#14: Become your own biggest advocate, with Immanuel Kant
How many times have people told you that you should believe in yourself, and how many times have you responded by thinking, 'Pfft, how can I believe in myself when I see evidence of my inadequacy everywhere I look?'?
Sorry, friend, but you see no such thing. Not only are your negative beliefs about yourself doing a great job at holding you back, they're also doing a great job at their own PR - by filtering the way you experience the world so that you think you see evidence for them where there is none. The truth is - as Kant taught us - you don't see the world as it really is. You see a filtered version. The good news is that you can change the filters so that instead of seeing evidence of your inadequacy, you see evidence of your worth. Your imperfect fairy godmother is here to show you how.
Episode transcript:
Let Immanuel Kant help you learn to advocate for yourself. Yep, you heard that right.
You're listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I'm Dr. Rebecca Roache. I'm a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and week by week, I'll be drawing on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
Do you have certain unflattering beliefs about yourself that are really hard to shift, and which hold you back? Perhaps you believe that you're not smart enough to do really well in your field? Or that your supervisor doesn't really take you seriously? Or that people are disappointed in you? Do you also see evidence for those beliefs everywhere you look? So perhaps the fact that you didn't get that job or that grant is evidence in your mind for the belief that you're not smart enough? Or perhaps the fact that your supervisor didn't say anything positive about that piece of writing you showed her last week is evidence that she doesn't take you seriously. Or maybe the fact that your family don't ask you about your work is evidence that they are disappointed in you. It's difficult, isn't it? Living our life with these unflattering limiting beliefs about ourselves. But here's a bit of good news: the version of reality that you see, and that contains evidence of your shortcomings everywhere you look, is just that - a version of reality. You're not seeing reality as it really is. You're seeing it shaped and filtered by your inner critic's PR machine. In this episode, I want to dig into this idea via what might seem like a surprising route: the writings of the 18th century German philosopher Immanuel Kant. One of Kant's most influential ideas is that we are incapable of seeing reality as it really is. First, a bit of background. Here is a very tiny crash course on Kant. More barely audible thud than a crash actually. Kant's ideas about how we perceive reality were preceded by a debate between two groups of philosophers, the empiricists and the rationalists. The empiricists believed that all our knowledge comes from experience, and rationalists believed that none of our knowledge comes from experience and that in a sense it's already in us. Now there are problems with both of those lines of thought. Empiricism can't be quite right, because much of our most important knowledge doesn't seem to come from experience at all. This point was vividly made by the Scottish philosopher David Hume, who argued famously that causation is not something that we perceive in the world, and therefore not something we're really justified in believing in. And rationalism has its problems too - perhaps most dramatically, it's hard for rationalists to convince us why we need the idea of an external world at all, and why we have any good reason to believe in any reality that lies beyond our perceptions. This is a problem that was famously raised, but not satisfactorily solved by the French philosopher, Rene Descartes. Out of this debate emerged Kant. He argued that we do gain knowledge from experience, but the way we experience the world is structured in a certain way, according to certain categories of thought. So for example, when you look around you, you don't simply see patches of colour, and patches of light and shade. You see objects, you can't help but see objects, you see them because you're hardwired to divide up the reality you perceive into objects rather than into patches of colour. And when you watch someone throwing a brick, and then a second later, a window smashing, you don't merely perceive a sequence of events, you perceive a causal interaction, the brick causing the window to smash. And that's what you perceive not because causation is something you literally see in the world, but because you're hardwired to ascribe causation to what you see. Now, this idea of Kant's was a very elegant way of bringing together the insights of the empiricists and the rationalists while using each theory to plug gaps in the other. But it comes at a cost. For Kant, we don't get to access reality as it really is. The world as it really is, is inaccessible to us. What we perceive is a version of reality. It's reality boxed up in a certain way, structured and filtered according to our categories of thought. And that means that when we perceive reality, we're also in a way perceiving ourselves. We can compare this to the version of reality that's presented to us in a painting or in a news story. So there's a sense in which both of those things really do represent reality. But they do so in a certain way, by emphasising some aspects of the world and playing down others. And because of that, they show us as much about the mind that created them - the priorities and values of the painter or the journalist - as they do about the reality they represent. Now Kant's views about this are to an extent borne out by contemporary psychology. So it's widely accepted by psychologists that babies are hardwired to recognise certain things like human faces, their mother's voice, objects that persist through time and space, and so on. In other words, from our earliest days, we filter reality, we highlight some parts of it, and ignore others. So let's get back to those unflattering limiting beliefs that you hold about yourself. Those beliefs filter your reality too, and the fact that they filter your reality means that they're especially hard to shake, because you think you see evidence for them everywhere you look. Because you hold those beliefs, you notice evidence that seems to confirm them, and you overlook or reinterpret evidence against them. Psychologists call this confirmation bias. So for example, if you're convinced that you're not smart enough to do really well in your field, you'll pick up on evidence for this belief - that time you missed a deadline, or got criticised or didn't get the job you wanted - and you'll overlook evidence against that belief. So when you hit your deadlines, or when you get complimented rather than criticised, or when you're successful in a job application, you might completely overlook the possibility that you've just encountered evidence against your belief that you're not smart enough. Or you might interpret it in such a way that it doesn't count as evidence. So instead of thinking, 'I was wrong to think I'm not smart enough to do well, I'd better reject that belief', you think things like, 'hitting that deadline was no big deal', or 'that person who complimented me was just trying to be nice, they weren't really sincere'. You might even pull a Groucho Marx on yourself by thinking something like, 'yeah, so I got that job I applied for. But if they're willing to employ someone as mediocre as me, their standards must be pretty low, and they can't be a very impressive employer'. I see this sort of reasoning all the time in my clients. And until I pointed out, they often don't even notice that they're doing it. Perhaps you recognise some of this in yourself, too. What it comes down to is this: if you're really wedded to the belief that you're not smart enough, or that people don't take you seriously, or that people are disappointed in you, then you'll have no trouble finding evidence to support that belief. But the reason you're finding that evidence is not because the world, in some objective sense, contains more evidence for than against your inadequacy. It's because your negative beliefs about yourself shape the way you perceive the world. Just as Kant told us that the categories of thought shape the way we perceive the world, when you believe you're not good enough, and when you believe that you encounter evidence for this belief all the time, that's because the reality you're perceiving is skewed. The reality you're perceiving is the output of your inner critic's PR machine. It's your internal Fox News. But there's a positive side to all of this. The first piece of good news is that, unlike some of the ways that we're hardwired to filter reality, we can change the way that our negative beliefs about ourselves shape our reality. We can break that positive feedback loop between those negative beliefs and the evidence for them that they lead us to see in the world. And in doing so we can slowly loosen their grip on us. The second bit of good news is that simply becoming aware that we're dealing with a heavily filtered version of reality is helpful. It's something that we can turn to our advantage to help motivate us to learn, grow, and succeed. We can do this by chipping away at our unhelpful limiting beliefs by paying attention to how we arrive at evidence for them. When we experience something that leads us to conclusion like, 'oh, here's yet more proof that I'm not smart enough', we can ask ourselves whether there's a way of interpreting that experience differently. Here's a way that you can put that into practice. Pick a negative belief that you have about yourself. That might be something like: my supervisor doesn't take me seriously. Imagine - just as an exercise for now - that you hold the reverse of that belief. So that might be: my supervisor has complete faith in me. Imagine that you're fully convinced of that alternative belief. Now, ask yourself how you might experience the world differently if that was actually what you believed. For example, you might currently view your supervisor's lack of positive comments on your recent work as evidence for your belief that she doesn't take you seriously. But if you were instead convinced that she has complete faith in you, then you'd view things differently. That alternative conviction of yours would lead you to view her lack of positive comments on your work as evidence that she has no complaints, or that she thinks she doesn't need to offer you any guidance at the moment, or perhaps that she's decided to focus her attention on other people who are more in need of her support. The great thing about this exercise is that you don't need to try to force yourself to believe the opposite of what you actually believe about yourself, and you don't need to force yourself to believe that the more flattering version of reality is the correct one. The truth is, you don't really know which, if either, is the correct one. And if we take a Kantian view, you can't know. There's a gap between the world we experience and what we come to believe or know about it, and we fill in that gap ourselves. We do this in part through the ways that we're hardwired to experience the world, and in part through the convictions that we hold about ourselves. By simply being aware that this happens, over time, you can take some of the wind out of your inner critic's sails. What you're seeing in the world is not evidence for the negative beliefs that you hold about yourself. Those beliefs themselves are leading you to see evidence where there isn't any. You can take all this one step further. By paying attention to those times when what you experience leads you to feel bad about yourself, you can uncover negative beliefs about yourself that you didn't even realise you had. This is how Kant did it: he started off by looking at the judgments we make about the world, and worked backwards from there to discover the categories of thought. Next time you find yourself feeling disproportionately insulted by a colleague's comment about your work or demoralised by a rejection from a journal or frustrated with yourself after an unproductive day, ask yourself: what belief about myself am I taking this experience to be evidence for? Perhaps it will turn out to be a belief that you were not previously aware that you had. And once you've discovered it, ask: how might have I interpreted this comment or that rejection if I held the opposite belief? You don't have to believe the opposite belief right away, although that can come with time. Through being open minded and paying attention to how you're filtering your experiences, you take the first step to living in a friendlier world where you're your own advocate, and where you're able to see evidence of your own worth all around you. Good luck! See you next time.
I'm Dr. Rebecca Roache, and you've been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you like to use, and please consider leaving a review on Apple podcasts and sharing the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful - you can take a screenshot on your phone and send it over to them. For more information and updates about me, the podcast, or my coaching, or just to get in touch and say hi, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com - or follow me on Twitter @AcademicImp or on Facebook at Academic Imperfectionist. Thank you for listening and see you next time.
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