When you ordered the hamburger instead of the salad, were you intentional?

After you have already ordered, you may say it was intentional.

“I’ve been going for daily walks”

“I ate a salad earlier this week”

“I’m going to the gym tomorrow”

“One burger isn’t going to hurt my health”

It is our nature to stand behind our choices, even if it is the wrong choice. I am not saying an occasional burger is a wrong choice, that is for you to decide.

We do this with work all the time.

“I thrive in meetings all day”

“It’s normal to get so many emails over a weekend”

“Everyone works on Sunday evenings to catch up”

“60 hour weeks are normal in my career”

Brad Stulburg calls this Motivated Reasoning in his book Practice of Groundedness

The first step to better is to recognize this blindspot. We can not effectively fix the blindspot and bridge the gap if we don’t know what the gap is.

Footnote: I first head of the idea of Choice Blindness from the book, Making Habits Break Habits. This book is a gold-mine of ideas! Read more about understanding Choice Blindness to break bad habits in this book. There is more via study by Johansson, P., L. Hall, S. Sikstrom, and A. Olsson 2005 "Failure to Detect Mismatches Between Intention and Outcome in a Simple Decision Task"