When I was in high school, I ran for the office of Student Body First Vice President. I made through the primary elections as one of the two final candidates, and I put on a really awesome skit at the elections assembly. As I was a huge film buff as a teenager, my campaign was based around classic movies. My skit was an faux Oscar ceremony that creatively mixed live people on stage playing presenters integrated with clips from classic movies like
Casablanca and
The Third Man. After all the clips were shown, the presenters announced that the Oscar for First Vice President went to.... Brian Tanner! A spotlight found me in the auditorium and I ran up on stage, gave Sara Swalberg (the presenter, all dolled up in a fancy red dress) a big fake kiss with a dip, and then gave my final campaign speech, asking the student body to vote for me.
They tallied up all the votes, and during seventh period the principal came on the intercom and asked all the candidates come down to the office. I was in the seminary building across the street from the main high school building, and to get into the high school building I had two options: take the stairs or the ramp.
In my mind I thought to myself, "If I take the stairs, I'll lose. If I take the ramp, I'll win." I knew that it was a silly superstitious thought, but I wanted to win and I thought that it really didn't make a difference which one I took, so I took the ramp. I got to the principal's office to find out that I had lost the election. As funny as it may sound, my first thought in that moment was, "I should have taken the stairs."
Logically, this makes no sense. All of the votes had already been cast and tallied, and Steps v. Ramp had no bearing on the decision whatsoever. When looking for the reason I lost, I should have looked to more relevant events, like my election skit. Seriously, did you read my description of it above? I was expecting high school kids to identify with black and white clips of Humphrey Bogart and
Orson Welles? The guy who beat me just played a clip from
Ace Ventura 2: When Nature Calls, and then came out on stage and stage and hollered, "Vote for me!" Mine was far more cleverly conceived and executed, but Jim Carrey got those '90s high school kids hooting and hollering, and consequently the other guy won.
Even though I know it is totally illogical, I still find myself falling into "ramp vs. stairs" thinking sometimes because it is somehow comforting to think that some decision that I made was the determining factor, not something out of my control. I am currently searching for a summer internship, a crucial component of the MBA program and my future career. Several of the opportunities that I wanted have not worked out, and it is really tempting to think, "If only I had done some little thing different..." However, the little thing on which I pin the blame often has no real bearing on this complicated hiring process that is largely out of my control.
I have a piece of paper that I have held on to for so long that I can no longer remember where I got it which contains a list of cognitive disorders compiled by Dr. David Burns. It is haphazardly mixed in with a messy stack of papers on my desktop, but it somehow resurfaces whenever I need it, like last night when I was feeling discouraged about how some things have played out in my internship search. The last item on the list reads:
10. Personalization: You see yourself as the cause of some negative external event for which, in fact, you were not primarily responsible.
This doesn't exactly fit with the train of thinking before, but it's close. It would be more like "you see arbitrary factors as the cause of some negative external event for which, in fact, they were not primarily responsible." It's a helpful reminder that sometimes things are out of my control whether I take the ramp or the stairs, and that's fine.
Returning to the student body officer election story above, as the cliché goes, it actually turned out better that I lost. My senior year I ended up being president both of the Madrigal singers and the National Honor Society, and I played the Tin Man in the school production of
The Wizard of Oz. Those were opportunities that arose later that I wouldn't have had the bandwidth to do if I had been vice president. Things like that only look good in retrospect - at the time the thing you really wanted fell through you're just crushed and there's nothing on the horizon to be optimistic about. But that's when you just have to move forward in faith, knowing that many of the determining factors are ultimately outside of your control but trusting that if you put in the effort other opportunities will arise.
Here is the complete list of cognitive disorders mentioned above. When I am discouraged I find myself falling into many of these, and it is helpful to think about my thinking and see if it makes sense or not.
- All-or-nothing thinking: You see things in black and white categories. If your performance falls short of perfect, you see yourself as a total failure.
- Overgeneralization: You see a single negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat.
- Mental filter: You pick out a single negative detail and dwell on it exclusively so that your vision of all reality becomes darkened, like the drop of ink that discolors the entire beaker of water.
- Disqualifying the positive: You reject positive experiences by insisting they "don't count" for some reason or other. You maintain a negative belief that is contradicted by your everyday experiences.
- Jumping to conclusions: You make a negative interpretation even though there are no definite facts that convincingly support your conclusion.
- Mind reading: You arbitrarily conclude that someone is reacting negatively to you and don't bother to check it out.
- The Fortune Teller Error: You anticipate that things will turn out badly and feel convinced that your prediction is an already-established fact.
- Magnification (catastrophizing) or minimization: You exaggerate the importance of things (such as your goof-up or someone else's achievement), or you inappropriately shrink things until they appear tiny (your own desirable qualities or the other fellow's imperfections). This is also called the "binocular trick."
- Emotional reasoning: You assume that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are: "I feel it, therefore it must be true."
- Should statements: You try to motivate yourself with "shoulds" and "shouldn'ts," as if you had to be whipped and punished before you could be expected to do anything. "Musts" and "oughts" are also offenders. The emotional consequence is guilt. When you direct should statements toward others, you feel anger, frustration, and resentment.
- Labeling and mislabeling: This is an extreme form of overgeneralization. Instead of describing your error, you attach a negative label to yourself: "I'm a loser." When someone else's behavior rubs you the wrong way, you attach a negative label to him, "He's a damn louse." Mislabeling involves describing an event with language that is highly colored and emotionally loaded.
- Personalization: You see yourself as the cause of some negative external event for which, in fact, you were not primarily responsible.
How about you? Can any of you relate to my "ramp vs. stairs" thinking, or any of the other cognitive disorders above? What have you done to overcome cognitive disorders? Comment below or send me a tweet (
@briandtanner).
