Am I being honest with myself?

Really?

That’s the first question in Andy Stanley’s great book Better Decisions, Fewer Regrets: 5 Questions to Help You Determine Your Next Move. 

The reality is, we can talk ourselves into anything. We can convince ourselves of anything.

We can see train wrecks and bad decisions a mile away in others. We are often blinded to those same bad decisions in our lives, which leads to more regrets. But, and this is the point of the book and the series we are in at CCC, if we ask ourselves better questions, we will make better decisions, which will lead to fewer regrets.

Andy Stanley says that there are 3 categories of decisions that create the majority of our regrets:

• Purchases
• Relationships
• Habits

Let’s take them one at a time.

Purchases: Do you know how Amazon gets me every time? People who bought this also bought this. So it gets me every time!

We have all bought things because of that. We’ve all talked ourselves into purchases that we didn’t need. Some were small, like a book or a shirt. Others were big, like a car or a house. 

Now, pausing to ask, “Am I being honest with myself…Really?” may not cause you not to buy something, but it might cause you to rethink it. Why are you buying this? Do you really need it? Are you buying it to fit in? Can it wait?

Relationships: Have you ever talked yourself into a bad relationship? You knew after the first date that he wasn’t right. You knew after the first coffee you weren’t compatible. 

Maybe you had a parent or a friend who said, “you should pay attention to that.” But we’ll turn around and say something like, “you don’t know her as I do. You don’t know him as I do.” Or, “Sure, he’s angry, but he’s under a lot of pressure. He’s going to go back to school.” Or, “Yes, she’s always in the middle of the drama, but that’s because of the other people.”

Almost every time I have sat with a couple contemplating divorce and they tell me why, I’ll ask, “Did you see this while you were dating?” Almost every time, they’ll say something like this, “Yes, but I thought I could change them. I thought they’d grow out of it.”

Habits: Do you have a habit you wish you could stop? A habit that you have told others you would stop, that you can handle it. Slowly, that habit became an addiction. A thing you couldn’t live without. Our heart sees something, our emotions want something, so our brain convinces us we should do that. We justify it by saying, “I need that.”

In each of these categories, if we were to pull back and ask ourselves, “Am I being honest with myself? Really?” we would find ourselves able to make a better decision. We would at least have the information to see we might be talking ourselves into something we don’t want to.

The truth is, we can talk ourselves into a great future or one filled with regrets.