Wisdom-Trek / Creating a Legacy
Welcome to Day 194 of our Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me.
This is Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to Wisdom
Rationalize or Rational Lies? Part 1
Thank you for joining us for our 7 days a week, 7 minutes of wisdom podcast. This is Day 194 of our Trek and yesterday we learned the importance of collecting the dots on your trail of life so that you can connect the dots as you move forward on your trek of life.  Today and tomorrow we are going to hike Rationalize Mountain and determine some of the reasons why we rationalize all sorts of actions and behaviors in our lives. If you miss any days of our Wisdom-Trek episodes, please go to Wisdom-Trek.com to listen to them and read the daily journal.



We are recording our podcast from our studio at ‘Home2’ in Charlotte, NC.   Paula and I are looking forward to a ‘date-night’ on Friday as we were gifted tickets to a performance of Charles Dickens, The Christmas Carol.  It is one of our favorite stories of the Christmas season.



Let’s begin our trek for today to see how far we can hike and then we will finish up the hike tomorrow.  As we view Rationalize Mountain from the foothills, we start to come up with reasons why we just might not want to move forward.  We might not want to face the fact that when we start to rationalize our actions in life, most of the time we just are telling ourselves ‘rational’ lies to justify the actions that we take.  So our trek today will be called:


Rationalize or Rational Lies – which is it? #1
Are you rationalizing your decisions? Let me answer that for you real quick. Yes, you are.  We all do, I do and so do you.  Even the very first two humans Adam and Eve rationalized their choice in the Garden of Eden as written in Genesis 3:11-13: “Who told you that you were naked?” the Lord God asked. “Have you eaten from the tree whose fruit I commanded you not to eat?” The man replied, “It was the woman you gave me who gave me the fruit, and I ate it.” Then the Lord God asked the woman, “What have you done?” “The serpent deceived me,” she replied. “That’s why I ate it.”



Let’s move forward on our hike and we will discover:

Why we humans rationalize our decisions;
The difference between what we think influences our decisions, and what REALLY influences our decisions;
How being aware of this can help you make better decisions;
How it can help you influence others, by appealing to the right motives.

1.   Why We Rationalize
We humans rationalize our decisions. All of us. Every day.  But I can show you how to spot when you’re rationalizing your decisions, and how to discover the real reasons behind your decisions. Then I will show you how to use this to start making rational decisions.



Let’s say you go to an electronics store, and a salesperson talks you into buying the newest gadget that has dozens of features you don’t need. Then you get home, and someone asks you why you bought it.  You might well answer, “Well it does this, and that, and it has this really cool feature, and look how useful this little feature is!”

The problem is that you find out that you really don’t end up using many of those features ever again after the first time you try them. This shows you that you didn’t really buy the gadget for those features. You bought it because you had a rush of emotions and you really WANTED that gadget at the store. And when someone points out you made a silly decision there,