Episode 45: How the Willingness to Be Wrong is Always Right

Welcome to the 100% Awesome Podcast with April Price. You might not know it but every result in your life is 100% because of the thoughts you think and that my friends is 100% awesome!

Hello podcast universe! Welcome to episode forty-five of the 100% Awesome podcast. I'm your host April Price, and I'm so happy that you have joined me on the podcast today. I appreciate so much the space that you have given me in your life, and in your schedule, and in your brain, all of which are really your most valuable currency. And so it really is my honor to be here and to have you out there listening, and I want you to know that it's an opportunity that I don't take lightly.

I really want to give you as much value as I can as we share this space in time and energy. And speaking of that I want to make sure that you know that on my website you can get a transcript of every episode of the podcast. I started doing this back at episode 18, but I have recently completed transcribing all the back episodes of the podcast so they're all there and they're all available to you.

And I just want to say that as I have done this transcription I have had the thought more than once, "Wow this is really good" or "Oh that's good. I need to remember that!" So it turns out that my brain has been lying to me about the quality of the podcast, Surprise, surprise! And there really are some powerful things there that will help you enjoy and love your Earth life experience more fully. And if you think about, and apply the things that I talk about on this podcast, I know that it will bless your life and I truly believe that.

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But I also want you to know that as good as the podcast is and as much as I try to give you here, it is no substitute for coaching, and I know this from experience. I binged the Life Coach School podcast and Jody Moore's podcast for a few months before I signed up for actual coaching. And everything I was learning on the podcast made so much sense to me and I loved what I was learning, but there was a huge difference between listening to the podcast, and being coached.

When you are listening you are listening through the filter of your own thoughts, you're listening through the filter of your own brain, and coaching is there to help you see past that filter, to remove all the constructs of your own brain, get behind the curtain, and see your life, and your results, without the filter of your limiting beliefs in the way.

And so it really shows you the truth, and it helps you see your life, and the people that you love, and the results that you're getting, in a completely new way. And this is why coaching is so powerful, and so if you haven't signed up for coaching you should. If you enjoy my podcast and you resonate with the things that I talked about here you should get on a call, and we should consider working together, and I will show you what you have been missing or really what your brain has been concealing from you, and it will change your life for sure.

So go to my website aprilpricecoaching.com and you can sign up to get coached. No matter how you feel right now or whether or not you decide to hire me as your coach, I promise you that you will feel better after our call.

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So today on the podcast I want to talk to you about being willing to be wrong, and how developing this trait can make such a big difference in your life. So let me set this up a little bit. As humans we all have a certain set of beliefs, there are the things that we've thought over and over again. We've thought these things in fact so many times, and for so long that we just believe that they are true.

And in my work as a coach, I show my clients that when they have pain, it is always because of the thoughts that they're believing, the thoughts that they have and that they're holding onto, and that they're believing are in opposition to their life experience. And this creates pain. And when my clients can see this and see that their thoughts are causing all of their pain, they ask me "how do I think something new?" "How do I believe something new? I want a way out of this pain. So how do I believe something different?"

And I want to show you today that you cannot believe something new until you are first willing to be wrong about what you are currently believing. The willingness to be wrong about what you believe precedes being able to think something new.

So in other words we have to let go of the thought that we're currently holding by being wrong about it in order to be able to pick up or adopt a new thought. So the other day I was talking to one of my clients who has a belief that she has to be skinny. That if she's not skinny, that that would be like the worst thing ever, because of what other people would think and because of what she would think. And so we were talking about her battle with her body, and with food, and with her body image.

And I talked to her about her beliefs about beauty. What makes something beautiful? It's just how we think about it. Right? It's just an opinion. If someone or something is beautiful it is because we think it is we think it is beautiful.

And I told her because it's a thought, then she could just choose to believe that she is beautiful. That she could adopt that opinion, that she could make that choice that believing she was beautiful was just a choice that she made with her thoughts. And she said to me "Well what if I'm wrong? What if I believe it? What if I believe I'm beautiful and I'm wrong about it?"

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And that's so perfectly sums up the problem we have in believing new things. And in so many ways not just our body image, but how we think about our money, or spouse, or our children, or our life, or our parenting, or our abilities, or value, or even and who we are fundamentally. In so many ways we are unwilling to change our beliefs in case we're going to be wrong. Now, by the way no one ever asked me what if they're wrong about their current beliefs. They only worry that the new belief might be wrong. And what if they believe it and then they're wrong about it?

So today I want to talk about being wrong, about how being willing to be wrong will allow you to believe new things. And this willingness to be wrong is the beginning of changing everything else for you.

So I want to start today by giving you a little physics lesson, and I really should have consulted my son before doing this so that he could set me straight. But then again, maybe it's not necessary because, I am totally willing to be wrong even in what I believe about physics. So here we go.

Okay, so you may not know this but there's a pretty famous argument that exists about how the universe works. And this argument specifically is about how the smallest particles in our universe work, because how these small subatomic particles act then impacts the rest of our universe and the way that it works. Right? And this is called quantum mechanics or quantum physics. And scientists have been trying to explain what happens on a sub-atomic level and how the particles, the sub-atomic particles behave.

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So about 90 years ago there was this intellectual scientific battle between Albert Einstein who you've probably heard of and Niels Bohr, who you might not have heard of but he kind of sketched out how the atom works. And they were having an argument about these subatomic particles, and they were talking about do they behave like particles or do they behave like waves. And so then all these other scientists of course weighed in as well, and Bohr and a bunch of his colleagues created their own set of beliefs around quantum physics, and it was called the Copenhagen interpretation.

So in a sense, Bohr and his colleagues created a set of beliefs about how these subatomic particles worked, and how they behaved. Now, there were people who disagreed with these beliefs, and one of these was a scientist named Bohm. And he had a different interpretation of the data and he didn't agree with the belief system of the Copenhagen group. Well, the Copenhagen group did not appreciate being told that they might be wrong, and one of them Robert Oppenheimer, who was the father of the atomic bomb, he said "If we cannot disprove Bohm, then we must agree to ignore him." If we can't figure out what's wrong with what he's saying then we're just going to ignore him and pretend that his data and his ideas just don't exist.

Well eventually, Bohm was so discredited that he was actually charged with un-American activities, and he was totally ostracized, and he ended up having to move to Brazil. But the whole point of this, and I do have one, is that there were all these differing views about how quantum mechanics work and eventually a majority of the scientists created one interpretation, one belief system, around how quantum mechanics work. And after that the cost of accepting any alternative way to think about the universe was suddenly super high.

For this group, they were so set that their beliefs were correct, that alternative theories and data became very threatening to them. And the cost of believing something else, or someone else, became much too high for them, and they couldn't afford to be wrong. They couldn't afford to think about the universe in a different way. And what I want you to know is that in many ways this idea that they couldn't be wrong hindered the progress of quantum mechanics.

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And it kind of prevented us from moving forward and learning new things, because they held these beliefs as like incontrovertible right, as impossible to be wrong. And so then they had to look at everything in terms of these truths, what they thought were the truth. And in the same way I see this so often as a coach, we have built our entire lives on some of these thoughts, these belief systems, and the cost of questioning those beliefs and being wrong feels so scary right? It feels like the cost will be too high to think something else.

And because we believe these truths are incontrovertible, and they can't be wrong then we start to look at everything in terms of these truths. For example, if we believe that our kids should be respectful, if that's our belief and then they're not, we notice that their behavior isn't lining up with our belief. And we know the belief is correct, and so then they must be wrong. Our children must be wrong. They must be doing it wrong. And when we think that way we can't see any other way of looking at it. We can't see any other possibility, and we set ourselves up that we're right, and they're wrong, and then we can't work our way out of that. But it is only because we believe that they should be respectful is just true.

When Bohm had different evidence that didn't agree with the Copenhagen interpretation, they saw him as wrong. They were right, and he was wrong, and they threw him out right? They threw all of his information out, and all of his data, and all of his hypotheses, and then they couldn't move forward and learn more.

Like if you really think about it what was Bohr's original objective, it was to find out how the universe worked. But he became so tied to his beliefs that he and the Copenhagen group ignored data, and evidence, and new ideas, and in many ways probably ended up learning less about how the universe worked. So if we go back to our other examples, as parents our goal is to have connection with our children. But if we're so tied to our belief that we are right, and they should be respectful, and then we insist that they are wrong, we end up making less connection, and creating more distance between us.

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Now, before we get into how to be wrong and how to be willing to be wrong I want to point out why we do this, why we function like this? Why did Bohr and his colleagues ice out Bohm and his ideas? Why do we want to be right as parents, and then ice out our kids? Why would we rather be right than get the results we want?

The reason is that being wrong is very dangerous to our brain. Remember our brain is a prediction machine, it likes to take the past and extrapolate the future. Our brain likes to think it knows how things are going to go, and it costs us something to be wrong. There is a price to being wrong, and for our brain it means that we are wrong.

The brain believes that being right is the safe way, evolutionarily speaking, being right is what kept us alive. We have to be right about the dangers, we have to be right about where the predators are, we have to be right about which plants are poisonous, and what that smell on the air means, right? If we're not right, we're dead. And so it's really important for the brain to think it's right, and to be able to predict the world. And this is why we hold so tightly to our beliefs, and hold so tightly to being right, even when it isn't serving us. We don't like to be wrong, and our brains fight to be right.

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So let's go back to my client who is struggling to believe that she was beautiful. Remember, she asked me "But what if I believe I'm beautiful and I'm wrong about it?" So I said "What if? What if you believe you're beautiful, and then you act like you're beautiful, and you treat your body like it's beautiful. What would that look like. What would be different if you believe that?" And she said "Well then I would appreciate it. I would enjoy all the food I eat, and I would want to take care of my body, and I would stop thinking about it all the time, I could think about something else. I could just be at peace with myself." And I said "Exactly."

And then I asked her "What if you lived your whole life like that, right? What if you lived your whole life like that believing you were beautiful, and then acting in this way that brought you peace, and in the end you found out you were wrong?" She said "Well, then I would have had an amazing life." I said "Exactly!"

And what I pointed out to her is the belief that she is beautiful, actually can't be wrong because, it's her belief, it's her opinion, which you can't ever make it wrong but it will change her life experience completely. If she's willing to be wrong about the belief that she isn't beautiful, and just decide to believe that she is.

So here's what I want you to remember, your brain fights to be right, even when it's painful. So recently on Seth Godin's podcast, he was talking about this and he said that "How we know when we're trying to be right and it's to our detriment, is when we see that we aren't progressing, we aren't making any progress." He said "We'll know that being unwilling to be wrong is actually hurting us, when the belief we are holding doesn't produce forward motion. It doesn't allow us to progress."

This is the clue for each of us our results, or our lack of results, tell us when being right is actually hurting us. When we're stuck, when we're stalled, or we're doing the same things in the same way and getting the same results, or where we're getting the exact opposite results than we want, then we have a belief that we need to question. Then we have a belief that we need to be willing to be wrong about, even if it means we are wrong.

So I want to give you a little example of this, and I know that I have used this example before, but I want you to hear it again and maybe hear it for the first time, because it so perfectly illustrates how being right, was keeping me stuck, and being wrong was the answer to relieving my pain, and helping me get the results that I really wanted.

So around the time that my daughter was a sophomore or junior in high school, she was really struggling, and she was sad most of the time. And then she was angry about being so sad, and then she demonstrated her anger and her sadness a lot. And I of course, as her mother thought this was ridiculous. I had a belief that she shouldn't be sad, I had to believe that she shouldn't be angry, and I have lots and lots of evidence for these beliefs. I knew I was right, she had an amazing family, obviously, she had everything she could want, she had access to a phone, and food, and a car, and education, and the gospel.

She had no reason in my mind to be sad, and she had no reason to be angry about it. And I believed wholeheartedly, that I was right about this, and she was wrong about it. And my brain was convinced that I was right, and that she was wrong, and that made her the problem. Now, from this place where I was for sure right, and beautiful talented teenage girls in America should be happy, I was completely disconnected from the reality in front of me, my daughter in reality, was sad, and angry.

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Do you see the problem? If the belief is that she should be happy, and then she's not something has gone wrong. And because I know for sure that I'm right about her needing to be happy, then she is the one that's wrong, she is the one with the problem. And believe it or not, this created enormous disconnection between us. I did not love the version of her that was showing up because it was wrong, it was contradicting my belief.

Now, what I want to point out to you is this, the whole reason that I had the belief and wanted her to be happy, was because I loved her. I was holding this belief that she should be happy because I loved her, and I wanted her to have the best life experience, and yet the result of holding onto the belief that she should be happy, was that I wasn't loving her

The whole reason for wanting to be right was because I loved her, but the actual result of wanting to be right was not loving her. And this is what I'm saying. This is what I'm telling you, right? The whole reason Bohr had his belief was because he wanted to figure out the universe, but needing to be right didn't allow him to figure out the universe. The whole reason I believed my daughter should be happy, was because I loved her, but needing to be right about this didn't allow me to love her.

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And this is what we do, we be right, at the expense of the result that we actually want, and it's only because our brain thinks the best course of action is always to be right. I want you to know that what changed everything for me was that my coach told me that my daughter wasn't wrong for being sad and angry. It was the belief that I was holding that was wrong. She wasn't wrong, I was. The belief that my children should be happy and cheerful, was one hundred percent wrong. And when my coach offered that to me and told me "She's not wrong, your belief is." My brain resisted it, it thought "But if I'm wrong then she's going to be sad!" My coach said "Exactly." And I was like "Wait what?" And my coach said "She is sad. April, she is sad, thinking she shouldn't be, only makes her wrong and generates all this conflict between you."

And then I could see it. If my belief was wrong, then my daughter wouldn't be. And if my daughter wasn't wrong, then we didn't have a conflict. There was no conflict between us. If my daughter was right, and I was wrong, then I was the only one who had to change. And our brains are like, "But wait if we're wrong about this we could die or she could die! She could die of sad, she could die of angry! This can't be right."

But I want you to know that this is the lie. If I want to love my daughter and feel connected to her, I only have to be willing to be wrong, and love what is, love the daughter that is. And it is the same for each of us. We have these beliefs in so many areas of our life that we're holding onto, because our brain believes it's protecting us. We think we can't give them up because then it will just be.

But giving up the need to be right, just stops the fight. It just stops the conflict between the belief and the quality. When I was willing to be wrong, I got all the connection back with my daughter.

When I was willing to be wrong about the idea that she should be happy, then I could adopt the thought that she should be exactly what she is, and then I could just love her, which is the only result I wanted in the first place. The way to the result was a new belief, a new thought, and the way to that new thought was being wrong about the old one.

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Sometimes, when we're willing to be wrong our brain protests and says, well we're just giving up, but we're only giving up being right. And that one thing, giving up being right, changes everything. Needing to be right is just old programming, it's the survival mechanism of the brain, but nothing bad actually happens if you're wrong.

If you think you're beautiful and you're wrong, nothing bad happens, you just get the positive effects of thinking you're beautiful for your whole life. If you think your kids are messing it up exactly like they're supposed to and then you're wrong about that, nothing bad happens, because they still get to choose, and then you get to be totally connected with exactly who they are, and the choices they're making without needing to change them. You end up getting connection!

Do you see there's like no downside to being wrong about these beliefs, your brain just thinks there is. In our primitive human brain believes that the cost of being wrong is too high, right? We're going to die, or our children are going to die, if we're wrong and so we just stay right and we just stay in pain, thank you very much. But I want you to remember like we aren't out on the Savannah, being wrong cannot hurt you.

Okay, so hopefully I've convinced you, your brain doesn't like to be wrong. It's probably saying right now, "Well April, you're wrong." But it's 100% okay to be wrong and it is the way to change all of your beliefs about yourself, because obviously, before we can adopt a new belief about ourselves or a life, we have to be willing to be wrong about the old one.

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So practically speaking, how do we do this? How do we become more willing to be wrong? It's not going to be instinctive. So I'm gonna give you a couple questions to ask yourself to encourage you, and help you embrace being wrong.

So, imagine first you have a belief that you are right, and you know does that you're not making forward progress, right? You're not getting good results, you're getting negative results, and it's coming from this belief that you just think is true. So for example, let's say we have a belief "I can't change" and you notice, "This isn't giving me the results I want, I just keep proving this thought true." And you think this thought is right, and there's no way that you could be wrong about it because you're like "Look I have all this evidence I can't change."

So the first question that I want you to ask is the question that Byron Katie asks: "Who would I be without this thought?" In other words who would I be and what would I do, and what would my life be like without this thought? If I didn't believe this was true how would my life be different? If you didn't believe you couldn't change then who would you be? What would you do? What would you change? If you didn't believe you were undisciplined, then who would you be, and what would you do? If you didn't believe you were impatient, who would you be? If you didn't believe you were dumb, who would you be? If you didn't believe that you don't have enough talent who would you be? If you didn't believe that you couldn't do it who would you be and what would you do?

Do you see that huge shift that you can get?  Who would I be without this thought? This question will help you see that like what you're believing is just a thought. And if you're willing to be wrong about it, you can be totally different you can change everything else.

Okay number two, another helpful thought is simply "What if I'm wrong about this? What if I just made this thing up?" And whenever I'm sure that I'm failing, and I tell my husband this, my husband asked me this question all the time, "What if you're wrong about that?" And this is very super helpful. I always just like brush him off and I'm like "You don't understand." So, when somebody says like "What if you're wrong about that?" We want to reject that right away, because our brain doesn't like to be wrong.

And so I think a more helpful way to look at this is to say "For sure I am wrong about this. Not, what if I'm wrong about this? But of course, I'm wrong about this."

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So, I have started doing this little exercise where I write the thought down and then instead of assuming that the thought is true and and trying to figure out like how it's wrong I just assume right off the bat that it's wrong. I just assume that I'm wrong right off the bat. I assume that my brain is lying to me, and it likes to make up these stories to keep me alive.

So, for example if I have the thought "I don't have enough time." I just start by assuming I'm for sure wrong about this I'm 100% wrong about this. And so the opposite of that is, I have enough time, my brain made up that I don't have enough. Why? Because it's scared, and thinks I'm going to die, but I'm not, I have enough time. Now what, So I assume the opposite, and then I say, "Now what?"I have enough time. Now what?" What do I do when I have enough time?

So, another thought that I get from my clients is, "My husband doesn't love me." I want you to assume that you're wrong about that, assume that you're 100% wrong about that. And in fact, my husband loves me. Now what? How do I show up in my marriage if I know my husband loves me? Now, you might be saying, "But what if I'm wrong? What if I think he loves me and I'm wrong?" Then you you're going to have a beautiful life, showing up in love and believing he loves you. There is no downside.

So, let's do one more. So, some of my clients are other coaches, and a common theme that I get from them is "I don't know enough yet. I don't know enough to be a good coach." And so, I ask them to assume that they're wrong about that assume that they're 100% wrong about that and that in fact, "I know enough right now."

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Now what? How do I show up as a coach if I know without question that I know enough to help my clients right now? What I want to show you is that just like with the first question. When we assume that we are wrong, then we can show up differently in our life because we can operate from a new thought.

So this kind of reminds me of that Seinfeld episode where George Costanza like looks around his life, and he realizes that none of it is what he wanted. And he's like struck with the idea that he did everything wrong, and that he should have done the opposite. Right? And he's like "What if every single instinct I've ever had has been wrong?" He's like "What if I was wrong about all of it?"

And he decides then he's going to do the opposite, that whatever his brain says, he's going to do the opposite and it totally changes him. Like he goes up to this woman and he says like "Hi I'm George. I live with my parents and I'm unemployed." And so he gets completely different results because he has changed how he feels, and that change in his feelings shows up in how he acts.

So if I think my kids aren't supposed to make mistakes, and I assume the opposite, my kids are totally supposed to mess it up. Now what? Then, I can just show up in love when they make mistakes. I don't worry about them, I don't withhold love, I don't create disconnection, I love them as they are and help them as much as I can with consequences, but always with the total assurance and confidence that nothing has gone wrong. They're supposed to mess it up, now what? Now who do I want to be?

So if you have painful thoughts that are keeping you stuck and preventing progress, assume from the beginning that you're 100% wrong about it. And ask yourself, now what? I'm wrong about this, the opposite is true, now what?

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So the last tool I want to give you is based on the idea that our brain thinks that being wrong is going to cost us something, that we're going to die. And so it likes to hold on to being right ,because it thinks there is too much to lose in being wrong.

So I like to remind myself that this is not true and this is what I tell myself, I have everything to gain by being wrong, and nothing to gain by being right. Remember that I need to be right is what is keeping us stuck, it's preventing forward progress, it's preventing us from seeing any other possibility, it's blocking the real results we want. And you have everything to gain by being wrong, and nothing to gain by being right.

So let's just look at the examples that I've given you through this lens. My client who thought she had to be skinny to be beautiful, what does she gain by being right? Well if she's right all she gets is a lifetime of hating herself, and monitoring everything she puts in her mouth, and judging herself, and equating her worth with her looks, which is only going to decrease over time, as the years go by.

But what does she gain by being wrong and thinking she's beautiful? She gains confidence, she gains love for herself, she gains peace around food, and around other people, and around herself, she gains time, and energy that she used to spent obsessing about her looks. She has everything to gain by being wrong, and nothing to gain by being right.

For me who had the thought that my daughter should be happy, what do I gain by being right about that? I gain conflict, and pain, and arguments, and worry, and judgment, for my daughter, it doesn't change her remember? It just makes me want her to be different, and then wonder about all the ways that I must be mothering that are wrong, and I feel less connection for her, and less love for her, and myself.

What do I gain by being wrong and think like she's supposed to be sad? I gain peace with what is, I gain love, and acceptance, and compassion, and understanding. I get to drop my judgment for her and my judgment for me. I just get to love her, and offer her help without needing to change her, and this is like pure relief for both her and me.

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So when we have thoughts that are causing us pain, or that are keeping us stuck, or preventing our progress, we have everything to gain by being wrong about it and nothing to gain by being right. Ask yourself what would I gain if I was just willing to be wrong, and see what becomes available to you.

That's what I have for you today. Being willing to be wrong is the start to believing something new, and it's how we make progress in our lives. Your brain doesn't want to be wrong but there is truly no danger in being wrong and you have to remind yourself of that. You can do that, and increase your willingness to be wrong by asking yourself who would I be without this thought, and assume that you're wrong.

Ask yourself "I'm wrong about this. Now what? Now what will I do?" And finally remind yourself that you have everything to gain by being wrong, and nothing to gain by being right. And the more you can be willing to be wrong in the areas where you're stuck, or that are painful, the more forward progress, and change, and relief you will get. And that my friends is 100% awesome! I love you for listening and I'll see you next week!