Justification

JUST BECAUSE

There's always a reason for why. We don't just follow blindly, we do all the things we do because we justify them in our minds first. Of course we do, we're rational beings, right? When we action a task, we would first have thought about the reasons for doing it - and after, made a justification why it's a good idea or not. Turns out, this isn't the case. We don't always have a good reason why because the word 'because' is all we need. And you'll see how many times I've used this word to justify in this post alone!

The copy machine study

A study was conducted in 1977 by Helen Langer, 'The Mother of Mindfullness' where she asked her research assistants to jump the line at the photocopier, asking just three questions to those in the queue. The answers to these questions showed that by having a justification - whether it made sense or not, was all that was needed. The results from her studies into behaviour were groundbreaking in that they help us to understand why we make decisions - good or bad. She has also made extensive studies about the illusion of control, ageing and mindfulness theory - and a book written in 2009 which I'll be adding to my reading list called, Counter Clockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility.

I've just read about this experiment with the Xerox machine on another one of James Clear's fantastic blog posts. It shows quite simply, how we'll allow decisions to be made even if there's no rational reason for making them. 

So what does that really mean for us making our plans for improvements?

It means that we have to constantly check our own reasoning and always question the thinking and opinions from so-called experts. There's so many ways to be caught out with marketing, popular opinion/trends, dogma/propaganda - it's all down to us at the end of the day - so if our own brains are deceiving us...we're not going anywhere. And worse - if left un-checked, this deceit can fix strong ideas in our minds that affect the rest of our thinking and we become inflexible to new ideas. 

It's really interesting once you understand that we are capable of making bad/unreasonable decisions. Because we can then see how it's possible to make more decisions & excuses based on these previously made decisions which have become cemented in our minds once we've justified them to ourselves as the truth.

Important decisions
We make many decisions throughout our day. Some of these are clearly very important like 'Is it a good time to cross the road? - yes it is, because I've checked and the road is clear'. Other thoughts are harder to make a clear decision on because they feature lower down on our priority list for important tasks. We'll have a set of possible outcomes which require more thought power/time and often in this position, we'll lazily attach a decision to these lower actions - using the higher more important decisions as a basis for justification. So, in this example: Should I get up early today? It's a decision we make based on having many positive outcomes that we know of - but unless there's a fire in the house, it comes down to making a reason why every day - and we get up purely because of that decision. Therefore, If we have a clear important reason that we can use to manage lower ranking ones - we stick to that one without question...we just need a positive & important reason.

Down tools syndrome

Yesterday, I woke with the alarm at my usual time of 5am and it was clearly not enough sleep for that day. So I justified staying in bed a little longer and that ended up being 'til 7am. It's ok. My reasoning was sound - I'm feeling a bit off-par at the moment and a bit of extra sleep will be good for me to recover from a slight cold. It's a decision to get more sleep rather than wake up so early when I don't really have to for life-saving reasons and therefore halting the cold from getting any worse.

The bit that's not ok. I then used this important reasoning to stop me doing my jobs. One by one they came up and I pushed them back/postponed and cancelled them - because I had to avoid getting a cold. It was amazing to observe this behaviour in myself - like having a health & safety officer in my head! He was shutting down the factory because of a potentially serious threat to the workers when all that was required was a temporary adjustment to the working hours. Luckily, the managers who make decisions on important factors like making money, are in a position of power to question why, because they've been known to be right on many occasions before, so my factory stayed open and I was very quickly up and running on full capacity again. 

To stay on top of these thought processes to ensure we do the things that are benefitting us the most - we just need to have a high level priority 'why' at the forefront of our minds.