How to Recognize Unconscious Biases, Overcome Them and Give Space to New Thoughts
Prejudices are an an obstacle in your mind, overcome and break these mental shackles.
While sharing his predicament, my friend who is a loan officer told me, “I rejected his loan application for a trivial reason.”
The applicant met the requirements, but even then my friend rejected it. He could visualize all the sad moments when he saw that name on the application form. With each alphabet, he lived each bitter experience of the friendship gone wrong. Before realizing, he subconsciously rejected his loan application.
At that moment, he didn’t read his name, but remembered,
“How he cheated with my sister.”
“How he never returned my money till date”
“How he ignored my phone calls.”
My friend asked me, “What can I do now?”
As a loan officer, he should have accepted the application, but because of a personal experience, he rejected it.
That’s the way unconscious bias makes you do things. It causes denial before you even realize it. It doesn’t let you do anything.
In that microsecond, you might experience the fear, the failure, the rejection, the self-pitying moments, the ignorance, the shame of being cheated, of not being appreciated, of being plundered. The face and sound of a person, a culture, a store, a city, a boss, the owner of a place where you lived becomes synonymous with these feelings.
- If it drizzles, you won’t go out because you are still scared of that time when you fell into the drain.
- Seeing someone you don’t want to see takes away your party time.
- It won’t let you take financial risks because you lost heavily during the recession.
It diminishes your ability to take risks in similar situations.
Unconscious bias impacts significant part of our lives. It affects every decision we take, from the time we get up to the time we go to bed. It not only forces us to relive the sad moments, but also creates wrong expectations of happy moments.
It doesn’t let you take decisions with the true nature of cause-and-effect analysis. It only takes your experience into account, not the true nature, without even consciously informing you.
Signs to Help You Identify Unconscious Biases
- You don’t talk to an individual, even if he is giving you a lot of money.
- You don’t thank that person, even if he’d save your life.
- You know nothing positive about few people.
- You hesitate and your body shivers while talking to a senior person at work.
- You think you are inferior/superior to the people who have lived in that country, spent their childhood in village/urban area, studied in a moderate/top institute, worked in a small/big company.
- You underestimate yourself looking at quick successes of your colleague.
You aren’t mentally ready to see something different or accept another person.
How to Free Yourself from Unconscious Bias
First of all, you have to believe that what you know isn't all there is to know about that person or circumstance.
You don’t know what might have changed after your bitter or happy experience..
If you believe it and are ready to forget your experiences, can you move on to other things.
- If you’ve a mutual friend, ask him for his fact-based opinion about this individual.
- If it’s a colleague, check his performance and relationships with other people
- If it’s your neighbor, check if she has the same relationship with everyone and if everyone has the same problems with him.
- If it’s an unknown person from a familiar culture or group, give him a chance to share everything he’s about to say and check logically if what he says makes sense or not.
Don’t judge a person by the culture they come from. Before you think about whether he’s brunette or blonde, white, dark-skinned or black; from India, Africa, China or America — look at his work, and relationship with other people.
Only then will you take decisions free from biases.
Some biases are good as well, because they subconsciously prevent you from stepping into danger. Our gut feeling results from this unconscious bias. We base our impulsive decisions on biases.
We must not worry about them too much in the unimportant matters of our life, but we should be careful in taking big decisions or correcting our way from failure to success.
Understanding biases can help you achieve impending success.
If you are struggling to achieve results with 100% effort, then you need to examine your biases involved. It might be preventing you from achieving success in your life.
All the best, take actions, reflect on your decisions and achieve success.
