Change your mindset by changing your reality

Erica Sampson
Inside League
Published in
8 min readFeb 13, 2023
Photo by Anika Huizinga on Unsplash

Early in my career, I struggled with something fairly common: I had a fear of looking stupid in front of my colleagues. This would often result in me getting defensive and outwardly angry when my thoughts or opinions were threatened. In some cases, this merely saw me labeled as “difficult” or “snarky”, but as I progressed as an individual contributor, and started looking to take on more leadership and people management roles, this struggle of mine started to hold me back. Critical leadership skills like receiving constructive feedback graciously, and accepting contradicting points of view, were difficult for me to do authentically.

More importantly, my reactions and behaviours clashed with my core values. Things like compassion, trust, and open mindedness were nowhere to be seen in the way I was handling some of these interactions. This contradiction between my actions and my beliefs was leaving me frustrated, regretful, and ashamed of how I was showing up for friends and colleagues.

I had seen it done differently, and I believed I could change. And so, I took on the challenge and set forth on a long journey to understand my brain, train it to think differently, and ultimately, change my reality.

Finding your trigger

In first learning to handle unproductive or socially unacceptable emotions, most of us start by leveraging the art of repression — and we usually do this at a pretty young age. We focus on attempting to hide the expression of this emotion after it has already surfaced. While some mild form of this can be helpful, trying to deny yourself the ability to express strong emotions long-term can have a negative effect on your overall mental health. It also tends to be kinda hard, not to mention a contributing factor towards burnout.

The more effective approach, I’ve found, is to find a way to stop triggering those emotions in the first place. For me, personally, that meant not feeling threatened when someone didn’t agree with my point of view; easier said than done. As anyone who’s tried to take on this kind of challenge will tell you, knowing and doing are not the same thing.

I had my goal. I wanted to think differently about those types of situations. My approach to doing this was initially trial and error, and I wasn’t always successful. But as I continued to explore the workings of my brain, I got more and more interested in understanding the mechanics of what was going on; how and why I was perceiving things in certain ways. As I learned, I also became more successful in my attempts to respond differently. One of the most important discoveries I made along that journey was that “reality” isn’t the concrete truth we think it is.

Understanding your reality

Most of us tend to believe that we’re interpreting life in real time, and that everything we see, hear, smell, and otherwise sense is the absolute truth, but that’s not actually accurate. In reality, the time it takes for our sensory organs to receive stimuli from our sense organs, convert that stimuli to electrical impulses, and then send those electrical impulses to our brain for processing, results in an approximate 50–100 millisecond delay.

The problem is, this isn’t good enough. We need to react to the world around us in real time. That 50–100ms might sound small, but it makes a huge difference in situations where your body needs to mobilize a quick response to the world around it. Imagine something as simple as catching a ball. Your hands need to be in the correct position to catch it at exactly the right moment, not 100 milliseconds later.

In an attempt to fulfill this need for real-time reaction, your brain does something pretty cool. Instead of just processing those electrical impulses and reacting to it as is, it uses that data to form predictions about the future. Those internally generated predictions leverage the sensory processing areas of your brain and become what you experience as reality. This bears repeating: what you perceive as reality is actually what your brain predicts will happen 100ms+ into the future.

Take a moment to pause and think about that. Think about all the ways this might go wrong, all the very small ways your brain might predict a reaction, a facial expression, a statement, or a piece of data differently from someone else. And then, how all those very tiny and seemingly inconsequential differences might compound and stack together to create subtle variations in the literal reality each of us experiences on a daily basis and believes to be absolute truth. It starts to become a little easier to understand why we might hold different opinions.

To really drive this home, some scientists have even gone so far as to suggest that our general understanding of reality is nothing more than “controlled hallucination”. They suggest that hallucinations, as we tend to think of them, are really nothing more than a mistuning of a brain’s ability to create calibrated predictions. What we generally refer to as “reality” is more of a fuzzy collection of predictions that are more or less similar.

Taking control of your predictions

I must admit, that’s a little unsettling; but it’s also foundational, because finding ways to fine-tune what your brain is predicting is a much more effective way of managing those emotions. Instead of trying to control the emotional response to that predicted reality, we can change, ever so slightly, the reality that’s being predicted in the first place.

This was a pretty mind-blowing discovery for me, and it led me down a different path in my attempt to reach my goal. I updated my objective to reflect this new insight. Instead of predicting that my acceptance in the group was being threatened when a colleague disagreed with me, I wanted to instead predict that there was a tantalizing piece of knowledge being offered.

I wanted to predict that obtaining that knowledge would help me grow and become a more valuable member of my team. My hypothesis was that the same “reality” which had originally caused me to get defensive and angry — and probably actualized some exclusion from the group — would instead have me curious, asking questions, and naturally drawing closer.

So how exactly might one approach the task of retraining a brain’s prediction module? Well, it probably helps to first understand a little more about how those predictions are being made in the first place.

As it turns out, making those predictions is hard work and time-consuming, so our brains have evolved a few shortcuts. Daniel Kahneman, in his book Thinking Fast and Slow, does an outstanding job of outlining the vast array of heuristics and mechanisms our brains use to make decisions (you can check out Mark Looi’s quick summary here). The general goal of these mechanisms is to keep us alive; to make decisions quickly and mostly accurately (i.e. “close enough”). These mechanisms evolved in a time where the threats we faced were predominantly things like being eaten by a predator or ostracized from our troop; they were fine-tuned to help us operate quickly and stay alive long enough to mate, reproduce, and raise our young — extreme accuracy was not the priority.

What’s more, these mechanisms don’t operate alone. Much like machine learning technologies today, our brains need vast amounts of data to train those mechanisms over time. In our case, that data comes from every single experience we have, memories we form, pieces of information we consume, and thoughts we generate over the course of our lifetime. That’s a lot of data, and that data hasn’t necessarily been curated to result in an even distribution of actualities.

Retraining your brain

Anyone who’s been involved in the development and training of machine learning systems like facial recognition or optical character recognition (OCR) software will tell you that the data used to train them can vastly alter the way they function. In 2008, Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru published the “Gender Shades” study, where their research showed that disparities in the testing data used to train 3 prominent facial recognition platforms resulted in significant racial and gender biases.

It’s not hard to imagine, given the vast differences in our life experiences — and, therefore, our collected years worth of training data — that our brains might make slightly different predictions from person to person. Unfortunately, it’s also easy to see why we humans are plagued by biases just as easily as our machine counterparts.

But how is knowing all this helpful? How could you possibly overcome a lifetime’s collection of potentially flawed or biased training data? Even if you’re young and you start now, that feels close to impossible; and you’re not wrong to feel a little daunted, it’s a really tough thing to do, but not impossible. You don’t need to completely replace a whole lifetime of experiences. Most of what you’ve accumulated is probably still very useful. You just need to find the data that’s contributing to the undesirable prediction and focus your attention there. Plus, we can leverage some of those decision-making shortcuts to our advantage and make things much easier.

There are 5 generally accepted types of heuristics your brain uses to speed up decision making:

  • Availability Heuristic — Judging that something is more likely if examples can more easily be brought to mind.
  • Representativeness Heuristic — Using stereotypes or categories to group something along with similar mental examples.
  • Anchoring Heuristic — A tendency to mentally gravitate towards initially established thoughts.
  • Affect Heuristic — Judging that if a decision feels good, then it’s the right decision.
  • Commitment Heuristic — Believing that if we’ve already made a decision, we should continue to stick with it.

While there are ways to leverage all of these heuristics, the two I’ve found easiest to use to my advantage are the Availability Heuristic, and the Representativeness Heuristic.

Leveraging these two heuristics and applying them to my original narrow problem statement, I established for myself a very tangible and actionable objective: to create a collection of experiences that associated acceptance and belonging with gaining new perspective. While that might sound difficult, and admittedly, it isn’t easy, it is actionable and possible with dedicated ongoing effort.

Cultivating your personal dataset

From there, I started reading and researching, attending webinars, and seeking out interactions; all in an effort to cultivate the dataset my brain needed to make those predictions. Over time, ever so slowly, I started to see change. And the beautiful result was that the changes I was making were also actively contributing more positive experience data points into the collection I was building. With every experience that resulted in the prediction I wanted, I was reinforcing that outcome and making it easier for that prediction to occur again the next time. At first I had to work hard to keep reminding myself of my desired outcome, but over time, it became easier and eventually second nature.

It took me years of dedicated and focused effort to see that transformation. I’ve made very intentional career decisions, am careful of the media I consume, and am mindful about the people I spend my time with. I am slowly creating the reality I want to experience; not looking to ignore the darker or more difficult parts of life, but to find a way of approaching them that leaves me content with my ability to uphold my values and stay true to what’s important to me.

And I’m by no means perfect. I still have moments of frustration that I later regret, and I occasionally say something mean or hurtful that I wish I could take back; but perfection is not the goal. The goal, for me, is the choice. To know and believe at the end of the day, that I have the means to control my own reality, and the responsibility to take ownership for that.

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Inside League
Inside League

Published in Inside League

League is a platform technology company powering next-generation healthcare consumer experiences. Millions of people use solutions powered by League to access, navigate and pay for care. Interested in learning more about League? Visit www.league.com

Erica Sampson
Erica Sampson

Written by Erica Sampson

Engineering Leader, coach, and lover of tough problems