First of all, what exactly is red light thinking?
I don’t know if there is such a person around you: when others have different opinions from him, he likes to refute them.
This phenomenon of habitually denying different opinions when hearing them is called red light thinking.
People with red-light thinking are always stuck in their ways, always think they are right, and refuse to accept new ideas and knowledge.
Their brains are like red lights, stopping them in their tracks. Once others disagree with him, he will refute without thinking.
We know that whether we are reading, studying, or communicating with others, we are all sharing experiences and exchanging opinions, and they are all inseparable from communication at the thinking level.
Those who don’t know can learn, and those who don’t understand can ask, but these are all based on the exchange of ideas. If you shut down your brain and refuse to accept new perspectives, how can you talk about progress and improvement?
Therefore, these people always enjoy themselves in their own world, make extremely slow progress, find it difficult to adapt to the current society, and are easily eliminated.
Moreover, it is difficult for them to seize the opportunities in life and watch them slip away from them in vain. Such people will always be at the bottom of society.
Red light thinking is a psychological phenomenon called habitual defense:
When our views and dignity are challenged, in order to avoid exposing our shortcomings, our first reaction is not to think about whether what the other party says is reasonable, but to directly refute it.
It is said in "The Fifth Discipline": The root of habitual defense is the fear of exposing the thinking behind our thoughts.
Being unwilling to accept inconsistent points of view for fear of exposing our shortcomings can cause us to lose the opportunity to become better.
For example, when a colleague says: "Your PPT is terrible."
Some people's first reaction must be to think that their colleagues say that you are not good, and then trigger your habitual defense and immediately refute it.
It’s not scary to have red light thinking. What’s scary is not knowing you have red light thinking. At this time, no matter how talented you are and how hard you work, your progress will be very slow.
How to change this thinking?
It is to establish green light thinking, that is, learn to accept some different viewpoints, which is exactly the opposite of red light thinking.
Specifically, there are two steps:
The first step is not to rush to refute.
You can't understand everything. Think more about why the other person said that. It's very likely that you haven't realized it yet, or you may have misunderstood it.
But many people deny it subconsciously. How to solve it?
There is a method. After others finish speaking, wait 3-5 seconds before you express your opinion. Even though it only lasts a few seconds, you can think about many things clearly during this time.
The second step is to distinguish between "I" and "perspective".
"I" refers to ourselves, and "viewpoint" refers to our thoughts and opinions.
Many times, what others refute is just our point of view, but we understand it as others' negation of us.
Steve Jobs once said: "I especially like working with smart people, because the biggest advantage is that I don't have to consider their dignity."
Smart people do not have no dignity, but they are able to distinguish between "me" and "opinion" and accept other people's opinions, so that they can make rapid progress and improvement.
And my colleague said, "Your PPT is very poor",In fact, he just said that your PPT is not good-looking, not that you are not good as a person.
If you do not distinguish between "I" and "opinion", it is very easy to trigger habitual defenses and refuse to accept other people's suggestions.
Once you understand these, you can calmly accept other people's opinions and truly absorb the nutrients of self-improvement in various carriers.
