In this week's episode we take a closer look at subjective bias distortions and the importance of reflective awareness in order to break through labels and build relationships between people, cultures and countries.

Liberate yourself from the labels and the biases that trap you and give yourself permission to honor all parts of yourself and all parts of the people around you. When you do you contribute to creating a modern society.

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Instead of looking at the specifics of an individual,

we generalize that around the old culture. And it's quite interesting.

These are, these are survival responses.

In all probability, you've heard somebody describe somebody else,

they may have a strong emotion about, 'My mom was always mean to me',

or 'my father was never there for me',

or 'that person they're always that way' or 'those type of people,

they're always that way.' And they have a very broad generality statement

projected onto people, that's not really the truth about people.

It's just our kind of our subjective bias distortion of what's going on there.

When we're really emotional,

we go into our subjective state and project things onto people that's not

exactly so. We end up with prejudice and we end up with

the exaggerations or minimizations of their behavior and not really get to know

the individual as they are.

It was Abraham Lincoln that was standing at a gala as a president,

standing on the podium, looking back out at the audience from the lectern.

And he pointed his finger at some gentlemen. And he goes,

'I don't like this man. In fact,

I despise this man.' And he noticed the room immediately divided up into people

that supported him and go, 'Yeah,

he's a scoundrel.' And the other group of people, 'Well, I know this man.

He's a fine man. What's wrong with him. What's wrong with Abe,

I can't imagine this.' And the whole room got divided up.

And then after he saw them all divided and they're all in emotional,

he then says, 'And it just goes to show that I don't know this man.

For I am certain that when I get to know this man,

I will love this man.' And he was trying to make a point that people tend to

polarize and bias and become prejudice against

people because of something that is either highly supportive or highly

challenging to their own value system. In other words,

if you infatuate with somebody, you see you're conscious of the upside,

but you become blind to the downsides,

ignorant and unconscious of the down side. When you're resentful to somebody,

you're conscious of the downside and unconscious of the upside.

And as long as you are polarized like that and not seeing what's going on,

they run you and you react.

And in fact what's going on is what you see in them is actually inside of you,

but you're too proud or too humble to admit what you see in them is inside you.

You're not really reflecting, you're deflecting.

And you're taking that personal response from something you think is overly

supportive or overly challenging to what you value in life.

And whenever we get polarized in our perceptions,

we tend to go in and label and create labels about people.

Our society,

when it's filled with labels and filled with these prejudices and filled with

these biases and subjective biases, confirmation biases,

and disconfirmation biases, false positives, false negative.

We're not really seeing what's actually there.

We're seeing only what we filter there based on our own, you might say,

our own wounds in the past. But how do we transcend that?

Because if you really look, if I walked up to you and I said to you,

'You're always mean. You're never nice. You're always cruel. You're never kind.

You're always negative. You're never positive. You're always wrathful,

never peaceful.' You would go, 'No, no,

that's not true.' You wouldn't believe it. You'd be,

you'd have intuition saying 'No,

I have the other side.' If I went the other way and I said, 'You're always nice.

You're never mean. Always kind.

You're never cruel.' With the other side you'd go, 'No,

that's not true either.' But if I said, 'Sometimes you're kind.

Sometimes you're cruel. Sometimes you're nice. Sometimes you're mean.

Sometimes you're positive. Sometimes you're negative.' You immediately go,

'Yeah, that's true.' We're only certainty when we have objectivity,

when we see both sides.

And we are uncertain when we have subjectivity and we are skewed in our

perception and have a subjective bias.

Almost all the labels we have in our society today,

all the prejudices that we're seeing on the news,

all of the subjective distortions that we put,

the misinformations that we see and hear on the news,

is all because of these subjective biases. An amygdala response,

in our animal brain you might say, our desire center where we're in survival.

And so we do that as a survival mechanism.

The reason why we end up having such a skewed view is because when we're out

there in the wild in our neurophysiology,

if we're out in the wild and we saw prey,

we would have to have our adrenaline run to go grasp it and go and catch it.

So we'd have to accelerate that and skew it and put it over into subjective bias

to get the adrenaline going. And the same thing for trying to avoid a predator.

So when we're into survival mode and we're not really inspired and really

poised in life, and we have this survival mentality,

we're going to automatically skew things into these prejudices and put labels on

people instead of actually honor them for who they are.

If you really get to know somebody,

I've been teaching the Breakthrough Experience,

one of my signature programs for over 32 years.

And one thing I've been certain about is working with people is, they start,

sometimes people come in with somebody they're highly infatuated or highly

resentful, just to show them how their biases are.

And then I ask them a series of questions to make them conscious of unconscious

information that is what's led to the label.

And I call this the Demartini Method. It's a method of dissolving the biases,

dissolving the prejudices,

dissolving those false confirmation and disconfirmation biases

and false positive, false negatives, and allow us to see the whole individual.

We all want to be loved for who we are.

But what happens is when we get a label put on us,

we feel that we're misunderstood and we're not really that individual.

We're more than that. We're all the above. We have all the traits,

is that what I've found. So,

our society tends to put labels on it when it's not fulfilled.

When people are not engaged at their work and not inspired by what they're doing

and not fulfilling their highest values,

feeling they're down in your amygdala in this survival mode,

living week to week, month to month,

instead of being thriving and actually living with an engaged vision in life,

they automatically increase their prejudice, et cetera.

There is a correlation in socioeconomics between prejudice and racial issues and

things of this nature when people are not engaged in what they love doing.

When people are doing what they really are inspired by,

living in their executive center,

getting their foresight and running their life, being more objective about it,

pre-planning things and actually getting to know individuals and asking quality

questions to become aware of the things that you would be normally ignorant of,

you get to love people,

and you get to have reflective awareness and you get to realize that they're

human beings with all the traits, just like you.

Our relationship with others has a lot to do with how well we can

actually reflect and see what we see in them inside us.

One of the great questions in life is what specific trait, action,

or inaction do I perceive in them that I admire or despise most,

and where do I perceive it in me?

And when you actually look at when you're pointing a finger and looking that

three of them are back at you and you realize you have those traits,

you can reflect and relate to those individuals and have a conversation that's

objective and that's meaningful.

But as long as you're sitting there in survival mode and you feel threatened by

challenge or infatuated by support, and you polarize your perceptions,

you're going to be trapped in this labeling mechanism and this prejudice

mechanism and these racial issues and these gender issues and these

cultural issues. I had somebody recently say, 'Well,

all those people from that country, they're all this way.' Well,

I've been to the country and I've found out that I've seen a complete spectrum

of responses from people from the different country, but we generalize that.

Instead of looking at the specifics of an individual,

we generalize that around the whole culture. And it's quite interesting.

These are survival responses instead of thrival responses.

If we fill our day with the highest priority actions

to us and get our blood glucose and oxygen going into the forebrain,

where we're more objective and we're more neutral, more resilient,

more adaptable,

we end up having the ability to transcend the labels that we project onto people

in modern society.

We are trapped in this survival mentality when we're not living

by what's most valuable to us. If you look very carefully,

think of a day that you are really, really, really,

you did the highest priority things, you knocked down your agenda,

you went by priority, you knocked it out of the ballpark.

And all of a sudden you felt like you're on top of the world because you really

got everything you set out to do that day done.

And you had time left over because you were managing your time effectively.

And what happens when you come home, you're resilient, you're adaptable,

you can handle almost any vicissitude that thrown at you, perturbation,

you can handle it well, and you're not projecting.

But the second you go and your work and you feel like you didn't get anything

done, you were putting out fires,

you never got around to what was most important in priority, you felt 'Whoah,

what a day.' You felt drained instead of, you know, inspired. Now,

when you come home, you're more likely to be projective,

more likely to be label projecting, more bias about things, more picky,

more sensitive, because you're down in your amygdala.

When we live by priority and fill our day with the highest priority actions,

we go into the forebrain, we go into the executive center,

we become objective and we're more neutral and resilient.

When we are not doing highest priority things and lower priority things,

we're down in our amygdala. And our amygdala is a polarizer,

the thing that gets addicted to fantasies and tries to avoid nightmares

and automatically polarizes things to more extremes. Our labels,

our prejudice, our gender issues,

all the things we see right now that are really polarized,

particularly in some countries right now,

have a lot to do with people who are not inspired and engaged,

fulfilling what they love in life.

I've spent the last 32 years teaching a Breakthrough Experience doing whatever I

can to assist people in prioritizing their life,

and learning a set of tools and questions to help them transcend these

biases,

allow them to be inspired by the life and realize that every human being is

worthy of love. Nobody's worth putting on pedestals or pits,

they're worth putting in the heart.

And so until you are actually able to transcend those labels,

the people on the outside are going to run your life,

because anything you infatuate with or resent, anything that you seek or avoid,

runs you. But the thing, once you to get to objectivity,

and get to the balancing state, and you're no longer highly polarized,

but you're poised, you run your life. And when you run your life, you're graced.

And when you do you don't project labels. So in our modern society,

the ability to transcend these labels simply boils down

to how well you can see and prioritize your actions and prioritize

your perceptions.

That means if you fill your day with the highest priority actions,

you'll have less probability of being prejudice and bias and in subjectivity.

And if you basically take whatever happens in your life and ask,

how is it helping me fulfill my highest values? Again,

you'll decrease the probability of these prejudice and labels,

and these polarities that we have. If we look very carefully,

we can find every single trait.

I went through the Oxford dictionary and I found 4,628 individual traits inside

myself. Every human being has got every trait, if you look really carefully.

But what we do is we tend to box people into categories.

They used to be archetypes of people,

but now they understand that there's just traits and everybody's got them all.

And knowing how to extract out in your awareness, instead of filtering,

looking and finding out where the whole spectrum of traits are in people so you

can appreciate them for their wholeness instead of put a label on them and only

see half of them. Our prejudice, our biases,

are a byproduct of not being inspired in our lives,

not living by priority and projecting these false ideals onto people and

fantasies about it, which creates our nightmares. So honor yourself,

free your mind up by looking carefully at whatever you see in others,

inside yourself.

Pluck the mote out of your own eye before you pluck it out of theirs as the

biblical way it is said. And by doing that,

you set yourself free of the labels because those labels aren't truths,

the human being is somebody worthy of love. Again,

nobody's worth putting on pedestals or pits,

but everybody's worth putting in hearts. If you do,

they are representations of you and you get to love them and you get to love

you.

And that liberates us from a lot of the labels and the biases that trap us and

get us caught in all of the distractions,

instead of doing something that's meaningful and inspiring and demonstrating

through exemplification what's possible in a world that has always a balance of

support and challenge and in the similarities and

There is a world of, at one time we lived in different countries.

Now we're living in a homogenous world where people from every country is living

in every country. It's time to transcend that, so we can appreciate it,

because the very people that you once condemned because of your own ignorance,

may be the people that you end up having closeness with in the future.

So give yourself permission to honor all parts of yourself and all parts of

other people, because we're homo-sapiens,

the rest of those distinctions are trivial and it's important not to be caught

in trivial pursuit, better to go into something that's meaningful.

Something that makes a difference.

So we can transcend of the labels in our modern society.