How Objective Perceptions Can Benefit Your Major Life Decisions
When you are able to perceive things more objectively in life, you can improve your relationships and better inform your major life decisions.
Learning to improve your objectivity means you can look past assumptions and biases and use clear, sound judgment to help you achieve your goals.
Subjective thinking is when you allow not only your outdated mental models and past experiences to inform your choice but also all your insecurities and the stress of your current situation. These factors can allow you to make poor decisions and act in ways you might regret later. Looking at the world though rose colored glasses can have its cons.
Creating a More Objective Brain
Our brains are not just cameras that see the world exactly as it appears. Instead, all the stimulus around us is filtered through our neural pathways and interpreted based on a whole host of factors.
These factors include your prior experiences with something similar, how much knowledge you already have about the topic at hand, your current emotional state, and so much more. We can easily over-react or misjudge a situation based on very little information when we don’t question our mental models and perceptions of the world.
Even though this seems like a hard-wired capacity, the good news is that this type of thinking can be changed. Your brain is very capable of learning and the more you practice a skill, the better it becomes. So, first, you have to start questioning your perceptions and noticing alternative ways to consider situations. Interrupting your knee-jerk reactions is a good first step, which allows you to take more time and ask better questions.
Every time you choose a different response than your subjective brains is pushing for, you are rewiring your neural pathways. You are building new perception models that can help you think more clearly and make smarter choices.
Knowledge is the very best tool for changing your perceptions and informing your new mental models. Because the beliefs and notions that inform your subjective thinking are deeply rooted, it will take a lot of new learning and practice to change those neural pathways, but it can be done.
The Benefits of Objective Thinking
There are many benefits to using more objective thinking when you are making big decisions in your life. Here are just a few:
• Thinking objectively can help you confront and transform biases you have about others or the world. Learning to think more objectively allows you to see how past experiences or prejudice are unduly influencing your decisions.
• Your decisions will be better informed by a complete inventory of positive and negative considerations. Objective thinking can help you better weight the upsides and downsides to any notion, and your ideas will be sounder and more likely to succeed.
• Learning to think more objectively allows you to decide what is important information and which is data that has no impact on your situation. It helps you eliminate the white noise and focus in on what truly matters most to you.
• Objectivity enables you to make the fair or humane choice, even when that option may not benefit you directly. When you can think objectively, you acknowledge the benefit to others or the world, and this can inform your choices in meaningful ways.
While it is impersonations to be purely objective in all of your decisions, learning to think less subjectively can help you make better decisions by giving you more information, helping you eliminate what’s not important, and focusing in on actual knowledge versions false assumptions. When you have better knowledge, you’ll make better choices.