Breaking the Patterns That Hold Us Back

Breaking the Patterns That Hold Us Back

Welcome back to the 29th issue of Disrupting Conversations!

Have you ever caught yourself humming along to a song on the radio, anticipating your favorite part? Or maybe you've walked into a meeting, already scripting how it will unfold in your mind. If so, you've experienced mental templating, a cognitive process that shapes our perceptions and behaviors more than we realize.

Mental templating, a term rooted in cognitive psychology, refers to our brain's tendency to create and use patterns based on past experiences. These templates act as cognitive shortcuts, allowing us to quickly process and respond to familiar situations with a goal of keeping us safe. They're the reason you can navigate your morning routine on autopilot or instinctively know how to behave in an everyday conversation.

But if left unrecognized or unchecked, these mental templates will hold you back.  

While they serve us well in many situations, they can also lead to biased listening and thinking, impacting our effectiveness in sales, leadership, and parenting. We are quick to judge and write off people, ideas, and opportunities. The perception of keeping ourselves safe overrides our ability and willingness to debate, experiment, and or accept, limiting our growth.

Meanwhile, by challenging our ingrained mental templates, we open ourselves up to new perspectives, deeper connections, and potentially groundbreaking insights in both our personal and professional lives. Let’s talk about how to do that.  

Breaking Sales is my podcast to connect with those who are ready to break free from the chains of old sales methodologies that don’t work.

Title of Episode: In the Real World, Curiosity Outperforms Competency

🎙️In this episode I sit down with Jeff Vertun, a commercial real estate professional, to explore the transformative power of changing your mindset. We dive into how he avoids and breaks his prospects’ pattern recognition so that he can have more meaningful conversations with them—conversations where honesty and even some vulnerability prevail. We also discuss how sharing competency and/or expertise too early fits right into a prospect’s pattern recognition, thus preventing them from listening objectively.  

When Pattern Recognition Misses the Mark 

Imagine you're driving home from work. A familiar song comes on the radio, and without thinking, you start tapping the steering wheel, ready for your favorite guitar solo. This automatic response is mental templating in action. You are listening for patterns in the music to help you identify what you’ll experience next. 

Mental templating is our brain's way of creating shortcuts based on past experiences. It's a survival mechanism that has served us well for tens of thousands of years. Our ancestors used this pattern recognition to identify which tribes were safe to approach and which posed a threat. This ability to quickly identify patterns and predict outcomes could mean the difference between life and death.

Fast forward to today, and we still rely heavily on the instinctual process of pattern recognition. They help us navigate our complex world efficiently, from mundane tasks like grocery shopping to more critical activities like assessing social interactions or making business decisions.

👉 However, there's a catch. While pattern recognition can be incredibly useful, it can also limit our perceptions and responses, especially in our conversations and relationships.

Consider a typical sales meeting. Before it even begins, you’ve probably already decided how it will go. You anticipate certain responses, prepare for objections, and maybe even pre-label the outcome. But what if this pattern recognition is preventing you from correctly listening, assessing and engaging the conversation or situation? You get caught mis-labeling the other person's demeanor, tone, and words? You label something incorrectly as “good” or “bad,” and it completely shifts your reactions and attitude.   

The same applies to our personal relationships. When having a difficult conversation with a partner or child, we often fall into familiar patterns, anticipating reactions and preparing our responses before the other person has even finished speaking.

So, how can we break free from the habit of pattern recognition?

1. Objective Listening: Learn how to stop pursuing conversation outcomes. Because once you define an outcome, you will only listen for what you want to hear, and ask questions aligned with where you want the conversation to go. Objectivite listening reminds you to stay open and not succumb to routines that keep you safe. Give yourself a chance to hear the truth, not what makes you feel better.  

2. Avoid Labeling: Our innate tendency to assign a value of “good” or “bad” to what we hear is a mechanism deeply rooted in pattern recognition. The good makes us feel safe, and the bad helps us avoid danger. The problem is that quick, surface-level assessment prevents us from having those deeper, more meaningful conversations that build trust.

3. Give Them a Sense of Control: Deliberately introduce elements that break the expected pattern. For instance, in a sales meeting, you might say, "I want you to know that not having a follow-up meeting is a perfectly acceptable outcome" or “We may not be the right solution.” Giving a prospect an unexpected "out" communicates that you don’t need something from them, and that can change the entire dynamic of the conversation. 

4. Provide Choice and Control: When giving feedback or having difficult conversations with a teammate or your kids, explicitly state that the other person has control over how they use the information. It allows them to feel empowerment and a sense of ownership as they decide the value of your feedback. It breaks the pattern of how they interpret your intent: telling them what to do versus helping them figure it out. 

The process of breaking patterns is a lifelong journey—remember, we are hardwired by our ancestors’ primal world to recognize danger by categorizing past experiences. But we live in a modern age that doesn’t hold the same risks. In fact, you could easily argue that we create an advantage when we stay open, objective, and curious. 

So, the next time you find yourself falling into a familiar conversational pattern, ask yourself: Is this pattern recognition serving me and the person I’m speaking with, or is it time to break free and discover something new?

Thanks for reading!

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