Promises, Promises (To Yourself)
Connie writes in with a great question whose answer got far too long for the Mailbag:
My biggest problem with money is that I lie to myself. I keep telling myself everything is going good and at first it is. Then I start slowly falling back into old habits but I keep telling myself everything is good. Eventually, everything is worse than before but I still keep saying everything is good, and then I’ve racked up thousands of dollars on the credit cards again. I don’t know what to do anymore.
I think that lying to ourselves is something we all do to some extent. Most people tend to believe they’re above average in most categories, which indicates some degree of self-delusion among practically everyone out there.
A little bit of self-delusion is very good, actually. It gives us self-confidence, something we need to have to overcome difficult situations. We can tell ourselves we can do something just a bit beyond our skill and talent level and thus by pushing ourselves to doing it, we’re able to achieve something that was previously just beyond us.
Yet, as Connie points out, self-delusion can sometimes be a very, very dangerous thing. It can push us into making some terrible mistakes under the guise of “everything being fine.” It can cause us to undermine our own progress and goals. It can sneak us into ever-greater problems, like an endless sink into debt or obesity or career mediocrity.
My biggest current problem with self-delusion is with my weight. I’m not gaining any – that’s not the problem – but I often delude myself into thinking I’m doing very well at losing weight when I’m actually treading water or losing it very slowly.
In the past, however, I’ve been able to battle self-delusion in many different areas: my career, my personal hobbies, and my time management abilities immediately come to mind.
Here are four techniques I’ve found that really work for cutting through self-delusion.
Make yourself directly accountable to others
This is the top strategy I’ve found. You’ve simply got to make yourself accountable to others in your life. Lay out your situation to them. Explain where you’re ...
