Winning the War in Your Mind: Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life

Using a personal story about his wife having a different view of him after getting new glasses, Groeschel introduces the idea of cognitive bias. Just like a lens shapes and frames the way we see the world, we have mental tendencies which bias us—often unconsciously—toward seeing the world in a particular way. Groeschel suggests that this might be fairly common in his readers’ experience, even if they don’t realize it: “I wonder how often you see what you expect instead of what’s really there—reality the way reality really is” (117).

Groeschel admits that he is a “control freak”; most of what happens in our lives is outside of our control, he says, but the way we think about those circumstances is not. “You cannot control what’s happened or what will happen,” he says, “but you can control how you perceive it” (120). This requires us to reframe our thought patterns, replacing old cognitive biases with new habits of the mind. This is not easily done, but Groeschel recommends an initial set of practices for when we are reacting to a situation. These practices include staying calm, studying the situation, identifying our automatic responses to it, and then trying to assess those automatic responses in light of objective evidence about what is actually going on.