How to Be Alright With Being Wrong
- Happy & Authentic
- Acceptance, Authenticity, Emotions, Happiness, Mindfulness
- on Feb, 12, 2017
- No Comments
The Status Quo
Most of us go through life assuming that we’re right, all the time, about everything. This faith in our rightness is often warranted, because most of us navigate day-to-day life fairly well, which suggests that we’re routinely right about a great many things. These moments of rightness affirm our sense of being smart, competent, trustworthy, and in tune with our environment. More important, they keep us alive. Our very existence depends on our ability to reach accurate conclusions about the world around us. This is why we relish being right and regard it as our natural state. And it’s also why we hate being wrong. When it does happen, we tend to view it as rare and bizarre – an inexplicable aberration in the normal order of things. It makes us feel stupid and ashamed, because error is associated stupidity, ignorance, madness and moral degeneracy.
The Flip Side
But the capacity to err is not a moral flaw or a sign of intellectual inferiority. Quite the opposite. It’s crucial to human cognition. It’s inextricable from some of our most humane and honourable qualities: empathy, optimism, imagination, conviction and courage. Wrongness is a vital part of how we learn and change. Thanks to error, we can revise our understanding of ourselves and amend our ideas about the world.
Intellectual Understanding VS Actual Understanding
Strangely enough, even though we understand that humans are flawed and fallible in the abstract sense, when it comes to ourselves right here, in the present moment, we can’t admit that we might be wrong. While we’re living our lives and not thinking about our lives, we don’t recognize it when we’re wrong, because we refuse to believe it’s even a possibility. And this is because of how our brain is wired. We always feel very right about everything we do and say, as we do and say it. Later on, when we think about things, we might recognize and admit that we were wrong. But how do we tackle this feeling while it’s happening?
But why?
We get stuck in the feeling of being right because our brains are built to make sense of everything new in relation to everything we already know. If you’ve watched my video on accepting your fallibility, you’ll know why I believe it’s important to accept when you’re wrong. Think of being right as a spectrum, not a fundamental state. Most people think that, if you’re not right, you’re wrong, but more often than not you’re somewhere in the middle, and accepting that will make you happier than denying it. Here’s my video below, if you’d like to find out why humans hate being wrong.
Realizing you’re wrong can feel bad. But being wrong, while it’s happening, doesn’t feel like anything. Or rather it feels like being right, which is why we don’t realize it when we’re wrong about something. We don’t have an internal cue to let us know.
Raised to Be Right
But even when we do realize that we’re wrong, we don’t want to admit it, because we’re raised to consider it a major flaw. When we’re in school we’re taught that the people who get stuff wrong are the lazy, irresponsible and dumb ones. Thus, we don’t want to be considered wrong, lest we be considered lazy, irresponsible or dumb. We’re taught that the people who succeed are the ones who never get anything wrong. So we grow up in fear of being wrong and when we realize it, we try to hide it from others, in case they judge us for it. We become perfectionists and over-achievers because we think that’s the only way we’ll get acknowledged as worthy. We act like getting something wrong means there’s something wrong with us, even though we intellectually know that isn’t the case.
So Here’s How We React:
When we realize we’re wrong, we feel incompetent and powerless and so we usually get mad, because that way we regain a sense of power. But that just redirects our wrongness. It takes the attention off the fact that we made a mistake and focuses it on the fact that we’re now being stubborn, mean or loud. It essentially changes the subject, which means we don’t learn and we just stay wrong.
When we realize we’re wrong, we insist that we’re right, because it makes us feel smart, responsible, virtuous and safe. But trusting too much in the feeling of being right can be very dangerous. It’s not a reliable guide and when we act like it is, we don’t take the precautions that could help us learn and prevent mistakes.
When we don’t realize we’re wrong and everyone else does, we explain them away with the following assumptions: If someone disagrees with us, we assume they’re ignorant and don’t know what we know. We assume that when we share with them what we know, they’ll agree with us, but when that doesn’t work, we assume they’re idiots. When it turns out they’re smart and have access to all the information we do, we move on to assume they’re just disagreeing with us because they’re bad people and they have an ulterior motive. So not only are we not fixing our mistakes in time, but we end up treating each other badly in the process.
So What Do I Do?
This is all well and good. I can just picture you saying to yourself: “I get it. I know I can be wrong sometimes, but I don’t know how to feel okay with it when it happens”. Not to worry. I totally get how you feel. If you understand and accept the notion intellectually, you’ve already taken the first step. The next step is to try to understand the reason behind your need to be right. To do this, ask yourself the following questions:
- What does being wrong make you feel about who you are? Now I’m not just asking if it makes you feel good about yourself, coz that much is obvious. What I’m really asking is if it makes you feel like you’re smarter, worthier, etc. than everyone else and if so, why is it important for you to be smarter, worthier, etc.?
- What is this rightness doing for you now or how do you believe it will serve you in the future? Be specific.
- What would happen to you, if you were wrong?
- What would it mean in general, if you were wrong?
- And what would that mean about you specifically, if you were wrong?
- What would happen, if you accepted that you didn’t know the absolute truth all the time?
- In what ways, specifically, would your life be different, if you went through life always being sure you are at least slightly wrong?
- If you always made a point of trying to see how you are wrong, for the sake of learning something new, what would change?
- Would it be a good thing, or a bad thing?
After you have pondered these questions and written down your answers, practise telling yourself the following mantra: “I don’t know the truth” or “Maybe I’m wrong about this”. Say it to yourself, even if you think you’re right, and watch how not much changes other than your relationships with those around you and of course your inner happiness and emotional wellbeing.
When it comes to stories, movies and TV shows we love red herrings, plot twists and surprise endings. We love the suspense when the characters think one thing is going to happen, but then something else happens instead. We recognize that it wouldn’t be an interesting story without something going wrong. So why don’t we accept and recognize that life itself would be boring and monotonous, if we didn’t get things wrong from time to time?
The whole reason we have innovations and improvements that make our lives easier is because the first time we do things we get them wrong. We can always make them better, which proves that even when we think we’ve done a good job, we can still be a little bit wrong. We can’t make anything better unless we admit that we didn’t get it right the first time.
Our capacity to mess up isn’t some kind of defect in the human system that we have to fix, overcome or get rid of. It’s fundamental to who we are. We can’t just upload the truth into our brains. We have to learn and grow and that can only happen with trial and error. The sooner we realize this, the better off we’ll be.
If this advice doesn’t work for you, let me know in the comments below or send me a message and I’ll do my best to help. If it’s not simple enough to answer in a brief email, I will ask you to book a complimentary breakthrough session so I can help you out for free through Skype.
You can find more videos with free happiness tips, on my YouTube channel. Subscribe to make sure you never miss a video. Each one comes with an article like this one and together they help you put into practice a strategy that will take you one step closer to authentic happiness.
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I’ll see you next Sunday!
Until then, remember: Happiness doesn’t require energy. It requires Strategy.
