The Unhelpful Thinking Styles IQ Matrix explores how to understand how your habitual thinking patterns influence your life and your perspective of the world around you. Furthermore, the map reveals how we tend to sabotage ourselves in subtle ways by how we think about ourselves, others, life, the world, and our circumstances. These ineffective ways of thinking prevent us from achieving our goals. An understanding of each of these 10 unhelpful thinking styles will help shift how you think about and interpret the world around you. Becoming aware of these tendencies will allow you to take control of your thoughts and subsequently the trajectory of your life.
The 10 unhelpful thinking styles explored within this mind map include mental filtering, jumping to conclusions, personalization, black and white thinking, catastrophizing, overgeneralizing, shoulding and musting, labeling, magnification and minimization, and emotional reading.
Here is a quick breakdown of the 10 Unhelpful Thinking Styles included within this map.
- Mental Filter: This involves filtering in and out information negatively. Here you are neglecting the positives and instead focusing on the negatives.
- Jumping to Conclusions: This involves making quick negative assumptions about people’s intentions or future circumstances.
- Personalization: This involves blaming yourself for everything. Here you are blaming yourself for any problems that arise, for mistakes you make, for failures you experience, and for any unfavorable circumstances.
- Black and White Thinking: This involves seeing only extremes of any situation. Here you only see the good or the bad or the right or the wrong. There is no middle ground.
- Catastrophizing: This involves making problems more horrible than they are in reality. Here you are blowing circumstances out of proportion and justifying why that’s the actual reality.
- Overgeneralization: This involves making broad generalizations based on very little evidence. Here you are imposing one event onto another. What makes sense in one situation must also make sense in all other situations.
- Shoulding and Musting: This involves putting unreasonable pressures and demands on yourself. Here you are creating unrealistic expectations upon yourself that you are unlikely to live up to.
- Labeling: This involves making global statements labeling others as well as yourself based on behavior in very specific situations. The labels you make form your belief systems.
- Magnification and Minimization: This involves magnifying the positive attributes of others while minimizing your personal qualities. Here you are devaluing yourself. You’re bringing yourself down while raising the stature of other people.
- Emotional Reasoning: This involves taking emotions as evidence of the truth. Here you are basing your view of a particular situation in accordance with how you’re feeling about that situation. Your feelings, therefore, dictate how you perceive a situation despite evidence to the contrary.
This map provides a roadmap and framework for understanding the ten unhelpful thinking styles that sabotage how you view the world. Referencing it regularly and committing it to memory will help you to embed these concepts and ideas into your subconscious mind.
A mind map, of course, does this beautifully because it mirrors the synaptic connections made in your brain as you try to establish new habits of thought and behavior. It brings together key concepts and ideas that help your brain to fully integrate and process this information. The brain, subsequently, rewires itself as it attempts to establish new habits of mind. It’s an ideal tool for creating lasting change and transformation.
By learning to become consciously aware of these Unhelpful Thinking Styles, you will begin taking control of your patterns of thinking. This will, subsequently, help you to redirect your thoughts in far more optimal and helpful ways.
When you purchase the Unhelpful Thinking Styles IQ Matrix you will receive:
- A PDF copy of the IQ Matrix, which you can use for printing in high resolution.
- A JPG image file of the IQ Matrix, which is ideal for viewing on tablets and mobile devices.
- A Desktop Background version of the map you can use for reference on your computer.
- A MindManager file for those who wish to edit the content of the IQ Matrix.
- A printable PDF summary of this IQ Matrix to help you better understand each concept.
Additional visual resources and variations of this IQ Matrix might be added to your account page at no extra cost in the future.
