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Do You Feel Not Good Enough? Maybe You’re Both Right and Wrong.
Embrace the contradiction.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, American writer and novelist, wrote:
“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”
This sounds useful, but as your experience will tell you, it’s also uncomfortable.
Cognitive dissonance is the name given to the state of mind in which a person holds two or more inconsistent beliefs at the same time, or acts in a way that contradicts a belief.
Our brains, it seems, constantly try to resolve these contradictions. One way of doing this is by changing our attitudes. For example, if you have the goal of exercising every day but failed to exercise yesterday, you might make yourself feel better by deciding to work twice as hard at the gym today.
While it’s natural to want to resolve cognitive dissonance, there are situations where it might not be useful to resolve it. In these situations, trying to resolve it might be causing you more discomfort than simply accepting the truth of two opposing beliefs.
