiness and well-being (this is sometimes known as “runner’s high”)
4. improves social opportunities–and the people you meet when you exercise tend to be happier, better-balanced, more reliable, and more proactive people than the general population due to the effects of regular exercise in their lives
5. improves self-esteem, self-image, and confidence
6. promotes self-awareness if done without distractions
7. fights depression, both temporary and chronic
8. reduces anxiety
9. improves sleep, making you better-rested and more focused
10. contibutes to greater energy and alertness
11. increases endurance for non-exercise activities, both physical (for instance, housework) and mental
12. helps reduce pain and weakness that might otherwise get in the way of other activities
13. improves our ability to relax quickly
14. promotes clear thinking
15. improves willpower through practice
16. makes it possible to get a larger perspective on other parts of our lives
17. provides a model for self-improvement in other areas

Of course, exercise is also nearly indispensable if you’re seeking weight loss and has many non-weight-loss-related health benefits, such as lowering blood pressure and triglycerides, improving cardiovascular health, preventing problems with posture as we age, extending lifespan, lessening back pain, improving digestion, improving cholesterol levels, preventing osteoperosis, and many others.

As long as I’m plugging exercise, I’ll also mention that not only does strenuous exercise get progressively easier and more pleasurable as you go from trying it out to doing it regularly, but it also doesn’t even have to be strenuous to provide good effects. For example, both in terms of mood and weight loss (two of exercise’s greatest benefits) walking alone, done very regularly and preferably for at least 30 minutes at a time, can yield enormous returns.

The most impressive benefits of exercise start when you exercise at least 3 times a week for 30 minutes or longer each time, and they increase dramatically if you exercise every day or close to it (for aerobic exercise: strength exercise seems to work best if you give that a resting day between days you work out).

Photo by Sean Dreilinger

In previous articles, I gave a general introduction to broken ideas and talked about how to detect them. In this article, we’ll take a look at a process that lets us repair broken ideas, removing obstacles to self-motivation and willpower.

Idea repair is serious medicine
In an array of psychological studies, idea repair (known in the literature as “cognitive restructuring,” “cognitive behavioral therapy” (CBT), and by other names) has proven effective against a wide variety of problems, including anxiety (including social anxiety), depression, repeat offenses by convicted felons, and many other issues.

Idea repair is not the same as “positive thinking”
Just to clarify what idea repair is and isn’t, I’d like to point out how it’s different from simply “thinking positively.” Positive thinking would direct a student who’s worried about failing a test to tell herself, “I will pass this test!” This may in some cases help with immediate mood, but it’s not necessarily any more realistic than the broken idea “I won’t pass this test.” Idea repair requires looking at situations realistically and in terms of what we really can do in our lives to make things better. If the student were to use idea repair, she might change the thought “I’m going to fail this test, and it will be awful!” to “It’s possible I’ll fail this test, and if I do, I’ll deal with it.”Assuming that she already knows whether she’ll pass or fail doesn’t do much to motivate her to improve her chances: instead, it tends to make the outcome look like it has nothing to do with her actions. Taking a realistic view, on the other hand, gives her the tools to face her situation and do something positive about it.

Identify the broken piece
In order to fix a broken idea, we have to first know how it’s broken. I go into this in some detail in the detection article, where I describe the 11 kinds of broken ideas. (You may sometimes hear a different count based on grouping them slightly differently; the list is based on Dr. David Burns’ cognitive distortion list, which is generally given as 10-15 items.)

Examples:

• “Everybody thinks my dancing looks stupid.” (mind reading)
• “He’s just saying I’m a dedicated worker because he has to say something positive in the review.” (disqualifying the positive)
• “I’m scared something will happen to him. He’ll probably be in a car accident.” (emotional reasoning)

Notice that these ideas aren’t necessarily impossible: they’re just assuming too much, in a way that tends to make it harder to take positive action.

Rephrase the idea in a strictly truthful way
When repairing a broken idea, it’s necessary to take out all guesswork, undo exaggeration, and include all the facts that matter. Restating a broken idea into a repaired idea is often a source of immediate relief, because it allows us to stop battling ourselves.

Repaired examples:

• “I’m worried that other people may judge me negatively because of my dancing.”
• “My performance review had some discouraging parts in it, but he did compliment my dedication.”
• “Just because I feel scared doesn’t mean that there’s anything to be scared about.”

When repaired ideas break again
Repaired ideas tend to bring some immediate relief, but we tend to have some of the same kinds of broken ideas in many situations over time. Unfortunately, repairing a broken idea doesn’t mean that it won’t come back broken later. So what’s the point of repairing them?

There are at least two major benefits to idea repair even when broken ideas keep coming back. First, there’s the immediate relief in the situation in which the idea has been repaired. And second, repairing an idea over and over will eventually make the broken idea come back less often and less severely, and consistent effort has a good chance of getting rid of a broken idea permanently.

Photo by A Sheer Moisturizing Experience

Some of the most powerful obstacles to self-motivation are broken ideas (or “cognitive distortions,” to use the formal term). A broken idea is any false thought that makes it harder to solve problems constructively. An introduction to them can be read here.

Examples of broken ideas
1. A man has been applying for jobs, but isn’t getting any interviews. He thinks “No one wants to hire me. I’m going to run out of money and be homeless.” This kind of thinking will make it harder for him to be motivated to apply for more positions, and he will tend to come across as less confident and positive to potential employers when he does have contact with them.

2. A mother is late dropping her children off to school, then has can’t get the car started when she tries to leave the school. She concludes “This day is a disaster.” This puts her in a pessimistic frame of mind, so that she tends not to do things that would make her day better and to interpret events in the worst possible light. (For more on this specific situation, see my articles Having a Bad Day? Here’s Why and How to Stop Having a Bad Day.)

The Red Flag
Detecting that a broken idea is in place is easy in the sense that, if you’re feeling bad, there’s a very good chance you’re nurturing one or more broken ideas. Being willing to pay attention to your own thinking does take some effort, which you can help bring out of yourself by committing to being mindful of your thinking in bad situations. It’s often harder to do this because of mood congruity, which gets in the way of imagining better times when we’re experiencing negative emotions. Fortunately, since we generally don’t like feeling bad, we’re often also driven to seek relief, which idea repair can provide.

Finding the broken idea
Identifying the broken idea requires reflecting on what we’ve been telling ourselves, whether mentally or (and this often easier) by writing it down. If you’re not sure what you’ve been telling yourself, start by writing down your present thoughts about the situation: broken ideas tend to persist as long as the mood they cause. This makes it possible to examine thoughts and figure out where they’re broken.

But What if The Broken Idea Is True?
Broken ideas are generally false (or at best, nothing more than a pessimistic guess), and they fall into specific categories of falsehoods. It’s easy to mistake them as truth because they often seem plausible: the job applicant might not find a job soon if he keeps searching in the way he is now. The mother’s experiences so far in her day have been unpleasant.  Yet short of having supernatural powers, neither one of them can infallibly predict what will happen going forward, and both of them are taking a small number of incidents and imagining that they describe a large, absolute pattern.

Categories of broken ideas
To identify a broken idea, compare it to these categories. Devised by Dr. David Burns, they not only make it easier to spot a broken idea: they also supply the solution in a way described in more detail in Wednesday’s post.

• All-or-nothing thinking: Seeing situations in black or white; thinking in absolutes.
• Overgeneralization: Taking separate incidents, like rejected job applications or being late, and concluding that they’re controlled by a large, unvarying pattern.
• Mental filtering: Putting all one’s attention on negative qualities.
• Disqualifying the positive: Dismissing good factors in a situation.
• Mind reading: Making sweeping assumptions about what other people are thinking.
• Fortune telling: Making assumptions about how the future will turn out.
• Magnification and minimization: Exaggerating information, often to support a negative viewpoint, for instance exaggerating someone else’s positive qualities to make yourself look worse or their negative qualities in order to make them look like a villain.
• Emotional reasoning: Assuming that because something feels like it’s true, it is true.
• Should statements: Imagining that the way we want things to be has direct influence over how things really are. Often involves anger at other people for not acting the way we would make them act if we were in control of them.
• Labeling: Using words to generalize or explain a person or situation in a way that’s misleading or incomplete.
• Personalization: Exaggerating our idea of how much a situation relates to ourselves; taking responsibility or blame for things that are not in our control.

Wednesday: Repairing Broken Ideas
Once we’ve identified a broken idea, we can work on repairing it. My follow-up article addresses this step by step.

Photo by johndan