24. The role of Self Sabotage...

​24.
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The purpose and role of excuses. And the 4 types of justification we often have.

As we talked earlier when our actions and our beliefs are in contradiction, this leads to what psychologists call cognitive dissonance. The thing about cognitive dissonance is that it actually creates quite a lot of tension within us and often results in us either changing our beliefs or our actions.

When we go through change and we find ourselves taking an action that we should not be - we hear ourselves making excuses or justifications. A justification allows us to explain our actions to others and ourselves, with lower accountability and often avoiding big parts of the responsibility.

Now, this is not with the intention to shame or make us feel bad. But if we are committed to making a change we must be also honest about the excuses and justifications we make. And they go in 4 categories:

• Deny: we pretend it did not happen, we conveniently ‘forget’ about it.
  
• Deal: we use our circumstances as a permission - as in - look what I am dealing with - my childhood, my stress, my work and so on.
  
• Distract: we use it to take our attention away from something that we believe is even harder to face, a feeling or ‘it was just this one time’.
  
• Defend: we find reasons why our behavior was actually good, as in - well,  a little bit of everything is healthy, balance is important.
  
  

Now, that said - again, blaming or shaming ourselves or others for making justifications does not lead to lasting change. If anything, we may sink even deeper into hiding and denying as we feel even worse about ourselves.

What helps is being kind and honest and compassionate and then finding new beliefs, new ways of going forward. This often asks us to look at beliefs.

Yes, I have heard about the link between our actions and our beliefs.
          Exactly, and there is an added aspect - our emotions.