In my last post I wrote about the negativity of blame and, in general, blame's uselessness. It's best not to blame, but rather, to learn from the process and the causes of the results of a bad decision or occurence. In this post, I am going to tell you how to stop blaming yourself, and therefore, how to start improving your results in all aspects of your life. Get on my bus, folks! If you do, your life is gonna improve! I promise!
One thing about the path of the bus of El Entrenador - it is fundamentally based in logic. It analyzes and it concludes. Sometimes it is right, sometimes it is wrong. Then it analyzes and it concludes again. Rinse, repeat. This is called a "feeback loop". It is the control process by which the bus stays on a path of continuous improvement on its way to goal attainment.
Let me ask you a few questions...
How logical are you? How do you arrive at decisions - large and small - in your life? Do you use data? Instinct? A "gut feeling"? Experience? Do you "wing it"? Seek others' opinions? Exactly what is your decision making process? Are you even conscious of it? Please take 15 seconds, close your eyes, and ponder the questions above. How do you arrive at decisions? It is very important to know this, so think about it!
Now that you have thought about your personal decision-making processes, consider how many times you have made an incorrect decision and then said to yourself, "Geez, my gut instinct was telling me to do the other thing...if I would have only listened to my instincts!"? If you find yourself in this position a lot, your problem is likely not your failure to follow your intuition (or gut), but rather your ability to analyze problems and situations. The fact is, if you were better at analyzing problems and arriving at correct conclusions, your "gut" would be agreeing with your brain. In fact, your gut feelings, for the most part, are only reflections of your thoughts.
Let me explain further: In the first place, why is your gut (supposedly) telling you something different from your brain? Honestly, it's not. Your brain is actually telling your gut what the alternative is and unknowingly to you, the alternative is becoming your "gut instinct". The process is that you have a decision to make and you ponder it and you make the one that you think is correct. And when it turns up incorrectly, you say, "Damn, I should have followed my gut instinct!" But your gut instinct is simply the alternative decision. You are using your supposed gut instinct to tell yourself that you could have come to the correct conclusion! In essence, you are unwittingly assigning blame to yourself. THIS IS A HUGE MISTAKE.
Here is another way to think about it: When is the last time you made a correct decision and said to yourself, "Boy, I'm glad I followed my gut and not what my brain concluded based on the data or logic!". Probably...uhmmm...never. If you followed your gut and not what was most logical or obvious, you very likely subconsciously considered some factor in the decision-making process that told you to "follow your gut"; in reality, the gut feeling was a logical decision, but you cannot point to exactly why it was the logical decision. Likely, you are not in tune with your personal decision-making process well enough to know what it is exactly that convinced you to go with your gut feeling.
More to the point: Understand that no human being can make correct decisions all of the time. We all make mistakes! We all come to wrong conclusions. We all over-analyze. WE ALL SCREW UP! But when we say that we should have followed our gut instinct, we are making excuses; in fact, we are assigning blame for the mistake. You are blaming yourself! The bottom line is, your time is far better served by figuring out WHY you made a bad decision. So you made a mistake! So what? Get over it! Get better! Figure out WHY! Why, why, WHY did you make the mistake? Ask yourself continually, "What was there in the data which should have led me to the correct conclusion?" Don't sit there telling yourself (beating yourself up) that you should have chosen the alternative. Figure out the reason you should have chosen the alternative! Forget the excuses of the big, fat gut!
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