Reasonable Doubt: A Guide to Metamodern Thinking

This is not really a guide on how to think.

You know how to think anyway. The problem is if you're like the rest of us, you probably do a lot of thinking that just isn't very helpful.

What this guide attempts to do is to give you some helpful perspectives for living effectively in a world of constant change, with an often overwhelming supply of new information, ideas, theories, agendas and opportunities.

A metamodern approach, going beyond both modernism and post-modernism. (For more on metamodern philosophy, please see links to Hanzi Freinacht’s work in the footnotes.)

The central focus of the approach is to get you to notice what you are thinking and to tip the balance of your thinking towards more helpful thoughts.

You are never going to escape worry completely. You will no doubt spend a portion of the rest of your life being anxious, fearful, scared, fretful, frustrated.

But, you can improve your average...

This essay sets out to do three things:

1. It aims to make it OK to have doubt, to be fearful, to worry. If you're worrying about something and you think it's wrong to worry, then you'll worry about worrying and you're then in a rapid downward spiral.
2. It hopes to raise your current level of awareness so that you begin to notice when you are thinking anything that isn't particularly helpful.
3. It aims to give you a few perspectives that can help you maintain a good average. We're not attempting to banish worry entirely. That's impossible. What we're trying to do is to raise your awareness sufficiently so that most of the time you are thinking stuff that's helpful rather than unhelpful.

And that's it.

A good friend of mine, Jim Rai, came up with the concept of 'The 70% rule' which involves aiming to spend around 70% of your time on thoughts/feelings/actions that you'd ideally want to do and only 30% on things you wouldn't.

A lot of people get put off by that because they think it's already admitting defeat by setting the bar too low. The wise man and the gambler both know that 70% right gets you just about anything you want in life!

It would involve you thinking the way you'd want for about 70% of the time. If 70% of your thoughts were helpful, you'd be not only rare, but unstoppable.

So, let's talk about what Reasonable Doubt might look like...

The main goal of the approach is to first become aware of our thoughts and perhaps eventually replace thoughts that aren't helpful with thoughts that are. [Although, that’s not the specific intention, it’s more a by-product of the process.]

So, how do we know if a thought is helpful or not?

You just ask yourself this simple question:

What WOULD you choose?

If it's what you are currently thinking, then great, keep on thinking that thought.

If what you're currently thinking is NOT what you'd choose to think, then we...

Stop thinking it right?

No.

Not at all. That's where most people go wrong. We don't stop thinking it, we just NOTICE that it's not particularly helpful, that we wouldn't choose it, that it isn't serving us, but that we're doing it anyway.

There's real power in this simple realisation. The very fact of deciding not to resist the thought we are currently thinking opens the door to all possible change.

AS soon as we make it bad to have a particular thought, we've created a problem: we now feel bad about having the thought that makes us feel bad.

Our reasoning goes something like this:

'Oh there you go worrying again. You shouldn't be doing that. You know it's not good for you. You know it isn't helpful. You know it isn't going to get you where you want to go. You dumb ass. Stop it. Stop it now!'

Now, there's nothing intrinsically wrong with wanting to stop having a negative thought. Absolutely fine to do that. However, you've got to be very careful about making it a bad thing to have an unhelpful thought.

In my experience, humans move away from anything that makes them feel bad, and it's this awareness of their thinking that is making them feel bad. Not the thinking itself. So, how do they solve the problem? They stop noticing their thinking!!!

Which is the exact opposite of what we're trying to do here.

So, you've got to make it good to notice when you're doubtful, when you're worrying about something. And then make it ok to have those doubts.

Make it absolutely ok to have those doubts. Make it great.

OK, I get it. Make it great to notice when you're doubting yourself, when you're worrying. Yes, useful.

But how does that actually help me replace this kind of negative thinking with something that would be a lot more helpful?

If we move away from what makes us feel bad, then guess what? We move towards things that make us feel good.

So, we make it fun to notice how we're thinking. And then we do it more. We enjoy it.

And guess what happens when we enjoy something? We stop worrying...

Of course, we still have doubts. We still worry. But we've now made it OK to not be OK. And that's what creates the real change.

So, in practice, what we do is we just NOTICE what we're thinking by asking ourselves perhaps the most powerful question known to man:

_What WOULD I choose?_

You get good at asking yourself this question and you've basically eradicated self-doubt, fear, worry, right there and then, for the rest of your life. Job done.

OK, so there's a bit more to it than that...

While undoubtedly the very act of noticing will work for most of us, it'd be helpful to find a more systematic way of getting beyond the original doubting thought more regularly and with considerably less effort.

So, what we do is this:

We ask ourselves this question: What WOULD I choose?

If the answer is anything like 'Not this'

Then we realise that we're doing something different from what we would choose to do.

Now, here's the kicker:

If we're doing anything different from what we would choose, what's the only thing that this can mean?

It can only mean one thing - we're not choosing!

That's so obvious people nearly always miss it.

If we WOULD choose to have a different thought, it can only mean that we're NOT CHOOSING our thought.

So, if WE'RE not choosing our thought, how is it still happening?

I mean, we're doing it, and we're not choosing, so somehow, something else is choosing for us!

We say you're absolutely correct, something else IS choosing for you and that something else is called your script.

Well, we call it your script. We say that 'everything that isn't helpful, that you wouldn't choose, that doesn't serve you' is not you. It's your script.

[This approach was conceived and developed by my good friend and mentor Richard Wilkins and I was fortunate to be exposed to it back in 2007. At that point he called it ‘The Matrix’ but realised that ‘The Script’ would be a more robust metaphor. For more info please check out the footnotes.)

What's happened is that from a very early age you've observed situations, your parents, your peers, celebrities, teachers, adults you interact with, and they've behaved in a certain way.

You may have not even been consciously aware of what was going on but you were learning how to deal with new information, experiences, situations, by observing how other people behaved.

As you went through life, layers and layers of this 'script' was handed to you and you began to process information that you directly observed using it as a frame of reference.

My son Thelonious (after the jazz legend of course) is five years old now and terrified of spiders. When he was one, he wasn’t in the slightest bit scared of spiders. No babies are ever scared of spiders. Why would they be? Spiders are just something with a few moving parts that scurry across the floor from time to time. 

But what’s happened is that Theo has elder brothers who (for whatever reason) are scared of spiders. He watches them shout and panic upon spying an 8-legged fiend. He observes their behaviour and learns to respond in the same way. We live in the UK where spiders are not particularly dangerous. Nonetheless he is now scared of spiders despite there having been no spider-related injuries for as long as anyone can remember. 

In the same way, we all learn how to behave by copying others. Humans are learning machines and we save ourselves a lot of time by copying other people rather than reinventing the wheel all the time. 

I don't want to get too deep here as delving into the script is a journey that never ends.

But all you have to do, whenever you respond to any external situation or information, is to notice what you're thinking/feeling.

If what you are thinking/feeling is what you WOULD choose, then it's you. It must be. It's what you WOULD choose, so it's the authentic you. Genuinely behaving according to your intuition, your conscious beliefs.

If however, what you're thinking/feeling is NOT what you WOULD choose, then it's your script.

You don't have to worry about it at all.

It's just your script.

Your script contains the reference points:

OK, when X happens, then you should feel Y

• When someone you love says something mean to you, you should feel bad.
• When someone cuts in front of you into your line of traffic, you should get angry.
• When people don't listen to your ideas, you should feel rejected.
• When you get overlooked for a promotion, you should feel a failure.
• When you have an important meeting coming up, you should feel anxious.

It's thoughts like these that come from the script, not from you.

Hmmm... I'm not totally sure about this - how do we know these thoughts aren't ME? I mean, obviously I'd prefer them to be from my script, but maybe these thoughts are genuinely from me, maybe that's just what I'm like?

A natural response, and an interesting line of thought in itself. There's actually quite an easy way to work out whether it's genuinely you, or whether it's your script:

Just ask yourself what you WOULD choose?

If the thought that you're having isn't helpful, it isn't serving you, then you wouldn't choose it. 

If you wouldn't choose it, then it's not you - it's your script. It has to be - that's the definition of the script:

Everything that you don't want, that isn't helpful, that isn't serving you.

Sometimes the script itself will reject this simplicity. It will come up with a line of thinking as follows:

I know this ability to differentiate between my genuine thoughts and the thoughts the script is choosing is brilliant. I know that just by asking myself the simple ’what would I choose’ question, I can easily determine whether it not it’s actually me or my script choosing, but...

...it can't really be that simple can it?

I mean, life's not like that. I've got to accept some responsibility for these negative thoughts surely? I mean, I can't just get away with it like that, can I?

Well, this is where the genius of the approach really comes in to play.

What would you CHOOSE to believe?

Would you choose to think that it can't be that simple? that nothing this good can actually be real, that this approach can't really be the truth?

Of course you wouldn't!

You'd always choose for life to be simple rather than complicated, you'd always choose for things that were really helpful to be true, you'd never choose for things to be difficult.

Of course, sometimes the script will seduce you with a brilliant piece of logic. It will say something like this:

Maybe anxiety about this project would be helpful? Maybe me getting stressed about the outcome will make me perform better? Maybe feeling frustrated about this situation will get me to take action?

All these are actually almost good points. Certainly worth exploring and I'm going to give a simple scenarios that may help you see that these positions are in most cases not only unhelpful, but they could even be damaging, despite their attractive logic.

Let’s consider peak performers for a moment, e.g. an Olympic athlete approaching their imminent event.

They've got the entirety of their training, their sporting life, their future, their ambition at stake in the Olympic final.

They've got the same dilemma as you:

What would they choose to be thinking about regarding their impending performance?

a) Relaxed confidence:

That this is going to go well, that everything is going to click, that they’ll realize their full potential, that all their training had been worth it, this is what life is all about?

Or

b) Unbridled anxiety:

That they won't get a good start, that something might go wrong, that they'll mess up, that all their training has been a waste of time, that maybe they should have done something else with their life?

Ok, that example appears absurd, but is it really any different from you and anything that you're doing?

You nearly always have two fairly well polarised states of being with regard to any situation.

These two states are opposite ends of the scale of ’you'

At one end of the scale we have your intuition: the authentic you, your gut feel, your integrity pattern...

At the other end of the scale you have your script: everything that isn't helpful, that doesn't make you feel good, that you don't want...

And all of life is a daily dance between these two opposing positions, a continuous battle in the fight to discern the difference.

The easiest way to work out when it's your intuition and when it's your script?

What WOULD you choose?

And that’s the central focus of the Reasonable Doubt approach. 

There’s a lot more to it than this. But you know, one thing at a time and all that.

Notes:

• The term metamodern is borrowed from Hanzi Freinacht, and you can find out more about his work on the metamodern philosophy here: https://metamoderna.org/hanzi-freinacht/
• For more about The Script and Richard Wilkins’ work, try his Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/therichardwilkins/