109. Who's fault is this anyway?

Our minds are a wonderful thing to have, and I want to remind you that your mind and your thoughts are not the boss of you. It's a function in our brain. It's a neurological biological phenomenon to have thoughts. Thoughts are not facts. They're just biological phenomena. Today, we're talking about how to use your brain for accountability and how to avoid bias. 

Transcript

Our minds are a wonderful thing to have, and I want to remind you that your mind and your thoughts are not the boss of you. It's a function in our brain. It's a neurological biological phenomenon to have thoughts. Thoughts are not facts. They're just biological phenomena. Today, we're talking about how to use your brain for accountability and how to avoid bias. Welcome to the art and science of creativity here on the Modern Creative Woman podcast. I'm Doctor Amy Backos. I am your hostess on this audio creativity journey. Let's get into this. Let's get this started. 

Uncommon accountability means that you take full accountability for your inner experience and your outward behavior. You don't have to like it. You don't have to resonate with the feeling that's vibrating through your body. In fact, you can want to get away from it. Yet accountability means that you fully acknowledge that you created that emotion and you're responsible for it. I have a very vivid picture in my head of a time that I failed to take accountability twice in one day, and it took me a long time to figure this out, that I was blaming another person that I understood right away. But then I was blaming the circumstance, and I worked on solving the circumstance and really needed to work on acknowledging that I created an uncomfortable emotion in myself. When I graduated with my master's degree in art therapy, we were asked to do a large presentation for our research project, and I had never spoken in an auditorium before, and I had certainly never spoken to that many people. It was all of my classmates and their families and friends, and pretty much all the students in the program and the teachers. And it was all the people, including my parents and my now husband, who I wanted to do a good job in front of. I practiced. I did all my due diligence in preparing. I thought I had a great presentation and the day I woke up ready to go present and I felt so annoyed at my boyfriend. He asked a question, I snapped. He asked another question. I snapped back in answer. I felt in that moment that he was being annoying and terrible and rude, and it was not the case at all. It was me being very uncomfortable, nervous, stage fright, and looking outside of myself to figure out why I was feeling so uncomfortable. I had failed to anticipate that I might have stage fright. It just really hadn't crossed my mind to prepare mentally for that. I knew it could happen, but I had no idea how it would come out, and I just didn't know that that's what I was doing in the moment. He drove me to the presentation, took me early, and I was so snappy, and I felt really bad. And I knew it wasn't because of him, but I didn't know what it was. So by the time I walked in to do my presentation, that was all I knew that I had been grumpy. I did my presentation. I think I did a great job. I won the thesis research award for the class, so I had this external validation that I did a good job, and still I was looking outside of myself. Why was I so uncomfortable? Must be the public speaking. It was the external circumstance. And I wanted to be a better speaker, and I wanted to continue talking about art therapy. So I did some really great work. I got eMDR to overcome the worries about speaking. It's an incredible experience and I still will get nervous before I speak, of course, but I don't freak out about it. I don't stress in the same way that I did in that first presentation. So twice in one day I was looking outside of myself for the circumstance. I thought my boyfriend was being annoying, and then I thought I was in a terrible situation. And it wasn't until many years later that I realized I chose that situation. Defending my thesis in this big presentation didn't just happen to me. No one plucked me off the street and made me stand up and give a speech. I planned for it. I went to college for four years. Then I went three more years for my masters. I chose this and I was behaving like it happened to me, instead of me choosing to show up and share my research. And as I learned more and more about personal accountability and the idea of this uncommon accountability for our internal actions, the more I could see myself doing it, and I and I really work to respond to Myself and respond to the external environment and not kind of confuse those two. That's definitely some of the work we do inside the modern, creative woman, helping people respond to what is not to that private, inner unwanted experience. You know, instead of trying to avoid what they're feeling and responding to their inner distress, they can respond to what's happening in the moment and feel way better. I ended up making a lot of art about accountability, because I wanted to understand it in myself and figure out how to help my clients through the situation when they are not accepting their own role in a circumstance. And what I mean is their own response to something that happens, their own inner thinking and feeling. So accountability means being responsible for your actions, your decisions, your commitments to yourself and others, and a willingness to explain or ultimately take responsibility for any consequences. And it means accepting full responsibility for both positive and negative outcomes, and really being able to answer for how your actions impact others as well as yourself. I hope you're hearing that there's two parts of accountability. One is towards yourself and one is towards others and towards yourself. We are responsible for working to align our thoughts and our feelings and our words and our actions. Being accountable means keeping commitments to yourself. Following through it also means in that second part of accepting the positive and the negative, it means that you allow yourself to have a look at the circumstance and have a look at yourself. So if something goes right, you can ask yourself, what was my role in this? If something goes wrong, you can ask, what was my role in this? It's a way to neutralize the emotions and respond in a way that gives you a sense of control over your inner experience. The other part of accountability is towards other people, and being ready to answer for how your actions might impact others. You may not have intended to say something rude or say something Racist or sexist, but you begin to perhaps understand the impact of those words and that you can be accountable for. There's several aspects of accountability that we all could learn from. And as I've been researching on accountability for this episode, I'm just seeing it more and more in the political arena. Not taking accountability for people's the politician's actions, refusing to take responsibility. So when we think about accountability, it's accepting responsibility that's ownership over your actions and the consequences. That's the first part. It's positive and negative. The second part is being transparent. That's a willingness to be able to examine and explain to yourself or others what happened. The third part is being answerable, and that means being prepared to face consequences of your actions. And it might include a reward or a punishment. So in the case of my thesis research presentation, I chose to do that. The consequence of choosing to pursue higher education involves academic research and presentations. The consequence of getting up on stage is I get to share my work, which is part of the purpose of doing academic research, is to share it with the wider community. The fourth aspect of accountability is building trust. And when we consistently take responsibility for our actions towards others and we follow through on our commitments, it builds trust with other people. And the same holds true for ourself. If we say, I'm going to track my finances this month and we don't, then we're failing to follow through on our commitment to ourselves. And I think a lot of women get stuck here. They say what they want to do and kind of wish that it will propel them forward to doing it. They say they want to go to the gym. They want to get out for a walk. They want to see their friends more. But unless there's that internal boundary and accountability to make those things happen, it's decreasing their own self trust and the trust of others if they cancel appointments. The fifth aspect is promoting ethical behavior. And when we think of accountability, it sometimes sounds like punishment. And that is not at all what I'm describing. Accountability is not when you go to work and something collapses in the business aspect of it. And they say, we need to find out who did this and hold them accountable. It's not about the justice system. It's not punishment. Accountability is encouraging people and organizations to act ethically and responsibility. That uncommon accountability really helps us orient towards our values as individuals or towards our values in organizations. I have some examples for you. If you are thinking about work, it's taking responsibility for maybe meeting a deadline or delivering on a promise. Showing up for a zoom call on time. Accountability in relationship is being honest and transparent with our partners. It's taking responsibility for our emotions and recognizing the other person didn't cause us some kind of distress. We caused that internal experience, but we're able to repair and connect when we're transparent about. When you did this, I felt this. It can show up in government by elected officials. Um, you know, being held accountable and sort of that punitive way. But the way I'm describing it is more the our elected officials can be transparent. They can talk with their constituents. They can be honest about finances, etc.. And in education, students are responsible for a certain set of behaviors when they're in school. And professors are responsible for a different set of behaviors. Students just don't sit and learn. They don't just receive information. There are students that I've worked with who attended their younger years of schooling in another country, where they learned that they were supposed to just receive the information, and then it's maybe a surprise to come to college or graduate school. And the professor wants your opinion. When I think about accountability for teachers, teachers are responsible for teaching, providing information, guiding, and students have to be responsible for learning. You know, they complete their assignments, they ask for help when they need it, but they're responsible for their own learning. No one can learn for us. The idea of accountability does play into fairness and justice. If there is an injustice, we can hold someone accountable through the courts. But accountability is really encouraging your own personal learning and growth, and it gives you the opportunity to learn from your mistakes and grow and improve. Accountability fosters trust and cooperation among our communities. If I can hold myself accountable for my actions, it will build trust with my clients, my family, my neighbors. And ultimately, taking accountability for our inner experience leads to better outcomes over and over and over. Have you ever worked with someone who would get mad at work or even raise their voice at work? It is not fun when someone is accountable for their feelings, and they have their feelings under reasonable management internally, and they're not going to yell at us. The better outcomes, especially at work, is it leads to individuals being happier, organizations Functioning better. And of course, society as a whole benefits when our institutions are doing well. I would be very curious if you can identify some areas where you have taken that on common accountability, that personal sense of owning your inner experience and times when you haven't. And one piece of art that I have done before, and I'm sure I'll do it again when I'm in a frustrated situation, is draw a line down the middle and on the left. Is that undesirable experience, and on the right is the acceptance piece. It's how I want things to be. It's how things are. And then it's me accepting that experience that whatever is happening is not what I want to happen, and that's the experience. Uncommon accountability means that you're internally recognizing when it's your emotions that you're responding to, versus thinking that how you're feeling is because of someone else, because of something they did. And it it's never about the thing someone did. It's how we interpret it. If you dislike the expression accountability because it reminds you of something punitive from school or work, then think of it as your own inner compass. And in acceptance and commitment therapy, we talk about ourself as the context where we are the context of our lives, and you as an individual are experiencing many different things. You experienced your childhood and your adolescence. You experienced having breakfast this morning. You experience emotions and thoughts and bodily sensations. You experience the sunshine on your face, a conversation, a handshake, a hug. But you are the context, and all of that other stuff is something that you can observe. And when you're capable of taking a step back and observing your thoughts, it's called diffusion. When you step far enough back to recognize, oh, that's a thought, not a fact. That thought is a biological logical process. Not a fact. Thinking that same thought over and over again is a repetitive biological process. So once we can relate to our thoughts in a different way, it changes. It shifts our relationship to wanting to be accountable to ourselves. It's really loving ourselves enough to see that we are the context of our lives, and we don't need to blame others for how we feel. And the moment we stop doing that, we start to move into that accountability that when people are in that spot, we tend to admire them. They tend to become leaders. They're able to have a look at what's happening and see their role in it, without blaming others for their inner experience. I would love to hear your own personal experience with recognizing your accountability or recognizing, like in my example, that I was looking outside of me all over the place to find a reason why I was uncomfortable, when in fact it was me making myself uncomfortable. Creativity plays an essential role in our own personal accountability. Our brains become used to looking outside of ourselves. There is in psychology something called the fundamental attribution error. The fundamental attribution error is a cognitive bias. And that means we tend to think that way even though it's not true. We lean towards thinking this way, and a lot of people do it. Most people, all people. It's where someone tends to overemphasize internal factors like personality trait and underestimate external factors when explaining the behaviour of others. Essentially, we're just more likely to attribute someone's actions to their character rather than the situation that's happening around them. When we see someone engaging in a behavior that we don't like, our natural brain tendency is to assume it reflects their character. They're rude. They're dishonest, something like that. And then our brain also will tend to not look at those external factors that might be influencing what's going on for them. They might be stressed or fatigued. They might be in a difficult situation. They might be having a terrible home life in that moment. If somebody is rude to you at the store or cuts you off in traffic or bumps into you and doesn't say anything. Our brains want to immediately judge that person as rude or aggressive, and not consider other possibilities. That that person might be in a hurry because they have to get home to their sick child, or they're in a hurry because they have to take someone to the doctor. We just don't know. And I think part of why the fundamental attribution error happens is because we can see the person doing the action, and we are often unable to see why they might be behaving that way. And here's where creativity comes into play. You can train your brain away from this attribution error by interrupting your own assumptions. So when your brain says, oh geez, they're rude, you can say, oh, that was a judgment about who I think they are based on that behavior. I wonder, I'm curious Yes. What else might be true? And you can play a little game in your head and come up with all the reasons why they might have been in a hurry, good or bad reasons. But your creativity in that moment will start to release that grip that the fundamental attribution error has on us. There are significant consequences to that fundamental attribution error. And it it can be. We really just misunderstood the motivations and reasons behind other people's actions. And that can cost a lot in relationships or at work. That fundamental attribution error can lead to all kinds of misunderstandings or disagreements. Now, if leaders, managers and politicians fall victim to this fundamental attribution error, they might make really poor decisions based on these flawed assumptions about others. And another side effect is when people are constantly blamed for their actions without considering a situation, or they're judged without compassion. It creates a real climate of fear and mistrust. So I want to give you a couple of ways that you can challenge your own brain when you bump up against the fundamental attribution error. Practice empathy. Now, I already said to use your creativity and imagine what the external factors might be that are influencing someone's behavior. Try and see the world from their perspective, even if you can't quite understand why they're behaving a certain way. You can have empathy towards them. That's a huge strength. It keeps you calm on the inside and that's the goal. If it's a high stakes situation. You can look for multiple perspectives and not just rely on your own judgements. You can talk to others, talk to experts, get different viewpoints, and then finally doing the work as a human being to recognize your own biases. When I was in jury duty last week, we saw a really great video about bias. And there's the kind of bias that we know that we're aware of. Maybe it's been pointed out to us, or maybe we recognize something from growing up where we feel a bias towards a certain group of people. But the video also talked about implicit bias, the ones that we just absorb, usually discrimination, racism, sexism, ageism we absorbed from living in society and seen images of people portrayed in movies and television, in magazines, or the lack of portrayal of people. And so doing the work to recognize our own biases is really, really important. I always recommend books. Join a book group, get involved in a way that allows you to understand your own biases. It's good for others and it's good for you. It helps you communicate better. It helps you know yourself better. And to just recognize that these brain biases we have are part of having a brain. And we're accountable for making changes to what our brain wants to do. Creativity is the antidote to so many of our cognitive biases and our attribution errors, and our accountability or struggles with accountability. Let me know what you think. In the show notes, you can click the button and send me a message. I always love to hear from you. It delights me to know and to hear how you're using this kind of information in your own life. Have a wonderful rest of your week. Now that you know about how to use your creativity, what will you create? Want more? Subscribe to the Modern Creative Woman digital magazine. It's absolutely free and it comes out once a month. 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Remember to grab your free copy of the 21 Day Gratitude Challenge. The link is in the show notes and you can find it at. Com. Have a wonderful week and I cannot wait to talk with you in the next episode.