Thursday, October 04, 2007

Rationalizing...

Resist the temptation to justify or explain yourself. Simplistic reasoning- friends don’t need it and enemies won’t believe you anyway. Another way of understanding it, is something like a rationalization process, when you’re not convinced about your right-ness in a particular action situation and later on, you’re trying to convince someone as you justify or explain yourself. It’s an extremely strong temptation, but if you can let go of it, perhaps it would help you take greater control of your actions. You’re not someone’s agent, so you have to go back to explain it to them. You’re not doing something just so that you can explain something to someone in a particular way. You’re doing, what your sensibility suggests is the best thing for you to do. If you’ve been myopic and bungled, then it’s for you to learn the lessons and accept your mistakes. Often, if you’re able to successfully/convincingly explain a bungled up action, you might just save your face but lose the lesson. With a lot of afterthoughts, we build up the situation so that we can reasonably well defend ourselves, but internally we know that it was a mistake.

Of course, impression management would require proving yourself to be the ‘smart’ one in every situation, but it’s for you to still see and understand that you don’t end up rationalizing just about everything you do or say. At best, it’s a defense mechanism.


wanderer

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