I’d like to welcome back a familiar face – Professor Ivan Robertson who’s kindly agreed to share his thoughts with us again. Also over the next few months I’m going to be asking a few new faces to be joining me on my blog so watch this space!
Was Gordon snubbed by Barack?
Professor Ivan Robertson
The fact that Gordon Brown and Barack Obama didn’t have a face-to-face meeting at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh hit the news headlines recently. Instead, they apparently chatted as the made their way through a kitchen. I heard a radio journalist commenting on this non-event and he made the point that at events like this journalists are always looking for the “snub” story – and, of course, because it’s impossible for the President of the USA to meet everyone there is always a story – and someone can always be made to look / feel snubbed.
This set me thinking about the kinds of thinking traps that people typically fall into. There is a long list that we use in the resilience training programmes that my company Robertson Cooper regularly run: things like “mind reading” (you assume you know what other people are thinking, without checking) and “mental filter” (you pick out a single negative detail and dwell on it exclusively, so that your vision of reality becomes darkened).
Lots of people fall into these thinking traps on a day-to-day basis – if you have access to cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) they might be tackled – but for most of us, without special training, they can have a pretty damaging impact. How much better would life feel if we were all aware of these traps and were equipped to avoid them?
Actually, Barack Obama did arrange for a one-to-one meeting with Gordon Brown, but it was done hastily and probably only because of the media interest in the original “snubbing” or to aid Labour’s election campaign back home…. or am I just mind reading and applying mental filters now?
