Because the first obstacle to change is ourselves

Playing with the acronym ANT, which in English means ant, taking my cue from psychiatrist Daniel G. Amen's categorisation, but above all based on my own observation and direct experience as a coach, I have compiled the eight most common and dangerous varieties of thought pest ants.

The Pole Ant: it leads us to consider the world as polarised. Good or bad, always or never, black or white. This ant is particularly dangerous for change because it does not make us see all the possible nuances, makes us think in absolutist terms where perfection becomes the only goal and there is no room for intermediate solutions or progressive improvements. The formula of everything, now and perfect or nothing very often results in nothing at all.

The 'deep black' ant: it is the automatic thinking that only tells us the dangers, the difficulties, the obstacles of change. It is Edward De Bono's black hat that takes over and only shows the glass half-empty, the climbs and the potential threats.

I do not believe that so-called positive thinking, the protagonist in some contemporary narratives on the subject of motivation, is the panacea for all ills; on the contrary, I think it can become dangerously distorting and misleading. I am also convinced that hyper-negative thinking is castrating and immobilising and can create insurmountable mental barriers to change. The 'deep black' ant can be the bearer of self-fulfilling prophecies, dysfunctionally guiding emotions and behaviour and thus making negative thoughts come true.

The judge ant: she appears with a flashy eighteenth-century wig and a cumbersome walnut hammer, severe, inflexible and above all always ready to judge. If you are stung by this ant, you will begin to look at the world in rigidly prescriptive and normative terms. What one must or must not do, what is right or what is wrong, losing sight of reading the context, the complexity of the scenario and the dynamics in which one is immersed. The danger is that these moral, behavioural and value standards are often not really our own but a distorted projection of those of others, of society, of parents, of the family unit, of friends, of office colleagues...

The emotional ant: whenever we experience an emotion with great intensity, our capacity for systemic thinking drops dramatically. Our thinking becomes blurred, we tend to observe and pick up only a small portion of the real, of what we are experiencing. It is what psychologist Paul Ekman calls the selective filtering mechanism, basically our emotions become the glasses through which we observe the world, selecting only that information, a small part of the whole, which goes to confirm and reinforce the emotion itself.

In the next article we will discover the last four varieties and indicate trajectories for the functional and conscious management of these dangerous inhibitors to change.

In the meantime, I propose a simple coaching assignment: over the next few days, listen to yourself and pay attention to every time one of these negative automatic thoughts comes up. Write down your inner dialogue and observe the impact it has on your mood and activities.

*Senior Consultant at Newton SpA