Apr 1, 2025
They are call Thought Distortions or Thinking Errors and they can have a serious impact on our mindset about speaking up.
Let's look at Thought Distortions using an example:
I recently worked through a situation with one of my clients.
Her team had just finished a big project and one of her senior leaders was referring to it in a meeting with multiple departments.
It had been a very difficult project that included a pretty significant mishap which the leader inaccurately blamed on one of my client’s team members.
My client knew this was not true and thought her team member was being thrown under the bus.
Using this example,
here are some ways that Thought Distortions can show up.
The first Through Distortion is...
Mind reading
Making assumptions about the motivations behind other people’s behavior based on the story we tell ourselves about that behavior, without definitive evidence.
If my client is trapped in Mind Reading, she could be thinking, “He knows this info is incorrect; he’s intentionally throwing us under the bus.”
Next up...
All-or-nothing thinking
Thinking that divides experiences into binary categories, like “right or wrong”, “just or unjust”, or “succeed or fail”.
Engaging in this kind of thinking, my client could be thinking, “It is wrong that I should be put in the position to have to stand up for my team like this.”
Number three...
Mental filter (also called selective abstraction)
Focusing only on the negative aspects of a situation, filtering out the positive ones.
A selective abstraction thought could be, ”This inaccurate statement makes my team look incompetent."
Number four...
Fortune telling
Predicting a negative outcome without realistically considering the actual odds of that outcome. My client could easily convince herself that, “If I speak up publicly, the leader will be mad at me, I will be blacklisted and I could lose my job.”
Let's give a shout out to...
Personalization
Believing that things are connected to you even if they may have nothing to do with you (aka, “He has it out for me and my team.”)
And here's a popular one...
Should statements
Imposing fixed 'rules' on how the self, others, and the world should operate, coupled with overestimations of how awful it would be if these expectations are not met.
“If I was any kind of a decent leader I would call him out right here in front of everyone”
What Thought Distortions might be at play for you in your situation?
Sometimes it’s easy to know.
Sometimes it takes some extra work to get to the bottom of our thoughts.
This is something that I often work with clients on so if you’d like to have a conversation about how to get unstuck by resolving your Thought Distortions, let's connect!