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How To Stop Lying to Yourself About What Really Matters To you
5 steps to taking your life in the right direction
Let’s be real. I lie to myself all the time and you do too.
When I quit my job, I told myself I wanted to have the freedom to work on my own terms. Yet in the last few months, my hours and stress levels slowly crept up.
I’m not an idiot. I saw what was happening. Yet every week I convinced myself of the same lie. Next week will be calmer.
There’s a battle going on inside our minds every day between the reality of who we are against who we like to tell ourselves we are. What we prioritize determines our character not what we say we think is important.
The gap between the two can be huge.
Our minds are designed to make up stories to justify our decisions even if rationally we know we’re being illogical. When other people make the same choices we do, we think they are delusional but we’re blind to our own flaws.
I’m a serial offender when it comes to lying to self-deception so I built a system to realign myself. Life’s too short to trap yourself with your own stories.
If you’re off-balance, follow these five steps:
#1 Stamp your time card
We’ve all got the same 24 hours in a day and what makes us different is how we choose to spend them. There’s no universal best way to use up the time it takes for the Earth to complete a spin. What’s best for me, won’t be best for you.
Yet are you using your time the way you’d like to?
A friend of mine recently told me they’d love to write poems again because it used to bring them a lot of joy. They can’t though. They’re too busy.
“Busy” is too often just an excuse.
Later in the conversation, I asked them to pull their phone out and show me their screen time. On average, they spent two hours per day on Instagram and TikTok. This type of story is alarmingly common.
The world has become more effective at stealing our time in a way where we don’t even know where it’s gone. We sleepwalk into not having enough time to do activities we love…
