Now in the final weeks of 2010, I have been fighting to break not one but two status quo biases. Talk about indecisiveness - it feels like a Sisyphean task. I would make a decision, then thoughts would start to wander, rationalizing process would kick off and bingo!!, back to square one.This loop kept repeating itself for weeks. Frustration is an understatement. I had headaches, cried, took long walks, read books to distract myself, watched movies and put immense pressure (read "drove them nuts") on people who care. And Max doesn't talk (damn you FOXP2). Now that, I have made my decision (more or less)... its time to jot down some factors which helped me break that vicious cycle.
- Start talking to oneself - listen carefully to your heart with all the brains and speak from the heart with all your brains.
- Speak your heart-out with someone close, who wishes you well and listen to them carefully.
- Speak to some who doesn't know you - an acquaintance. They might not be imbibed with the biases/blind-spot's you and your friends have on you.
- Meditate - helps opening up that most coveted open mind.
- Metacognition - it creates a loop in-itself, paradoxical but don't underestimate it's potential. (I think, it's next only to love on the hierarchy of human potentials)
- To state the obvious - there are risks involved either way but there is an illusion of less risk in status quo.
- Picture your future self. Picture yourself traveling through those two different roads and pick the one you want to travel most.
- Don't make a decision with help of cognitive fluency. It's the foundation of future remorse, guilt and what not.
- There will be others inevitably affected by staying or breaking the status quo. Be polite to them either way.
- Breaking the status-quo is not a zero-sum game like it seems to be. We can make it a win-win situation.
- Remember all those perpetual cognitive looping is not waste of time. It inevitably hones our decision making skills (neural plasticity?).
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