Have you ever wondered where your thoughts come from? Everything we think – and notice, are curious about, believe in – emerges from neural circuits in our brain that store our history. In other words, due to the way brains process, everything we experience is unconsciously biased by our lived lives.

From birth, our parent’s beliefs become part of our unconscious, personal, ecosystem; the cultural norms of our youth begin creating our lifelong beliefs, habits, behaviors, and identity; the schools we attend introduce us to the way the world works and how to behave accordingly; our professions are chosen to comfortably maintain the biases we’ve accrued and person we’ve become.

Net net, our lives are a conglomeration of our history and unconscious biases, causing us to live and work, marry and spend time with people whose norms, interpretations, and beliefs are very similar to ours.

WE CANNOT UNDERSTAND OTHERS

We unwittingly listen through biased filters and hear distorted versions of what was said; we play and read and watch according to what we’re comfortable with and rarely venture far afield; and aided by the way our brains filter and prune incoming data, we notice what we notice in response to our personal norms, values, and learned habits. We even restrict our lives accordingly – our politics, our curiosity, what we read, our professional choices.

Our lives are lived in a reality of our own making, believing, with certainty, that what we see, hear, and feel is ‘real’. We each live in a unique reality that gets maintained every moment of every day, a reality so automatic and habituated that we’re often unaware how different it might be from those around us.

Given the subjective nature of our lives and our idosyncratic filters, we sometimes make assumptions and judgements of others with different lifestyle choices, education, assumptions, race, or political beliefs. And when we notice these biases and attempt to change our behaviors we are often unsuccessful: changing core biases must be resolved within the system that created it.

This article explains the elements that trigger our biases and offers a route to systemic change.

WE MUST UNDERSTAND SYSTEMS TO ADDRESS BIAS

I’ll start by explaining ‘systems’ as they’re at the root of change: A system is a conglomeration of things that all agree to the same rules. Our ‘human system’ includes a composite of our physiology, biology, and neurology mixed with our norms, culture, history, values, beliefs, dreams that we hold largely unconsciously and formed during our lifetimes.

As a dedicated whole, our personal systems enable us to show up every day as unique individuals: although unconscious, they define our politics, our mate selection, even how we listen to others.

Because we’re often unaware of how deeply rooted our biases are, we are sometimes surprised when they show up. Problems occur when we try to change them and they resist. For permanent change to occur, to modify unconscious bias, it’s not enough to try to change our actions, as you’ll see. We must change our system. Here are a few of our naturally occurring practices that would need to be reconsidered for change:

• Listening: our habituated listening filters automatically bias whatever anyone says to us; we set up our lives to avoid discomfort, unwittingly interpreting what has been said to stay comfortable. When new information is offered our historic, habituated, biased listening filters kick in and uniquely interpret incoming data, often differently than the intended meaning. Indeed, it’s not even possible to hear anyone without bias; when what we hear (or see, or feel) makes us uncomfortable, we react historically regardless of how far the intended meaning is from our interpretation.

Sample

• Questions: all normal questions are biased by the Asker’s subjective curiosity, thereby restricting the Responder’s replies to the Responder’s reaction and interpretation of what was heard, and potentially overlooking real answers.
• Historic: biases are programmed in from the time we’re born. Every day we wake up with the same biases, kept in place by our choice of friends, TV, neighborhoods, professions, reading materials, etc. To permanently shift our biases, we’d have to change our historic programming.
• Physiological: who we ‘are’ is systemic; our beliefs and norms, character and values have been programmed in and become our Identity, creating the behaviors and responses that will unconsciously maintain our status quo in everything we do and every action we take.
• Triggers: because of our lifetime of inculcated beliefs, values, norms and outlook, our brains react chemically, unconsciously, and automatically when there is an untoward activity.
• Information: training programs, books, suggestions typically tell, show, explain, offer stories, videos, etc. etc. in hopes they’ll trigger new behaviors. Again, thanks to the way our brain listens, we may not accurately interpret the incoming content.
• Behaviors: Our behaviors are our beliefs in action. Behaviors represent us; they are not ‘us’.

To change our biases it’s necessary to change the system that created them to begin with. And this cannot be accomplished by merely trying to change. Remember Einstein’s saying that you can’t resolve a problem using the same thinking used when it was created?

CHANGE IS A SYSTEMS PROBLEM

Change is the alteration of something that has existed in a certain way, using specific and accepted norms, in a specific configuration, for a period of time. To amend our responses to bias, we must first modify the status quo that triggered them.

Change is basically a systems problem: Anything new, any problem to fix, any new activity the system is asked to take, poses a risk to the system and demands changing the status quo in a way that maintains the beliefs and norms. Indeed, any new decision is a change management problem.

When we attempt to problem-solve without systemic agreement, without a way to incorporate something new with the existing system so the system doesn’t implode, no change will happen regardless of the need or the efficacy of the solution. The risk of disruption is too high.

Too often we try to change behaviors via Behavior Modification practices. But these attempts will not cause permanent change. To change our unconscious, automatic responses our system must be reconfigured to produce alternate outputs. Offering any sort of information before the system knows why, how, when, or if to do anything different will only inspire resistance as the system won’t know how to apply it.

CHANGE IS A SYSTEMS PROBLEM

Let’s put this all together: Real change demands a systemic shift to create new triggers, new assumptions, new neural pathways, and ultimately new behaviors. The goal is not to not to get rid of unconscious bias but develop new beliefs. New behaviors will emerge as a result.

We must become Facilitators, not Influencers. We must teach folks to create and habituate their own new neural pathways and filters.

1. Listening: we must train ourselves to do ‘meta listening‘ that avoids avoid habituated neural pathways when listening to others.
2. Questions: I developed a new form of question that guides people through their own unconscious. These Facilitative Questions are systemic, use specific words, in specific order, that traverse through the steps of change sequentially so others can note their own incongruencies. So: What would you need to know or believe differently to be willing to take an extra step and consciously choose to listen from a ‘different ear’?
3. Beliefs: by shifting the focus from changing behaviors to first changing beliefs and systems, we end up with permanent core change, new triggers and habits. And we can avoid bias altogether.
4. Information: we make several types of information available for the learner to choose from, to fit their own learning criteria and styles, and needs to fit into their unique areas of deficiency.

I believe it’s time we had the tools to permanently change and become non-judgmental, accepting, and kind. And above all, cause no harm. All of our lives depend on it.

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Sharon-Drew Morgen is a breakthrough innovator and original thinker, having developed new paradigms in sales (inventor Buying Facilitation®, listening/communication (What? Did you really say what I think I heard?), change management (The How of Change™), coaching, and leadership. She is the author of several books, including her new book HOW? Generating new neural circuits for learning, behavior change and decision making, the NYTimes Business Bestseller Selling with Integrity and Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell). Sharon-Drew coaches and consults with companies seeking out of the box remedies for congruent, servant-leader-based change in leadership, healthcare, and sales. Her award-winning blog carries original articles with new thinking, weekly. www.sharon-drew.com She can be reached at sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com.