magine going back a few thousand years in time. You’re hunting for your next meal. You’re hungry, it’s cold, and you’ve been hunting for hours. Suddenly, you hear a rustling sound in the bushes next to you. It sounds like something big. A shiver runs down your spine, and your adrenaline surges. You have to decide: is this going to kill me, or am I about to have dinner? The wrong decision could cost you your life.
Evolution moves more slowly than technological development. In today’s society, we still operate with this same mechanism, but it no longer serves us the way it did when we were hunter-gatherers.
There are four ingredients that guide our internal decision-making and reasoning.
Self-awareness – If you’re not aware of what you’re thinking or what you’re reacting to, you can’t use your reasoning skills to do anything about it.
Free will – Without the free will to make a different choice, you literally cannot do so.
Creative imagination – We use our creative imagination to come up with alternative options and different perspectives. These open up the possibility of making a different choice that could help us in a particular situation or change how we respond.
Conscience – Without our conscience, we would make uninhibited choices that could potentially harm ourselves and the people around us.
With these four ingredients, we can create a win-win situation. You can imagine endless possibilities in which your actions have positive effects. And although choosing a win-win situation seems like the logical thing to do, people often don’t make that choice in practice.
Sometimes, you make a decision that isn’t good for you but benefits someone else (lose-win). Or you choose something that benefits you but not the other person (win-lose). You might even make a choice that benefits no one (lose-lose). And then there’s a fifth option: choosing not to choose.
We have a responsibility to choose how we respond. Or, when our response or mindset isn’t serving us well, to make a change. Your (current) mindset is closely connected to how you respond in the moment.
So how do you help someone break out of an exaggerated emotional response? One simple trick is to ask a question that requires them to use their memory, such as, “What did you have for dinner three nights ago?” Answering this question engages a different part of the brain than the one involved in emotional reactions, which can significantly reduce or even eliminate the emotional response.
If you believe there are no bugs in a system, you’re unlikely to find any. If you believe that every bug is simply the result of your own mistakes, those bugs won’t be properly investigated or resolved. In both cases, the quality of your application will suffer. Challenge yourself to make a different choice. Adjust your behaviour to return to the right mindset for finding bugs and ensuring quality.
What happens when other people influence your mindset? External influences will always affect the way you think. The trick is to become aware of them. This is sometimes called “influence” or “marketing”. It’s unavoidable. But when you’re aware of these influences, you can choose to act differently when you find yourself caught in a negative spiral or reacting in ways that don’t feel right.
After all, you don’t buy absolutely everything you see advertised, do you? You make a conscious choice not to, despite the attempts to influence you.
Since you’re constantly being influenced, your own behaviour is also constantly influencing others. That’s not something you can prevent. What you can do, however, is make sure you influence people in ways that benefit both you and them.
This isn’t easy, but with a little understanding of how your brain tries to help you, you can learn to work with it and make different choices.
My Mindset Manifesto
I’ve created a Mindset Manifesto!
The way the Agile Manifesto is written is a wonderful way to emphasise what matters more than something else that may be less helpful, but is still part of reality.
In our interactions with others and the choices we are free to make,
We value
Emotional control over emotional weakness
Positive thinking over negative thinking
A growth mindset over a fixed mindset
Appreciation over expectation
Small adjustments over big expectations
The ability to change someone’s mindset comes with the responsibility to make a conscious choice.
