Pride and Prejudice

You're Biased!

Now, before you go off in a huff and rant against my assertion do, please, let me explain. Everyone has biases. Actually, you have to or else your brain would drain all of your energy.

Power and Purpose

The purpose of this guide is to allow you to be aware of your own biases and those of others - NOT TO FIX THEM! - That is NOT your job. Your awareness will enable you to re-frame your communications and be prepared to challenge unwarranted assumptions or faulty thinking - with love and kindness.

The power of your payoff when you put this into action will be to listen much more deeply and effectively and communicate with empathy and clarity for mutual understanding.

Key questions to be considering as you read, watch or listen to this AdvantEdge Coaching Guide:

* What is the ONE thing you will stop doing, start doing or change how you behave or act that will have the greatest impact on your leadership performance from your learning here?

* What is the single, tiniest step you can take immediately that will begin that improvement and by when?

What is Prejudice?

Prejudice is one example of cognitive bias that is most often a preconceived, unfavourable opinion about another person or group. Indeed this is known as the “In-Group” or “Out-Group” Bias. It enables you to judge another person almost instantly based on very limited data. Which is very efficient but often seriously flawed. Yet, we all have them.

Blame your parents, upbringing, society, politicians, culture, race, language, tv, Hollywood, the Interweb, FaceBook... whatever you like, you still have biases.

Some biases are potentially helping you make better, quicker decisions, others could be, and almost certainly are, undermining your true power and potential.

But I’m not biased!

You already know that everyone else you meet is biased right? (That’s your confirmation bias kicking in by the way.) Especially those people who disagree with you or have a different political or religious viewpoint. So are you and everyone else is too because your brain HAS to be biased.

Your brain hates ambiguity and uncertainty! And, it is willing to take short cuts to remove it from the situation. If there's insufficient information to go on you will use whatever is available and unconsciously fill in the blanks from your memories and beliefs until you recognise a pattern and come (jump) to an internal representation.

It’s one way that your brain saves you precious energy and stress and saves time making decisions.

If we were to allow our brains to take in all the available information, process it, evaluate it objectively and make a decision. Well, that speeding vehicle would have wiped out your life already. OK, maybe it’s not so drastic, but your brain sees uncertainty as a threat and triggers your threat response biasing decisions toward habit and modulating our propensity to take risks (do something new and untested).

A Quick brain primer (so that you don’t use your biases and fill in your own wrong answers).

Your brain is programmed to minimise effort and save energy.

In his fabulous book, Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman shows that your brain works using two different systems, 1 and 2 (yeah, terrific names ;-)). System 1 is fast thinking - mostly unconscious, prone to biases and errors and can be exploited by others to influence your responses and choices. System 2 is slower thinking but more reliable and it is supposed to monitor System 1 but often it doesn't bother when it's feeling a b