Liminal Thinking: Create the Change You Want by Changing the Way You Think

by Dave Gray

“What is liminal thinking? Liminal is a word that means boundary, doorway, portal. Not this or that, not the old way or the new way, but neither and both. A state of ambiguity or disorientation that precedes a breakthrough to a new kind of thinking. The space between. Liminal thinking is a kind of psychological agility that enables you to successfully navigate these times of transition. It involves the ability to read your own beliefs and needs; the ability to read others’ beliefs and needs; and the habit of continually evaluating, validating, and changing beliefs in order to better meet needs.”

Once you see the boundaries of your environment, they are no longer the boundaries of your environment. —Marshall McLuhan

The confidence and courage I gained by quitting smoking led me to change my life in far more profound ways.

You can cultivate a way of thinking and being that will allow you to have these breakthrough insights more often. Through that new way of thinking, you will be able to guide others to similar mind shifts that will give them the power to transform their lives. This way of thinking is a practice you can use to find and create new doorways to possibilities, doorways that are invisible to others. I call this practice liminal thinking

Liminal thinking is the art of creating change by understanding, shaping, and reframing beliefs.

Reality leaves a lot to the imagination. —John Lennon

What is going on in this story? Each blind man has a grip on one aspect of reality, but none of them holds the whole truth. Each man’s picture of the elephant is constrained by the boundaries of his own experience.

The parable makes sense because we know the men are blind. None of them can see the whole elephant. But the point of the story is not that blind men cannot see. The point of the story is that we are all blind.

This is what the story of the blind men and the elephant is all about. We are all blind. Reality is like the elephant. We may be able to grasp pieces of the truth, but the whole truth about reality is unknowable.

When people confuse their beliefs with reality, they get into arguments and conflicts, sometimes even wars. Have you ever had an argument with someone in your family—your spouse, your child, or your parent—over something you thought was obvious?

Have you felt the frustration that the person you are arguing with must be obtuse, an idiot, or simply crazy, amazed that they just can’t see something that is blatantly evident and glaringly obvious? You were engaging in a battle for the obvious.

Beliefs are not reality. They are not facts. They are constructions. You construct your beliefs, even though for most people this is an unconscious process. By beliefs, I mean everything you know.

Like the blind men and the elephant, it’s often the case that people see the same thing, but they see it differently, and the argument over who is right and wrong distracts them from learning or doing anything productive with the situation they find themselves in.

The obvious is not obvious. Even the obvious. Especially the obvious.

Beliefs seem like perfect representations of the world, but, in fact, they are imperfect models for navigating a complex, multidimensional, unknowable reality.

The map is not the territory. —Alfred Korzybski

The obvious is not obvious. It is constructed. We work together, as individuals and in groups, to construct the obvious every day.

When you walk into your obvious club, you will find people reading the same books, watching the same news channels, and talking to the same people, all of which tends to reinforce the same version of reality. When you feel that your reality is being threatened, you will often fight to protect it.

A neuroscientist named Manfred Zimmermann estimates that our capacity for perceiving information is about 11 million bits per second.

Your experience of reality is limited by the range of your experience.

So your experiences, which are already a subset of all possible experiences, are further limited by the things that you notice, or pay attention to, within those experiences.

Zimmermann estimates that your conscious attention has a capacity of about 40 bits per second. That’s a tiny, tiny fraction of what you can perceive: 40 bits out of a potential 11 million. That’s 10,999,960 bits of information that you sense but don’t notice, every second.

Think of your attention as a very thin sliver of your overall experience, like a needle on a record player.

With that in mind, let’s draw your attention as a thin line that rests on the platform of your experience, a line that, at least to some degree, you can control and direct.

These are the third and fourth parts of the Pyramid of Belief: theories and judgments. You will only make theories and judgments about things that you have paid attention to or that you have noticed.

These four things—your experiences, attention, theories, and judgments—form a foundation that reduces the unknowable to a kind of map or model that is simple enough to understand and use in daily life.

this Pyramid of Belief reduces reality from infinite complexity to a small set of theories, which form the foundations on which you (and everyone else) construct our beliefs.

it’s easy to confuse your beliefs with reality, and that’s what most people do.

Your beliefs form the fundamental model that you use to navigate the world, to think about things, to decide what to do and what to avoid, like a map. We form a lot of these beliefs by middle childhood.4

Here’s a picture of you and me, or anyone at all really, because this is all of us, standing on top of our self-constructed Pyramid of Belief, living in the land of the obvious. We feel that we’re standing on solid ground here. We think that the ground is reality, that it’s obvious. But we actually constructed this reality. Your “obvious” is one of many versions, and other people have different ones.

The space between the baseline of reality and “the obvious” is liminal space. These needs, feelings, and thoughts happen inside you. If you don’t talk about them, they are invisible to others. Learning how to navigate this “below the obvious” construction zone is one of the core skills of liminal thinking. Liminal thinking requires you to become more conscious of that invisible belief construction process, in yourself and others.

A belief is a story in your head, a cause-and-effect chain, like a recipe or rule for action. The basic recipe looks like this: If you have a need, then look for a belief that provides a rule for action to get the result that you want. Many beliefs take the form of “If x, then y.” A very simple example would be, if you are hungry (need), then eat (belief). If you follow the implicit rule and eat (action) and that causes you to feel less hungry (result), your belief has been validated.

This is the basic way that we learn how to be effective in life. It’s called a learning loop: a continuous feedback cycle of needs, thinking, and action. It’s the way we learn how to act, to give us the best chance to get what we want out of any situation.

In that case, his behavior would reinforce my belief that he’s a problem dog, and so on. This is where learning loops go wrong, creating a vicious cycle called a doom loop.

When two or more learning loops interact like this, they form a system of belief and behavior that I call a story web: a shared world that is co-created by the people (or dogs) who participate in it. This shared world can seem as if it is just “the way it is,” when in fact it is just one of many possible realities.

Now it’s a delight loop: a self-reinforcing pattern of positive belief and behavior.

If I had chosen to believe Spitfire was a problem dog and I had acted on that belief, it would have been a self-fulfilling prophecy. By my belief and actions, I would have created that world. But I chose to believe Spitfire was a good dog, and acted accordingly. By those actions, my wife and I created that more positive shared world, with a lot of help from the dog, of course. That is the power of a story web. Changing stories can change reality.

Your beliefs inform your actions, and your actions are interpreted by others, and those interpretations become the basis for their beliefs, which inform their actions.

Beliefs are the psychological material we use to co-create a shared world, so we can live, work, and do things together. Changing a shared world requires changing its underlying beliefs.

Beliefs are necessary. We couldn’t survive without them. They are tools for thinking. We use them to navigate the world, and they guide our actions. But they also limit us. In fact, the words liminal and limit are linked; they share the same Latin root. The same boundaries that make it possible for us to think also limit what we can conceive.

Even your closest friends, with the best of intentions, may have limiting beliefs that close off possibilities and opportunities that would otherwise be open to you. This is what I mean by thresholds and doorways. There are opportunities around you all the time, every day, and in many cases you are unable to see them, because limiting beliefs blind you to real possibilities. Liminal thinking is a way to identify limiting beliefs and open yourself to hitherto unseen possibilities that can open new doors.

Beliefs are tools for thinking and provide rules for action, but they can also create artificial constraints that blind you to valid possibilities.

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.

Citizens set aside general partisan values about war and intervention—if any such values exist—to support their party’s position in each conflict.”

Whatever groups you belong to or most strongly associate with, the dynamics will be similar. Collectively, we create a kind of bubble of belief that reinforces and protects our existing beliefs by denying that alternative beliefs are within the realm of possibility. It’s a kind of collective delusion or dream that we co-create in order to maintain a group map that we use to navigate the world.

It’s a bit like living in a snow globe. If you shake it up, you will get a lot of noise in there as people try to convince themselves that their beliefs are an accurate depiction of reality. Argyris called this self-sealing logic, or, when applied to organizations, organizational defensive routines.3 In order to maintain a sense of certainty and control, as well as a collective self-image of who we are and what we stand for, we work together to create and maintain this shared map of reality.

People like stability. Once a group of people has formed a belief, they will tend to reinforce it in a way that creates blind spots to alternative beliefs.

This is self-sealing logic at work. New information from outside the bubble of belief is discounted, or distorted, because it conflicts with the version of reality that exists inside the bubble.

People rarely test ideas for external validity when they don’t have internal coherence.

Liminal thinking requires a willingness to test and validate new ideas, even when they seem absurd, crazy, or wrong.