How to Improve Your Mindset: Political Conversations

Benefits: Discover 3 actions you can take to shift your mindset.

So That You Can: Have productive political conversations. (Or any hot-button conversation for that matter.)

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How to Improve Your Mindset: Political Conversations

This is going to be a tough one guys, and TBH, I don’t have all the answers. Improving the mindset I take into political conversations is something I have been thinking about and working on for years, and I’m still not great at it.

As I write this post, articles of impeachment are about to be drafted against Donald Trump. Naturally, coverage of the impeachment hearings has been hard to escape, and, inevitably, I’ve ended up in some political conversations.

What I’ve realized is that my mindset is definitely not where I would like it to be. Even though I know better and just wrote a post about being easily offended, I still find myself feeling . . . Offended? Defensive? Protective? It’s an emotion that’s difficult to identify.

I still find myself wanting to shake people and scream, “Seriously! Why can’t you see what’s going on right in front of your face? Why can’t you see through the bullshit?” And, no doubt, they find themselves wanting to do the same to me.

So, can we improve our political mindsets and our political conversations? I think so, and I think that, as Deliberate Thinkers, we have to keep trying. Here goes . . .

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What Doesn’t Work

Before we get into the How To, let’s first look at how most of us approach political conversations. We state a “fact” that we picked up from a source that we deem credible. The other person refutes our fact with a “fact” that they picked up from a source that they deem credible. And the “Yeah, but”s go back and forth until both people are frustrated, if not with each other, with the trajectory of the conversation.

Neither party has Stayed Curious. Neither party has Respected Other Points of View. (Two components of the Cycle of Deliberate Thinking.) Neither party has gained anything from the conversation other than a headache.

But why? Why do we always let ourselves fall into this trap? This is the question that’s been on my mind lately, and yesterday I discovered an answer. It was in a TED Talk featuring Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist whose main areas of study are the psychology of morality and the moral emotions.

Haidt contends that, when it comes to issues of morality, our intuitions come first, and our strategic reasoning comes second. In other words, our moral judgments tend to be based on emotions and gut feelings rather than reason and evidence. And, generally, our political views are moral judgments.

Since our political views are rooted in our personal morals, our political conversations are actually conversations of morality. In conversations of morality, strategic reasoning comes after intuition and emotional reasoning. That’s why you’re not going to persuade people with reasons or evidence. Yet, that’s what most of us try to do. That’s why we fail to have productive conversations, over and over again.

What Do We Do Instead?

We improve our mindsets of course ?, and that’s what we’ll talk about next. But, since shifting our mindsets isn’t going to happen overnight, I will offer a few suggestions that you can implement immediately at the end of this post. How to fake it till you make it, if you will.

Mindset Shift #1 - Focus on Commonalities

First, keep in mind that most people aren’t at the extreme right or extreme left end of the spectrum. A 2018/2019 study conducted by More in Common, a research group, found that only 8% of the population is on the far left, while 6% is on the far right. Another 19% of conservatives share a lot of values with the 6% on the far right. After taking that group into account, 67% of the population is in the “Exhausted Majority,” as More in Common calls it.

(These stats came from a great article that is worth checking out. There’s a link at the end of the post. The site even has a quiz that helps you determine which “Tribe” you are in. I got Traditional Liberal, which seems to fit and is only 11% of the population. Go figure.)

Meaning that, unless you are one of the people on one of the far ends of the spectrum, you share a lot of commonalities with 2 out of 3 people. That might not seem too encouraging, but the point is, you are not outnumbered.

Also keep in mind that people with opposing political views typically want the same things; they just have different ideas about the best way to achieve the desired results. Here are a few things that most people want:

Safety – for ourselves and for our family and friends
Financial security
Freedom to make our own choices
A moral standard to hold people accountable to

If we remind ourselves that the person we are engaging with probably wants the same things we do, the chance of having a productive conversation is much higher. We’re changing our expectations of the conversation from, “This person is going to attack me; I better be ready.” to “This person’s trying to stand up for what they ‘want,’ but it’s quite possible that we want the same things. I’ll listen and ask good questions so I can figure out what we have in common.”

As I said before, this mindset shift is going to take time and practice. You’re not going to be very good at it at first; I know I’m not. But, we can be good at it if we choose to, and embracing The Cycle of Deliberate Thinking will help.

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Mindset Shift #2 - Stay Curious by Remaining Skeptical of Your Sources

No matter which “side” you’re on, you are being manipulated by the media. We all are. That’s the media’s job, and they’re very good at it. Once we realize this, we can use this realization to frame everything that we see and hear, and this reframing will help us have productive political conversations.

I think we all know that this manipulation is taking place, but it’s not necessarily something we give much thought to, most of the time. The person who really changed my perspective and awareness is Noam Chomsky. If you’re not familiar with him, according to Wikipedia, Chomsky is:

. . . an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes called “the father of modern linguistics,” Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy and one of the founders of the field of cognitive science. He holds a joint appointment as Institute Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Laureate Professor at the University of Arizona, and is the author of more than 100 books on topics such as linguistics, war, politics, and mass media.

The long and short of it is, whether you agree with his opinions or not, the guy is a genius. I’ve watched him speak enough times to feel confident saying that if he says a fact is a fact, I believe him. This guy’s lifeblood is data and research; he’s not going to say something that he can’t back up.

Why am I overexplaining Chomsky? Because, in a minute, I’m going to say that we need to be skeptical of the sources we rely on, so it’s important to know why I rely on Chomsky.

The thing that changed my perspective of the mass media was a documentary film titled Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media, which explores Chomsky’s political life and ideas. Its central theme is a book that Chomsky co-wrote called Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. The following quote is from a 1988 interview conducted by Bill Moyers, after this book had been published. Chomsky states:

. . . the major media are major corporations. Like any other business, they have a product and an audience, a product and a market. The market is other businesses. They sell their product to advertisers — that’s what keeps them going — and the product is audiences, and, in fact, for the elite media, privileged audiences, because that improves advertising rates. So what the media are, fundamentally, as far as institutions are concerned, they’re major corporations selling relatively privileged audiences to other businesses.

Wow! Read that last line again. That’s a pretty powerful statement, and once you see/hear it, it seems so obvious. It’s just not something that we Deliberately Think about very often. Of course the media is in it for the money, and, of course, they have to tell their audience what they want to hear or they won’t get paid. Duh!

Once you’re aware of this reality, you’ll be skeptical of your news sources, and you’ll want to corroborate their stories. You’ll be more likely to question statements that just don’t make sense to you.

I have a whole post dedicated to being skeptical of media sources.

This awareness will also improve your political mindset because you’ll realize that the media is dividing us, intentionally or not, because division increases ratings. The person you are entering into a political conversation with may not be aware of this. It’s not your job to raise their awareness; that will only lead to bickering. It’s your job to remind yourself of this so that you can shift your mindset back to finding commonalities.

Mindset Shift #3 - Sincerely Try to Understand Other Points of View

Another thought leader who I have high regard for is Dr. Jordan B. Peterson. One of the “rules,” from his book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, is to, “Assume the person you are listening to knows something you don’t.” Again, duh!

Yet, how often do we actually go into a conversation, political or otherwise, with this assumption. My answer is, not often enough. We usually go into a conversation trying to prove a point or show how brilliant we are. We don’t go into it with a sincere desire to learn; to understand the other person’s point of view.

This presents another challenge that will help you shift your political conversation mindset. Listen more than you speak, and ask good questions so that you can understand the other person’s point of view. Again, in doing so, you will shift your mindset back to finding commonalities.

What Do We Do in the Meantime?

As promised, here are a few suggestions for engaging in productive political conversations that we can implement immediately:

Take a deep breath. Count to ten if you need to ?. And hold your tongue if you have nothing productive to say.
Focus on finding one thing the other person says that you agree with.
Build on that one thing, and try to stay on that topic. If you truly can’t find anything you agree with, just don’t say anything.

Remind yourself that you aren’t going to sway people’s political beliefs with reasons or evidence. So stop trying to! It’s really not worth your time or effort.

Also remind yourself that “you” are not your political views. That is only a small part of your identity. Just because someone is opposed to your political views doesn’t mean that they are opposed to you, and vice versa.

Click here for more posts with a “mindful political views” theme.

Take advantage of our worksheet, which you can use as a tool to improve your mindset.

And until next time . . .STAY CURIOUS!