We tend to avoid information that’s not consistent with our beliefs. There’s been a long-running debate between psychologists:

Do people actively avoid contradictory information or is it a more natural process? For example, it may be that we don’t hear opposing views because we hang out with people like us.

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Some new research [PDF] (led by a psychology professor at the best school in the world, the University of Illinois) has answered that question.

If you seek opposing views, you’re in the minority

The research confirms that people do avoid ideas that disagree with their own. They did this study to “see … to what extent people are willing to seek out the truth versus just stay comfortable with what they know.”

The researchers found that two-thirds of us choose information that supports what we already think. However, the more interesting part of their research to us was this:

They found that two types of people are more likely to listen to alternative points-of-view:

People who are confident in their own beliefs

We were out with a friend right after we read this research. The timing was perfect. She’s very politically active – politics is one area the researchers cited that we’re particularly reluctant to consider the other side.

Our friend told us that she no longer subscribed to a certain magazine. She said that she found she always disagreed with their point-of-view. After further discussion, it was clear that she’s not confident in her opinions.

If she had confidence in her opinions, it wouldn’t bother her to read the other side. In fact, by reading the other side, she might gain confidence in her positions. Or she might change her mind, but be more confident in her new opinion.

The best way to confirm your opinion is to continually test it against all the information available. Talk with people who hold counter opinions. Read everything you can. Try to balance opinions on all sides of an issue before arriving at a conclusion.

Even then, continue testing that opinion with any new evidence you find, both pro and con. Then you’ll have confidence in your opinions.

People who have to defend their ideas in public

It’s interesting that the researchers cite the much-maligned politicians here. Politicians constantly have to defend their point-of-view.

They serve as an example to us. Don’t keep your opinions to yourself; defend them.

We should point out two things here:

• You have to be careful discussing certain subjects with certain people.

• We’ve talked about things here in very black-and-white terms. Obviously, many if not most issues are full of grey. That’s what makes for interesting discussion!

When you do discuss your ideas, you will hear other points-of-view that you can synthesize with your own. Your ideas will sharpen and grow. So will your confidence in what you believe.

That’s bigg success … as long as you agree with us!

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Thanks for reading our post today. Please join us next time when we’ll discuss what we can learn from cats about communication. Until then, here’s to your bigg success!

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He’s a great singer and seems like an all-around nice guy. He really came into his own over the course of this season. There were so many really good singers in the group, including Adam Lambert who seemed to be the odds-on favorite.

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The ten-year rule

One of the challenges we have in reaching bigg success is thinking that it happens overnight. American Idol certainly gives that impression. After all, how many people had heard of Kris Allen five months ago?

Not many. However, he did a lot of work out of the spotlight to get to this point. He’s had formal training and been singing for about sixteen years.

So although it may seem that he’s an overnight sensation, a lot of blood, sweat and tears led to his crowning achievement.

That’s usually the case in any field. In fact, psychologists talk about the ten-year rule: it takes roughly ten years to develop the skills needed to reach bigg success in any endeavor.

The cost of thinking it’s a gift

While the debate rages on – is it natural talent or developed skills – there’s more and more evidence that hard work, with focus, over a span of time, is what usually produces the extraordinary successes we see.

In our culture, we see people like Kris who become media darlings overnight. So there’s a tendency to think he just has that certain something.

The problem with buying into that thought-process is that you lose your resiliency in the face of adversity. If you think that bigg success just happens, you’ll be more likely to give up when things don’t come easy. And you know it don’t come easy!

There’s more than one 3 o’clock in a day

We recently attended SOBCon, the business school for bloggers, and met Jon Haydon. Jon had a great blog post about seeing his social media idol, Chris Brogan, speak at the conference. Chris is an idol to a lot of people including us.

For those of you who don’t know who Chris is, first of all – he’s a super person. Second, he has reached the heights of influence in social media circles everywhere you look – from Ad Age to Technorati and beyond.

Jon’s post was fantastic. He got a number of great comments. We found one particularly revealing. It was by Lewis Howes, who we also met at SOBCon. Lewis commented about a conversation with Chris, who said that “he stayed up until 3:00 every morning for four years to get to where he is!”

At SOBCon, we heard Chris asked about how he got started. He said it goes back ten years to the early days of chat rooms.

Lewis added in his comment, “He didn’t just pop up out of no where and ascend to the heavens … No! He worked his butt off every day and didn’t let others hold onto his string.”

Well said! Bigg success takes time and hard work. It doesn’t just happen overnight. It won’t be easy. Just keep the faith and keep on plugging … you will be a bigg success!

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Please join us next time when we discuss a fun way to clear out the clutter. Until then, here’s to your bigg success!

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Direct link to The Bigg Success Show audio file:
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He devised a formula to find out when people are unhappiest. It’s based on many factors – the weather this time of the year in many parts of the developed world, Christmas bills coming in as we try to figure out how to pay them, our New Year’s resolutions starting to fall by the wayside, and more.

It’s been reported that fewer people went into debt this Christmas compared to prior years. So maybe it won’t be so bad this year. On the other hand, we get blasted daily with reports of layoffs, store closings and other bad news. Many people are feeling like they’re not in control of their own lives. So this may be a particularly blue Blue Monday.

Rock bottom up!
We can see the glass as half empty or half full. We could just sit around feeling sorry for ourselves. Or we could look at it this way – if today really is the most depressing day of the year, then it can only be better for the rest of the year!

It reminds us of J.K. Rowling’s address to last year’s Harvard graduates. She said that, before her success with Harry Potter, she reached rock bottom. She found it very liberating because she knew she had nowhere to go but up.

Dreamin’ and schemin’

That’s what we call our formula for getting over the blues. It works for just about any situation that you’re unhappy about. So use this to get back on track with that New Year’s resolution, for financial problems, and just about anything else. Well, it won’t help with the weather!

Step 1: Allow yourself to mentally escape. For just a little bit, stop thinking about where you are. Instead think about where you want to be. Picture it as clearly as you can. Then write it down.

This has helped us innumerable times. By focusing on where we want to be for a short time, our motivation returns. We find we have new energy to return to the problem that got us down in the first place. Now we have the strength to return to the present and move to the next step.

Step 2: Schedule your steps. With your written description from your mental escape in Step 1 in front of you, think about your current situation. What will it take to get from where you are to where you want to be? Write down every step that you will need to take, focusing of course only on things you can control.

Step 3: Take the first step. This is really the most important step. Taking even the smallest step helps you lose that feeling of powerlessness. It gives you a reason to pat yourself on the back. It gets positive energy flowing to solve your problem instead of being frozen by it.

This is something that helps us get over the blues. What works for you?

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Oh, and if you’re feeling down today, hang in there. Dr. Arnall has also calculated the happiest day of the year. That happens in June!

Thanks so much for reading our post today.

Tomorrow, we’re inaugurating a new President here in the United States. He’ll swear that he will “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution.” Join us next time when we ask, “Does your organization need a Constitution?”

Until then, here’s to your bigg success!  

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Direct link to The Bigg Success Show audio file:
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A study by Virginia Tech Transportation Institute and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration found that about 80 percent of all crashes and 65 percent of all near-crashes involved someone who was distracted within three seconds of the event. 

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I plead guilty as charged. I have to admit to using my car as a roaming second office. I store up phone messages and return calls while I’m on the road. .

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I’m in the car on a busy, busy day with all these things rolling through my mind. That’s one of the distractions that we often don’t take into account. I zone out … I don’t really pay attention like I should. I’m in my own world. .

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Psychologists have identified four types of distractions, according to Grohol’s article.

• Visual … checking out an accident or looking at a billboard

• Audible … cell phone calls, the radio, or another person talking

• Physical … eating, flipping the dial, shuffling your iPod, or putting on make-up

• Cognitive … daydreaming, thinking about other things in your life

Of course, a lot of distractions are multi-faceted. For example, talking on your cell phone includes three of these – audible, physical, and cognitive.

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I really do think it saves time. We have a friend who consults with us. He talks to us when he’s on his hour-and-a-half commute home. I can understand why you would use your phone when you have that long drive.

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I won’t dispute that at all, but I now realize more than ever that I have to recognize the odds of something happening and take measures to try to minimize the distractions.

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Changes we plan to make

• Leave earlier. When we have a lengthy trip, we usually don’t give ourselves the time to stop and eat. We gas, grab, and go … eating on the road. Leaving earlier will allow us time to stop and eat. We’ll probably eat healthier, too!

• Ignore the phone. Granted, that’s a hard thing to do. So we’re going to turn our ringers off when we’re only going to be in the car for a short time.

• Change our greetings. If we’re expecting an important call, we’ll change the greeting to let them know when we will be checking our messages.

• Pull over (if we can). For those rare situations where we have to take the call, we’ll stop driving momentarily.

What's your biggest distraction while driving? 

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