Temperament- this is the quality of an individual, which is expressed in the tendency to think in generally accepted, stereotyped truths, to show unoriginality, inexpressiveness, and stereotyping in behavior.
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“Living according to a pattern” means living without reason, obeying habits and cliches ingrained in the mind. Inertness and one-sided thinking dulls consciousness and deprives a person of the ability to analyze, reducing the ability to find solutions to non-trivial, unknown problems.
The habit of acting traditionally is often provoked by self-doubt - a person is afraid of failures and does not feel ready for responsibility, using ready-made tips and templates from others. However, most often patterned behavior is associated with conformism and laziness.
The danger of template thinking is that it “lives” in our subconscious: we are not aware of either the presence of templates or why and how we use them. A person “dances to the tune” of the beliefs and cliches that have taken root in him, being in the illusion of free will, and, feeling the consequences of stereotypical thinking, he does not understand their true cause.
To stop thinking statically, a person needs to develop the habit of asking questions and finding independent answers, without using ready-made solutions.
- Templates are behavior without comprehension, analysis and self-control.
- Stereotypes are juggling with stereotypes.
- Templates are the absence of an individual approach.
- Stereotypes are the inability to look at a situation from different angles.
- Templates are a thoughtless life “out of habit”.
Disadvantages of template
- Stereotypes dull consciousness and deprive you of clarity of thought.
- Templates make a person predictable and easy to control.
- Stereotypes hinder self-improvement and development.
- Stereotypes deprive you of free will and the joys of creativity.
- Templates lead to mental laziness and slow-wittedness.
Manifestations of patterns in everyday life
- Exact sciences. Any exact formula is inherently formulaic: it is reduced to a specific type, and the method for solving it is known beforehand. Block diagrams of algorithms in computer science have a similar property - simple sequential actions brought to automaticity.
- Education. The form of education that exists today invests in children's thinking basic concepts and principles, seeking to fit students' knowledge to the examination framework. From year to year, students and schoolchildren study in similar programs in which non-standard, originality and self-expression are not encouraged.
- Psychology. In psychology, the fight against harmful mental patterns is called reframing - a technique that allows you to rebuild the mechanism of perception of a situation or object. The reframing method is often used in NLP and sales psychology.
- Cyberlover robot program. The task of the program is to lure private information from chat visitors by posing as a temperamental man. The cyber pick-up artist uses standard scenarios of communication and seduction; to “break the script”, it is enough to ask any unpredictable question like “Have you been to America?” The statistics are inexorable: 99% of girls never realized that they were talking to a machine.
How to overcome stereotypes
- Develop self-confidence. A self-sufficient person expresses individuality without fear of ridicule, criticism, or making mistakes. Self-confidence will allow you to say: “I’m not that stupid, maybe someone else is wrong.”
- Learn to think for yourself. Train yourself to analyze the nature of each of your actions. Is it dictated by free will or provoked by a pattern, a habit? Does it bring your goals closer to realization? If patterned behavior forces you to “tread water”, forcing you to work on tasks and goals that are completely alien to you, find a way to modify it.
- Develop your creativity. A banal decision leads to a banal result. Try to look at familiar concepts with fresh, abstract eyes. Engage associative thinking, performing intuitive, spontaneous actions. Use the " brainstorming”, writing down any, the most ridiculous ideas that came to mind. Transform problems into opportunities.
- Expand your horizons. Children who are curious by nature rarely think in stereotypes. Be like children: take advantage of every opportunity to learn or see something new. The more knowledge you have, the easier it is to consider the situation from unusual angles.
Golden mean
Temperament
Creativity
Pretentiousness, over-originality
Catchphrases about stereotypes
Stereotypes constrain our thoughts and actions. They limit our freedom, destroy the scale of priorities, and sometimes even distort logic. - Haruki Murakami - A stereotype is a plane trying to pretend to be volume.- V.A. Chernov - An attempt to comprehend the truth requires the rejection of stereotypes and clichés. - Harold Evans - By always trying to be normal, you will never know how amazing you could be.- Maya Angelou - Charles Duhigg / The power of habit: why we live and work this way and not otherwise A book that explains in detail the mechanism for the emergence of a pattern (habit), the principle of action, as well as methods that allow you to eliminate bad habits and pin the useful ones. Authorin simple language
talks about how important it is to take responsibility for the behavioral stereotypes that live in our minds.
Igor Vagin /
Learn to think brilliantly
The author of the book is convinced that any person, thanks to his individuality and uniqueness, can surprise others with amazing abilities or do something incredible - just awaken his creativity in six simple ways.
But no one really says how to do this.
The fact is that a person does not know how to think differently.
More precisely, not the person himself - this is how his brain works, he thinks in patterns, but, scientifically speaking, in neural networks.
At every lecture, seminar or training, I focus the attention of listeners on this main tool of the brain.
The main concept of the School of Creative Thinking is built on the formation and disintegration of neural networks.
Its essence lies in the fact that creative abilities can and should be developed by practicing solving real creative problems.
In other words, during creative work, neural networks are formed in the brain for a specific task. And the more often you perform such actions, the more powerful the neural network becomes.
A person’s ability to learn certain skills is also built on this.
This is how thought patterns are formed in our heads.
For companies and business in general, the problem is that these total patterns are very contagious and affect all team members.
The only way to go beyond template thinking is to replace old templates with new ones.
If you carefully study successful companies, this is how their development occurs.
The clearest example of Apple and Steve Jobs, which replaced old thinking patterns with new ones.
But these new patterns did not appear out of nowhere; he first created them in his brain in the form of powerful neural networks.
Innovative leadership is another important concept of the Creative Brain.
I don't believe in hive minds.
But this is a topic for another discussion.
Replacing old templates with new ones is much easier than creating new ones from scratch.
Already the analysis of existing dogmas, attitudes, rules, “reinforced concrete paths” will lead to significant structural changes in thinking and assessment of the situation as a whole.
This approach is effective because it makes the brain's work easier.
The brain sees the goal, understands what and how to do and begins to create new patterns (neural networks).
Important point.
To achieve a significant result, you need to set a goal to create something new, not make changes.
In practice it looks like this:
- You need to carefully analyze a creative task or problem in business, break everything down into its components.
- Identify and make a list of those patterns that you are trying or have tried to use for a long time To solve the task.
- Replace old templates with new ones. But this needs to be done in stages. If you work with all the templates at once, it will be very difficult to understand which replacement had an effect.
When replacing some templates with others, you need a certain creative courage and firmness in decision making.
The brain will resist any innovation with all its might, and the brains of your colleagues will immediately begin to fight for usual ways thinking.
Another effective method combating the stereotyped thinking of an individual and the team as a whole is development of new mental models.
In the context of this article, a mental model is a mental structure of new patterns that is created for the time of solving a problem or for a certain period of the company’s activities.
The development and creation of mental models is the topic of a separate article and special practice.
Look for patterns in your thinking and the thinking of your employees and replace them with others, and a creative breakthrough is guaranteed.
“To break is not to build”
this is not about template thinking.
Template thinking
Welcome to my blog, friends. I want to dedicate this entry to such a concept as template thinking. Have you ever thought that we all live by rules every day? Society, education, moral and ethical standards at the subconscious level have embedded behavioral scripts in us. Today we’ll talk about how this affects our lives.
“Everything significant that has been created in human history is the fruit of the individual creativity of a genius. The masses can only repeat” Gabriel Tarde.
According to their way of thinking, people are divided into two types. Those who think in stereotypes and those whose way of consciousness is outside the stereotypes. There are many more of the first, because at all times logic has been the most important of truths. No one took into account situations where the logical solution was not the only one.
Let me give you a trivial example - children's blocks. A child assembles a pyramid of cubes, stacking them on top of each other - this is pattern thinking. His parents push him to this action. But if a child arranges cubes, drawing a pattern out of them, or simply scatters them chaotically, this is thinking outside the framework of patterns. At the same time, perhaps this pattern that the baby laid out can be useful to exactly the same extent as if a pyramid was built from cubes.
Two steps forward, four steps back... - don’t even try to step aside!
“A man must do three things in life - plant a tree, build a house and give birth to a son” - have you heard this saying? This is nothing more than a real template.
An unmarried woman is unhappy, a person who does not have a decent bank account is a loser, what time should you get up and go to bed, what and how to eat, when to give birth to children and how to raise them - there are plenty of examples of templates.
From the very first day of a person's life, he is assigned a pattern, and the older he gets, the wider the range of patterns by which he must live. What's wrong with that, you ask? Nothing!
The template is nothing more than what has been accumulated over many generations life experience. A person, taking advantage of mistakes already made by someone else in the most different situations, knows the result of his action before he performs it.
If you touch a fire, you can get burned, if you eat poorly, you will have health problems, and if you don’t go to work, you risk being fired. There must be rules in society! Otherwise there will be chaos.
But! The scale of the pattern of our life is so great that the framework has penetrated into every area of it. We are used to it and it is convenient for us. But! Often the ability to think only in patterns prevents us from seeing more than we see. Stereotypical thinking prevents us from making truly necessary decisions.
Are you already a computer or not yet?
The most accurate method of template thinking is a computer. The program embedded in the “brain” of the computer processes information and responds to it, strictly according to approved directives. A person’s adaptability to norms, the habit of thinking in scripts, leads to the fact that he, at the subconscious level, rejects everything that is outside the template, outside the program. That's how it works human psychology– go to what is most convenient.
Meanwhile, life confronts us with different tasks, and sometimes the only correct solution is outside the framework of the template.
But we don’t see this solution, because it is behind the limitations that our own subconscious sets for us. Hence failures, lack of ideas, and, as a result, loss of interest. It’s good if it’s about a specific issue, bad if it’s about life. A stereotyped personality is very often in a struggle with his own inner world. Because natural desires are replaced by a subconscious desire to conform to the framework. Think bigger!
Discover your genius
Creativity is the most shining example not stereotyped thinking. And not only in art. Chemistry, physics, rational theories, whatever – ours everyday life, from everyday problems to professional ones - there is a place for creativity everywhere.
Think for yourself - if all of humanity lived only according to patterns, then we would not have geniuses and their great inventions. We would not know the great artist Leonardo Da Vinci, the legendary physicist Albert Einstein, one of the best composers in the world Wolfgang Mozart and all the others who gave humanity development in various areas of life. In many ways, the secret of the enormous scale of their talent is also in the ability to think broader than everyone else. One hundred percent originality.
What about you and me?
Let there be frameworks, I wrote above - you can’t do without them. But it is important to be able to open your own eyes where the situation seems hopeless, and the absolutely correct and logical solution does not seem to fit. And this can be learned.
Today in the century information technologies the availability of almost any information is very convenient. The Internet is crammed with all kinds of advice that help you get rid of boundaries and expand your own consciousness.
And finally
Overcoming a thinking pattern can help in the right situation to use not only logic, but also to find a non-stereotypical, creative solution. I sincerely wish you to go beyond the boundaries when necessary. Success and good luck, and see you again here on my blog.
Ecology of life: Some tips to help you abandon stereotyped thinking and look at problems or difficult situations on the other side...
The book Liminal Thinking talks about how to move beyond the boundaries of your beliefs in your personal and professional life.
Here are some tips to help you stop thinking and look at problems or difficult situations from a different perspective.
Getting rid of template thinking
Admit your bias
Many of the problems that business leaders want to solve are caused by their behavior.- at least partially (it happens that the managers themselves do not realize this). And if you have an intractable pressing problem that keeps making itself felt every now and then, start by admitting your own bias.
Most often this is what happens: we try to solve the problem as if looking at it from the outside. When a person talks about problems, he often points the finger at others, excluding himself from the situation. He constantly repeats the word “them” because “they” seem to be the problem.
But in most cases, “they” are not the only reason. Problems that remain unsolved for a long time are classified as systemic. And if you are part of this system, then inevitably you are also part of the problem.
The biggest blind spot is yourself
If you are not willing to pay attention to how much you personally contribute to the situation and how much the problem is caused by you, you will never have a clear picture of it. Your understanding of the situation will be distorted, as will your beliefs.
Listen to your emotions
Emotions are important and even necessary in order to make decisions about further actions. If you do not experience emotions, if the matter does not evoke any feelings in you, you will never come to a logical conclusion about the need for any action. You will have nothing to strive for.
You have needs. You work, shop, dine, etc. to meet your needs for food, water, or shelter. And if they are satisfied, other, more advanced ones appear: a better house, or a car, or a great goal and search for meaning.
“Leaving emotions at the door” is a dangerous idea. You can't take off the emotions like outerwear, and leave them somewhere.
Empty your cup
The most common mistake when trying to change something is to assume that you have a good understanding of the situation. Sometimes some people see a problem one way and others another. And sometimes others don’t see the problem at all or see a completely different one.
To learn something new, you need to empty your cup, get rid of the excess: knowledge, teachings, beliefs and prejudices that hinder you. In Zen practice this is called "beginner's mind."
Having a “beginner’s mind” means awakening the desire to learn, becoming inquisitive, open to everything new. Even if you are an expert in some field, you begin to study the situation from scratch, rediscovering it for yourself, just as a beginner or a child would do.
Break the mold
We perform many actions automatically. Sometimes a problem seems insoluble to us because we act according to a pattern that we do not notice.
If you act not out of habit, but arbitrarily, without thinking through the course of events, then you can see the situation in a new light.
Think about how you work. Chances are, like many of us, you live on autopilot. Every day you drive the same route, see the same things along the way, and over time you stop noticing what surrounds you. But if suddenly the road is closed - for repairs or for some other reason - and you have to find a detour, you are forced to pay attention to everything new that is around you.
Most likely, you act the same way - and intentionally - in the most different areas. As soon as you realize that you are stuck and things are going in circles, try to change something. Any action you take to get out of a rut will help you see the situation differently and point you to new opportunities. Do something differently.published . If you have any questions about this topic, ask them to the experts and readers of our project .
Based on materials from the book “Liminal Thinking”
One of the reasons for the activation of creative thinking and intuition in dreams, in our opinion, is that, thanks to the liberation of the psyche from accepted forms and patterns, patterns of thinking, from con-
Wman M., Krippner S. (with A. Vaughan). Dream Telepathy. - N. Y„ 1973. - P. 219. Ibid. - p. 220.
Formist conventions give scope to the so-called lateral, or unconventional, thinking. In the field of creativity psychology, this relatively new term denotes that type of thinking that differs significantly from template, “traditional” thinking carried out according to the laws of formal logic. When implementing template thinking, a person moves from od. significant reliable judgment to another, which when solving complex problems leads to a one-sided approach. An extreme form of template thinking is the “thinking” of computing machines (computers). In addition to this formal side, template (“flat”) thinking uses such generally accepted concepts and ideas, which are sometimes simply prejudices.
Unconventional thinking is radically different from template thinking. To illustrate this difference, here is a test (“riddle”) that psychologists offer people to test the extent to which they are guided by stereotyped ideas and the extent to which they are able to think creatively and originally.
Here's the problem: a father and his son are driving in a car along a highway. Suddenly the father gets distracted and an accident occurs: the car hits telephone booth. The father dies instantly and the son is seriously injured. He is quickly transported to the nearest hospital, where it turns out that he internal organs seriously damaged. A prominent surgeon is immediately invited, who arrives and, entering the operating room to examine the boy, sighs heavily and says: “I cannot operate on this boy, he is my son!” What's the matter? The boy's father died. How can a boy be the son of a surgeon?"
The answer is simple: the surgeon is a woman, she is the mother of the wounded boy. Despite the apparent obviousness of this answer, most subjects cannot solve the problem. In one study, out of 26 men, only 3 and out of 24 women, only 4 (all were previously unfamiliar with the task) were able to give correct answers. The reason for this surprising result is that there is a widespread prejudice that a woman cannot become a prominent surgeon. When the task is somewhat modified and they say that the surgeon, approaching the wounded boy, began to cry loudly and hysterically, tears appeared in his eyes, etc., a much larger number.
We took the problem from the following book: Baron R. A. and Byme D. Social PhychologV Understanding Human Interaction. 2nd ed. - Boston a. o., 1977. - P. 177.
subjects correctly solve the problem. And this is for the reason that it is good for another stereotypical idea (closer to the is- “p”) in grief, crying, as a form of behavior, is typical for women. It is interesting that such stereotypical ideas about women are not only men, but also women themselves."
Such stereotyped ideas, fettering and suppressing the original, creative thinking, people have information about many phenomena that are different in nature.
It often happens in life when a person faces difficult, seemingly insoluble problems. However, after some preliminary work suddenly, in the form of an intuitive “insight,” sometimes a very simple, elegant solution to a problem penetrates into the sphere of consciousness, which “for some unknown reason” had not appeared before. But the main reason that man has been unable to find such a simple solution for a long time is that many new problems cannot be solved by conventional thinking. When trying to solve the above problem, few people showed unconventional, creative thinking.
If we had offered the solution to this problem to the subjects from the very beginning, many of them would have grinned: it’s so simple, this is the solution! However, when you need to find it yourself, it turns out that it is not so easy. The famous American psychologist Edward de Bono rightly writes: “Even in the most successful examples Without conventional thinking, the solution becomes logically obvious only after it has already been found. And the fact that it was found in an unconventional way is quickly forgotten. As soon as there is already a solution, there are immediately a lot of people who want to explain how it could just as easily be obtained using template thinking. Knowing the answer, it is quite easy to discover the logical connection between the problem and its solution” 2.
The main way to get new ideas is through lateral thinking, which deals with unlikely possibilities or paths. When the path, the direction of the work of thought, which has a low probability, leads to a new and useful result, they immediately become more likely. Template thinking always has
The author of these lines repeated the experience described and is inclined to think that women are even more prejudiced against themselves than men. It should be said that 0 The result also depends on the traditions of the socio-cultural environment where the Research is conducted.
DeBoe.
but Ed. The birth of a new idea. - M., 1976. - P. 14.
dealing with paths that are likely to lead to negative results.
Unconventional thinking either leads to fundamentally new results, or allows a person to view the tasks facing him from a new point of view.
Since unconventional thinking is widely used in dreams, it is also interesting to consider the following question: what similarities exist between this type of thinking and those disturbances in thought processes that arise when mental illness? As rightly noted Ed. De Bono, The more unconventional thinking moves away from the logical laws of template thinking, the closer it seems to insanity. What difference is there between unconventional thinking and those fragmentary, jumping from one question to another associations that are created by the thinking of a schizophrenic? The main difference, according to Ed. De Bono, is that in the case of unconventional thinking, the entire process is strictly controlled and controlled, while the disordered thinking of a schizophrenic is carried out spontaneously and is not subject to conscious control. “If unconventional thinking prefers to use chaos, then this is controlled chaos, and not chaos as a consequence of the lack of control. Along with this, the logical faculty of the mind always involves carefully developing and ultimately evaluating a new idea whenever it appears. The difference between template and unconventional thinking is that with template thinking, logic controls the mind, while with unconventional thinking, it serves it.
Let us note that the question of the existence of similarities between the dream thinking of a mentally healthy person and the thinking of a schizophrenic in the waking state has long been discussed in psychology and psychiatry. For this reason, the above thoughts Ed. De Bono are of significant interest, although we do not agree with him that the unconventional thinking of mentally healthy people is always under the “strict” conscious control of their personality. Especially in dreams, such control and such (especially conscious) management are absent, although, as we already know, as a result of the processes of dream thinking, new and original (unconventional) creative associations are obtained.
De Bono Ed. The birth of a new idea. - M., 1976. - P. 17.
Reli, as Ed correctly points out. De Bono, awake
Only a small number of people express a spontaneous, natural tendency towards unconventional thinking, then in dreams, from our point of view, everyone exhibits such a tendency to some extent, regardless of their will.
Foresight of the future
Foresight or anticipation of the future is one of the highest forms of human thinking. Dreams with elements of foresight occur quite often. This is not surprising, since in a waking state we all strive to guess at least those events that should occur in the near future. When we plan our actions for tomorrow, the week, the month, and beyond, we are essentially trying to anticipate the future. It is more difficult to foresee the actions of other people, events occurring in nature and society, since their causes and conditions are almost completely beyond our control.
In some cases, with the help of dreams in which the future is anticipated, unpleasant or dangerous events can be prevented. Let us give just one example, which was told by the famous modern researcher of sleep and dreams S. Kripner.
A young woman wakes up in the middle of the night and alarms her husband to tell him her terrible dream. She saw in a dream how a large chandelier hanging over their baby's bed fell and killed him. In the same dream there was another vivid image: she saw Wall Clock, which showed exactly 4 hours 35 minutes. The husband watched with the mocking smile of an unbeliever as his alarmed wife took the baby into her bed. But his expression changed abruptly when, some time later, he heard a crash from the children's room. This chandelier fell on an empty bed. It was exactly 4 hours 35 minutes.
The child was saved by the fact that anticipation of a future event allowed the young mother to change one link in the chain of future events, namely, to transfer the child. But how she managed to perceive the scheme of future events is not at all clear. Only hypotheses are possible here."
Thus, as the French researcher Ilye O'Jacobson correctly noted, the presence of anticipation does not mean that we should be fatalists: sometimes human intervention and changing the course of events are possible.
Nik O" Jacobson. La vie apre"s la mort? - P., 1977 - P. 87.
Dreams in which future events are foreseen, according to the seers, arise according to the following scheme: extrasensory perception of pairs. psychological information - its subconscious processing - the formation of a dream (this is also a subconscious process) - testing. dreaming and awareness of a dream - anticipating understanding of it | nature. Then a person can take certain actions either to prevent the expected event, or to ensure its unconditional occurrence, depending on his goals.
