Courage, Cognitive Bias, and Truth

When I lost my mom two years ago, I quickly learned I had never actually previously understood words like grief, devastation, or dread. The words took on entirely new meaning because I gained a conscious understanding through experience. In that moment, it became clear to me that sometimes words are used regularly without conscious understanding of what they actually mean.

As my mom’s health deteriorated in the last few years of her life, she continued to display courage and personal power in the face of tremendous adversity. To crystalize the word “courage” in your head, imagine for a moment that you went from being an athlete to being unable to feed yourself. You are completely reliant on others for simple activities like pulling up a blanket or taking a sip of water. How would you feel being in front of other people let alone being fed in front of others? How would you feel being put into a car? Would you attend a wedding?

It’s easy to conflate courage with confidence. To me, confidence strikes as more of a successful, conscious relationship with vulnerability whereas courage is conscious willingness to go into a scary situation. It’s arguable that it literally takes courage to build confidence (you may or may not be naturally brave; if you’re not, you’ll have to develop courage). My mom went to parties, to weddings, and got onto planes to fly abroad. Her story is an invitation for reflection on courage, specifically, and what the word actually means. I like how Mark Twain referred to it:

“Courage is the resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not the absence of fear.”

Through her mastery of fear, my mom became the most courageous person I’ve ever known. Her story is also an invitation to reflect on responsibility - with leadership from my father, our family knew our responsibility when mom’s health started to decline. If we failed at getting the results she needed, the accountability was immediately obvious.

What Do These Words Mean To You?

Why do I share all of this? Lately, I have been consciously focused on these words:

• Courage
• Accountability
• Responsibility
• Truth

It is easy to think you know what these words mean until you consciously experience them. The absence of accountability stands in stark contrast to the presence of it - once you’ve seen it first-hand, you can’t un-see it. Same with responsibility. Sometimes it’s easier to see it in others before finding a similar example for yourself. Consider the example of the parents who take responsibility for their kids on a plane versus the ones who don’t. Consider when someone is held accountable versus when they’re not. There are times when we’re responsible and accountable - and there are times when we’re not.

In either case, own it.

Courage and truth also go hand-in-hand, but their relationship requires some conscious unpacking, too. It’s easy to confuse truth with facts, but the two are not the same.

Cognitive Bias

Truth contains facts including some seemingly-paradoxical self-contradictions. Facts on their own do not necessarily contain the truth (and if you want your head to spin a bit more, consider that statement as both truth and fact). This can lead to some common cognitive biases that regularly victimize intellectually-minded people. The key is to make sure the egoic mind doesn’t mislead you (or others) into assuming it already knows everything there is to know.

Here are a few examples:

• Anchoring Effect - Relying too much on the initial piece of information offered when making decisions.
• Availability Heuristic - Overestimating the importance and likelihood of events given the greater availability of certain information
• Blind Spot Bias - Viewing oneself as less biased than others
• Clustering Illusion - Erroneously overestimating the importance of small clusters or patterns in large data
• Confirmation Bias - Focusing on information that only confirms existing preconceptions
• Illusion of Validity - Overestimating our ability to make accurate predictions, especially when data appears to tell a coherent story
• Reactive Devaluation - Devaluing an idea because it originated from a perceived adversary or opponent

When we don’t practice active listening with an open mind, we’re prevented from getting the maximum perspective on a topic before making a decision.

The Truth vs the Facts

Understanding the above helps us get a tighter grip on the facts… but what does it say about the truth? Nothing and everything!

By definition, a rational person respects facts because they are logically and cognitively oriented. This isn’t a problem. The problem is thinking their set of facts is all they need to know - that’s the egoic mind at work and, at best ignores context and, at worst can lead to righteousness. The issue here can be traced subconsciously to the definition of a “set” that excludes infinite, undefined, or under-understood concepts or subsets including self-contradictions (paradox). This makes for nice, neat building blocks for logical reasoning, but it also leads to fallacy, bias, and assumption. In other words, truth can contain both paradox and fact whereas fact is on its own a part of a larger whole. Context matters here and can easily change the truth of your facts!

The mind is fundamentally egoic, so it tends to dismiss the importance of paradox and the unknown in the search of truth. This is precisely because the egoic mind likes anything that reinforces its own hypotheses and importance. The logical mind loves facts, but cognitive biases and logical fallacies do exist, self-contradictions do exist, and unknown variables do exist. The egoic mind forms a mental block from recognizing any of those because the egoic mind must always be right and already knows everything there is to know on the issue.

With experience, words take on a different meaning. Having said that, it’s worth noting that we all need to make sure our previous experience doesn’t result in hubris. If you use the phrase “I’ve done this before” or “I’ve seen this before”, leverage that as a reminder to check your assumptions and context. Not doing so can inadvertently lead to intellectual laziness and close-mindedness and prevent the truth from emerging. We must constantly remain open-minded and on the lookout for fallacies and biases to be do our best, which is ultimately what we are each most responsible for.

Seek the Truth and Tell the Truth

I believe that we all need to be truth seekers in our lives. It may be contrary to some people’s feelings about the integrity of certain businesses, but the market is a reflection of real truths represented as needs, capabilities, and opportunities. In our search for truth, we must remain open to different perspectives, be wary of assumptions, and not take things personally. As long as we make a genuine effort to do the best we can (and this includes keeping an open mind), the truth can present itself and effectively set you free. Be responsible, be accountable and be clear about what your responsibilities are. If it’s someone else’s responsibility, confront it unemotionally so that accountability can be maintained and everyone can go forward...

But it starts within - not “over there.”

Similarly, I believe that we must develop the courage to be truth tellers through conscious intent. “Truth telling” should not be misconstrued as “don’t lie” (which is certainly true), but in order to tell the truth, we must be able to know it and see it before we can speak it. To speak truth to power takes courage, but we need to understand what “truth” and “courage” actually are first. Once we develop this knowledge, we can then speak truth with power and leverage the experience to grow. In my view, this is actually the more literal meaning of “knowledge is power.” The key here is to keep an open-mind oriented toward learning and humility - this gives us a path to seek the truth… and tell it.

Key Takeaways

1. We must be truth seekers and tellers.
2. Speaking truth to power requires that you speak truth with power.
3. To build personal power, you must develop conscious understanding of courage, accountability, responsibility, and truth.
4. To develop conscious understanding of those words, reflect with intention on examples you’ve seen in others' lives and in your own life. This is vital.
5. Whether we’re responsible and accountable or not, we must own it.
6. Catch yourself before you externalize your problems. It starts within.
7. To build your ability to catch yourself, develop your self-awareness.
8. The truth is always more than just your view of the facts.

I encourage you to join me in reflecting on these words of courage, accountability, responsibility, and truth as part of your day-to-day work, but also in the work of building yourself. If you enjoyed reading this, please like, share, or comment!

Jesse Chen is an experienced leader with a background in community engagement, coaching, and personal development. He is a former management consultant, entrepreneur, activist, and TEDx speaker. Jesse is currently writing a book on personal development based on his life experiences.