Binary thinking is oversimplistic. As much as we wish it wasn’t, life is complicated, and viewing the world in black and white completely ignores the nuances—the gray areas—of the big issues, and of everyday life. By relying on this default reactive way of thinking, we make assumptions that are often inaccurate and sometimes dangerous, especially when they concern an entire group of people. Failing to appreciate situational nuances can lead to tunnel vision and prevent us from seeing alternatives.
Mindfulness teacher and researcher Dr. Shalini Bahl recalls how she felt forced to choose between two outcomes during her stint as a city councillor in Amherst, Massachusetts. Some of her fellow councillors, backed by a resident majority, voted for a temporary moratorium for a large-scale solar project on private land with trees. “There was a lot of pressure to vote. It was very much an ‘either-or’ thing,” she says. “That’s when my understanding of binary thinking really came into play, during my role as a political leader.”
Instead of doing the easy thing—recusing herself from voting—Bahl tried another option. She approached the dilemma with curiosity. “There was a third way of looking at the situation that wasn’t either-or,” she says. “It’s both yes and no. We need more solar and also want to protect our forests. How can we do both?” She knew that despite not having the immediate answers, she needed to stay engaged and openminded by speaking with individuals outside of her immediate circle. Instead of a moratorium, a guide was created for implementing responsible solar development. As she writes in her book Return to Mindfulness, “Curiosity enabled me to navigate a complex decision with diligence.”
When faced with a difficult decision, it can help to shift our focus from a place of judgment to curiosity. “Generally, we’re listening with an agenda rather than truly trying to understand the lived experience of the other person,” says Bahl. “We’re often just listening to prove that they’re wrong. There’s no room for asking questions.” Mindfulness practice is also a useful tool for being comfortable with discomfort. Not everything needs an answer right away. And learning to sit with the questions we’ve asked can often help us find that nuance.
Tapping into our innate curiosity can help us better understand the complexities of each situation, increasing our resistance to making impulsive decisions. In a time where misinformation is prolific across the media, it is more critical now than ever to be able to recognize our own biases and increase our receptivity to different perspectives. Try it next time you find yourself stuck in a conflict. Pause, breathe, and in Bahl’s words, ask yourself, “What is my intention here? Who can I go to who might offer a different point of view?” You may be surprised by what you learn.
While reflecting upon my last couple of posts, I remembered this article I found the other day and I think it relates perfectly to why people often feel stuck at times when making decisions. Often we spend so much of our time choosing one approach OR another because the decision is often final and we can’t go back on it.
For example, if I’m making a decision about the structure of my website, it’s a serious decision because restructuring a website can break all of your links within it and to it.
Even having a chat with someone the other day, they kept asking me about something and said, “So what’s the right choice, the right thing to do?” It was as if there was only one path. But there’s often many. And you don’t have to choose just one but multiple ones at the same time which seems impossible.
But in terms of my website, for the longest time I thought, should I keep it as a traditional journal timeline format or should I shift it over to an evergreen notes approach? Obviously today, I’m realizing it doesn’t need to be one or the other but it can be both, with one working off the other very well.
Even in a conversation with ChatGPT the other day, it highlighted something similar to this. It indicated how people with Socialized Minds often focus on just success while avoiding failures. But ChatGPT revealed that as one grows and develops, they realize that success often occurs through failures, as those failures help us to grow in the process. So even in this instance, it’s not this OR that but instead this AND that.
Even more so though this article highlights the importance of not rushing the decision making process and giving room to see what curiously emerges from the process which also relates to how cognitive dissonance needs to be slowly resolved at more evolved stages of development. In effect, we often fear uncertainty and ambiguity, thus we want to naturally rush the process to get over this feeling of uneasiness. But we shouldn’t.
BTW just to close off and build upon what I said before, if I was now going to extract insights from this journal post and add them to my structured notes, my guess is that this relates to “vertical development” but more specifically relating to the characteristics of a Self-Transforming Mind.