Tackling Confirmation Bias in Dating
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Sick of your reality? Your beliefs create your experience. Change your beliefs, change your experience.
Your beliefs create your experience.
You believe something about yourself or about others which creates a thought, leads to a feeling, results in an action, creates a result and reaffirms the belief.
Changing beliefs is HARD WORK. It is also so necessary if you want to change your experience in the world. Especially in dating, you may have lots of beliefs that control your experience.
“I only attract fuck boys”
“I’m not good at long term relationships”
“I’ve already had The One and I let him get away”
What you believe you will experience.
Those are sucky beliefs, right? I bet you don’t want to keep living that experience. So, let’s change them!
The first thing to address when changing beliefs is a thing called confirmation bias.
Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one’s prior beliefs or values.
This cognitive bias means that your brain only sees proof of what you already believe and ignores proof to the contrary. Your beliefs create your experience!
Changing confirmation bias: when you see something and believe that it must mean something negative for/about you, take a moment to grab your phone or a notepad and write out every possible positive reason for that negative bias to be untrue.
For example, a guy cancels a date last minute and you think that means that you are not attractive enough for them.
Write the positive possibilities:
- They were honest about not being capable of keeping their commitment
- That person just doesn’t have the same values around keeping their commitments
- They wish they could make the commitment but was just not possible
- They have social anxiety and that gets in the way of keeping meetings
- They met someone else and want to pursue that
Etc…
None of them have anything to do with you or your attractiveness.
As you’re learning to be more cognizant of confirmation bias, you may struggle to immediately accept an alternative way of thinking. That’s totally normal.
To bridge this gap, use an affirmation/bridge thought. Repeat “I’m willing to see this differently” or “I am learning to see this differently”. These statements take the pressure off being perfect.
If you need help coming up with new positive possibilities, comment below and I’ll help you brainstorm!
Originally published at http://clairlofthouse.com on October 21, 2020.
