Article
How Black and White Thinking Cripples Us Strategically: 3 Steps to Remove Mental Barriers to Your Success
By Chris Albert
4 min read
Over the past few decades people have become extremely conscious of what they eat. First we saw the low fat, high fiber craze. Recently, carbs and sugar have been deemed the enemy. We are often told that “we are what we eat.” If you want to look good and perform well as a human being, then you need to eat a healthy diet.
I could give you a whole lecture on what this entails but I’m not writing this blog about food. Today I’m writing about something that is equally vital, and that is our psychological diet.
Just as your body and physical health are affected by your nutrition, the people, ideas, and information you surround yourself with every day with impact your mind and what your mind considers possible. This is your psychological diet, and it will impact your happiness, your ability to get through hard times, and your success in this life.
The more narrow your psychological diet is, the more narrow your possibility to be a resilient, well though out, and successful human being. Here are three tips to ensure that your psychological diet is up to snuff:
1. Never let a negative person bring you down.
At one time I was in a long-term relationship with a woman who hated her job. She came home from work every day complaining, and whenever I went to try anything new, she would become jealous. As I worked extra hours to try to open my own business, she would say things like, “why are you even trying at this?” and “there’s no way you’ll be successful at that.” Eventually I stopped working to open that business up, and I didn’t start again until the relationship eventually ended. I often think of the months I wasted because I listened to her negativity, but I’m also grateful that I got myself out of the relationship.
Be wary of the people you surround yourself with and how they affect you. Try to surround yourself with positive people who want you to succeed at whatever it is that you choose to do. You want people around you who are going to constructively criticize you and challenge you to become better, but do not entertain the ideas of someone who is flat out negative.
And remember, as Jim Rohn says, “You are the average of the five people you hang around with the most.” Hang out with five negative people who have nothing going for them, and you will be the sixth. Seek out positive people who are working to better their own futures and they will help to better yours.
2. Seek out friends from different social circles and value the opinions of others.
I am a big fan of befriending people who do not think the same way I do. I lean on the conservative side of the fence politically, but I have many friends who are liberal. I am a Catholic, but I have friends who are Baptist, Mormon, Jewish, Muslim, and Hindu.
This allows me to see things from multiple perspectives and helps me to avoid narrow and limited thinking. This does not mean that I am not principled in what I believe. To the contrary, I am able to formulate many of my arguments more effectively because I better understand what others think. It also keeps me from being being “dug in” on any one particular issue that might lead to me making a serious mistake in judgment.
I myself am wary of anyone who demonizes an opposing viewpoint because that tells me that they have not considered anything and that they do not have the power to understand things from alternative perspectives. People like this are actually very easy to control. You can simply manipulate them by saying things that they’ll agree with (think of presidential politics at the time of this writing).
All politics aside, do not allow yourself to fall into narrow minded behavior. Understand opposing arguments, and this will allow you to think more independently. It will also allow you to understand people. Understanding people, and how they think, is a key attribute of being a leader. None of us, even those of us in the military, can be tyrants if we are leading humans. The only true way to lead is to get people to want to follow, and to do this, you have to understand how they think.
3. Read
I say this over and over again, but if you want to be successful you need to read. Not all of us may be able to travel the world at the moment. We may not be able to get mentors who are multi millionaires or who’ve held leadership positions, but any of us can fork out a few dollars for a book.
Books are important because they give us perspective. Reading about the lives of successful people can help us to understand that the difficulties we go through in life are part of the process of becoming successful. Books like these keep us from feeling sorry for ourselves and they help us to realize what is possible in our lives. Above all they help us to realize that we are not resigned to any particular fate.
And just as with people, do not just read books that you agree with. Read books about opposing view points and books about people from differing backgrounds than yourself. Read books about other religions, books about people from other times and places, and books about people who you may not like personally. Every perspective contains something you can learn from.
Conclusion
To sum all of this up in one big phrase: don’t allow yourself to become narrow minded. When you are narrow minded it opens you up to being manipulated and held back from your true potential. Surrounding yourself with positive people, understanding opposing opinions, and reading books from multiple perspectives are three keys to having a healthy psychological diet and a life without limits.
And keep in mind, none of this is meant to change your opinion on anything. Rather, it is meant to allow you to express your own opinion in a more coherent and logical manner. Knowing more never makes you less of a person, but being ignorant can keep you from being the person you were meant to be.
Transcript
Machine-generated from the episode audio and lightly edited — may contain errors.
Chris Albert (link to this point)
Good afternoon. This is Chris Albert, I'm the host of the Warrior Soul podcast and the owner of Warrior Soul Apparel. I wanna thank you guys again for listening to me. This is another short episode where I give you some perspectives on life, some tips that you can use, some hardcore things that you can implement in your life to make your life better. Tomorrow, I am going to have the privilege of interviewing Andrew Marr.
Andrew is a former special forces operator who currently runs the Warrior Angels Foundation. The Warrior Angels Foundation puts veterans in touch with alternative therapies for for traumatic brain injury and for post traumatic stress. And it's going to be really interesting conversation. Got to see him on Joe Rogan, and he had a really interesting perspective on how to handle these problems that are plaguing our veteran community. But I want to talk about another problem that's I think plaguing humanity right now, not just the veteran community, but what I'm about to talk about can really help those of us in the veteran community to live bigger, to live better lives, and to achieve more success.
And that is narrow thinking. You know, a lot of us are not, we're fully capable of living outstanding lives. Know, we're intelligent. We are physically capable of doing great things. We've made some really hard decisions in our lives.
But the problem is that a lot of us aren't thinking big enough. A lot of us aren't following our dreams because we don't believe that our dreams can happen. We don't believe that anything good can happen for us because we're listening to negative thoughts. We're listening to small thinking, we're allowing other people to influence us into small thinking and to believing that we can't be greater than we are today. Well here's the thing ladies and gentlemen, Every one of us is on a journey, every one of us is on a path, and every one of us has the opportunity to make our lives into whatever we want them to be.
What the greatest influence on what those lives become, is the way we think. In order for us to aspire to greatness, we first have to believe that greatness is possible. We first have to believe that we are capable of greatness. And unless we believe that, we will only achieve small things in our lives. Now for a lot of us who served in the military, we believe that the greatest thing we're ever gonna do in our lives, the greatest thing we've ever done in our lives, the greatest thing that will ever happen to our lives was serving in the military.
And a lot of us leave it at that. We hang up our boots, we go home, and we live out the rest of our lives in limited fashion. Now I don't think that there's anything wrong with getting a job or you know, just living a normal life. But the problem is that so many of us are unhappy with that. So many of us feel like we're resigned to a certain kind of life after the military.
If you're perfectly happy in a normal life, and you're perfectly happy having your job, and living in a house with your family and everything like that, I think that that's a beautiful thing. But if you're not, and you want something more, then you have to consider something. Why are you not going for it? What is keeping you from doing what you really want to do with your life? And the answer is, nothing in reality.
It's the circus that we create in our own heads, and I've said this before. But how do we create that circus? How do those lies that we tell ourselves begin to manifest themselves as reality in our own minds? And that, in my opinion, has to do with three different things. The first and foremost is this, it has to do with the people we hang out with.
Who are we listening to? Who are we allowing to have an influence over us? Are we listening to people who tell us that we can't do things? Are we listening to people who are generally negative? And you know who these types of people are.
You know, we've seen them in the military. We've seen them in our jobs. They're the people who silently criticize everything. They're the people who question why we're putting so much effort into what we're doing. They'll question us when we begin a diet to try to lose weight.
They'll question us for going to the gym. They'll question us for picking up a book and reading, and they'll question us for starting a new project. You know, was in a relationship with a woman at one time where I was trying to start a business, and she would say over and over again, why are you doing that? You're going to fail. And she was saying that out of pure jealousy.
She was saying it because she thought that I was gonna leave her behind, and she thought that me doing that business was going to take less attention away from her. And not being strong enough at the time, I listened to her, and I stopped going for what I wanted. I stopped working on that business, and I set myself behind for years until the relationship ended. And then I realized that there was absolutely nothing help holding me back from doing what I wanted to do, and I went out there and I did it. It was like the world was lifted from my shoulders.
So I want you to look at your life right now and see what false lies you're listening to. See what lies you're listening to. See who is spreading those lies into your lies into your head. And then question the value of that relationship. Is it worth keeping that person in your life?
And if you do keep that person in your life, just limit their influence over you. The second thing we do is that we don't have a good variety in the types of people we associate with. You know, I come from a very, you know, it's a medium sized town, but I had a lot of people that I grew up with that I was very, very close with. We hung out as a group, we did everything together, we ate together, and as I got older I realized something. Unless I found other people to hang out with, unless I found new friends, I was probably going to end up being on that same barstool that I was, you know, ten years ago.
I'd probably still be there today. I want to encourage you to go out there and meet new people. Go out there and meet new friends. And if those friends have differing perspective from yours, then good. You need to be exposed to that.
And the reason why you need to be exposed to that is because we as people are hurt by black and white thinking. Black and white thinking limits us, limits us from viewing how people with opposing viewpoints think. It limits us from understanding people in general, and when we don't understand people in general, we don't become good leaders. We become people who are too hard headed to see when they've made an error. We become people who are too hardheaded to sometimes see the truth.
And so expose yourself to multiple perspectives. And don't think that that's gonna change your hardcore principles and your hardcore beliefs. What it'll do is make you better at arguing for what you believe in. It'll make you better at implementing your life in the way that you want to. Because you'll be able to understand people and when you understand people, you'll be able to convince them to do the things that you want them to do.
Then the third thing, and this is going to be like kicking a dead horse, but you guys got to read. You've gotta read everything you can. You've gotta read history. You've got to read biographies. You've got to read about things you don't know about, things you haven't been exposed to, and about things related to life that are that are gonna show you that you're not the only one with problems. They're gonna show you different perspectives about how to show how to approach problems, how to approach your challenges, and they're going to show you how to avoid mistakes that could derail you for a really long time. You know, I've made so many different mistakes in my life, and I, like many of you, have been prone to black and white thinking before. And I've been prone to small thinking before. And it wasn't until I started to expose myself to multiple perspectives, until I started reading, until I started meeting people and talking to people who have different backgrounds than I do, that I started to find success.
And I started to understand what it takes to find success. And you know the biggest thing that's limiting you right now is nothing but the lies you're telling yourself, your own thoughts and stories that are just as good as fairy tales that people are telling you. I hope you're all well. I hope you get the the chance to listen to my interview with Andrew Marr when I post it next week, and I wish you all a great weekend, and have a great day.
Host of the Warrior Soul Podcast and founder of Warrior Soul. Worldwide trainer and nutrition coach, contributing author at Testosterone Nation and Muscle and Strength.
