Notice Your Black-or-White Thinking

I often see smart, intelligent, capable clients temporarily slide into an all-or-nothing mindset. It usually shows up when the pressure is high, or they get triggered, and can be detected by the language in use:

• He went against me in the meeting (collapsed into ‘him-or-me’ rather than ‘us’ and against ‘me’ rather than ‘my suggestion’)

• She said I was wrong (‘only one of us can be right’ rather than ‘what if we’re both right?’)

• We completely failed (no place for acknowledging progress)

• I need to be the smartest in the room, otherwise they will see me as incompetent (or, in the client’s actual language, ‘stupid’)

• Only one party can walk away as a winner (no space is given to consider what a win-win would look like)

The problem is not the utilitarian use of such categorisation - it is often helpful to imagine the extreme ends of any given scenario (e.g. best-case and worst-case analysis).

The problem comes from a psychological mechanism at play here, which serves it’s purpose, but important to be aware of:

When we’re unable to cope with ambiguity, our psyche deals with it by going into the either-or mode to simplify the world.

And it simplifies the world artificially. In the extremes, it’s called “spitting”. And there is a range of such splits that can show us in our lives:

• If your boss is ‘bad’ - that makes you ‘good’.

• If your team didn’t deliver - it’s ‘because of them’ (or ‘you’), not ‘we’.

The problem lies in how we show up when we get stuck in the all-or-nothing mindset. We show up defensive, our thinking narrows to tunnel vision, we don’t see, and often aren’t willing to look for alternative options forward. This is why it is often true that we usually don’t get stuck in a situation; we get stuck in how we experience and think about the situation.

We often don’t get stuck in a situation; we get stuck in how we experience and think about the situation.

It’s like adding lots of contrast to a photograph - you will bring out the extremes but will lose all the nuances that are so vital to doing good work, collaborating with other people and to life in general.

I sometimes see this in my 5-year-old son: when I’m in his favour, he gifts me with “You can be my friend forever”. When I’m not, for example, after saying ‘no’ to his extra dessert request, he can go into “I will not be friends with you any more, ever again”.

You may smile as you read this, yet we ‘adults’ go into such thinking too and part of my job to notice when clients are operating from this mode and to say “sounds like you’ve gone into a black-or-white mode”. It is normal that we do it, especially when we are stepping into bigger roles or bigger projects that are a stretch to our psyche. But it is during such stretch periods that we need to pay extra attention to which state we’re operating from in a given moment.

Here are some more examples that often come up in my coaching practice:

• ‘This was the worst sales presentation’, rather than noticing what worked well and what could’ve been done better.

• Or this was a leadership success or a failure. Smart or stupid.

• Nice or arrogant.

• Me or them.

• I do it all myself, or I let go completely.

• I will either influence the board or I won’t.

• I’m a good or a bad parent/child/brother/colleague/leader/boss.

When you notice yourself thinking in such categories, be aware that your mind is shrinking into simplifying and splitting reality. A state in which your thinking is not the most creative and resourceful. Your mind, for whatever reason (pressure, tiredness, personal triggers), regresses and becomes limited in its thinking. Happens with all of us. The good news is that we can work on noticing it and pulling ourselves out from a reactive state to a more responsive one.

That’s why, when I have a client who goes into such an ‘either me-or-them’ mode, I often ask: ‘What would a win-win be for both of you?’. It often creates a long pause… and then a third alternative.

A more subtle variation of such artificial categorisation is when leaders are working on shifting from “I am paid to deliver results” to “I am paid to lead a team/organisation that delivers results”. A subtle shift of focus that opens pathways from ME to WE thinking (as opposed to ME as a leader and THEM as a team). But I will write more on such developmental shifts another time.