Why Do We Reject Good Advice?

Habits can be a very good thing to have.  Fishing for compliments can become a very good habit.  If our habits protect the work we are proud of doing, we will continue to do more of what we like to do.  We like to do what feels good to do.  We also like to do for others what others seem appreciative for us to do.  These kinds of patterns rule our lives.  We tend to rub up next to the things in our lives that feel good.  Life can be otherwise nasty at times so we prefer to remove anything from our lives that represent patterns that are contrary to helping us feel good.  We want to feel good.

We develop habits that are more likely supportive to the patterns that will help us feel good.  Sleeping in late feels good.  It can become a problem if it interferes with our working schedule, but it feels good.  Eating a chocolate candy bar feels good.  Having six of them each day feels good, but can eventually challenge our budget and health.  Drinking a good beer or a great glass of wine feels good.  Drinking a few of them in a row feels better, but every night this pattern can do some serious damage.  We like to do things that help make us feel good.  It is one of our great desires.

When we get home from a long day at work we do not like to walk in and have someone complain to us about something we forgot to do before we left for work in the morning.  That does not make us feel good.  We reject patterns of this nature.

We tend to gravitate towards the things that help us feel good.  We work our patterns in life to become more familiar and more closely associated with getting around those things that help us to feel good.  These efforts eventually become our leading habits.  We do them over and over and over until they occur without our 'official' thought process.  They become involuntary for us to do.  We no longer need to think about them for us to do them.  They 'just happen' because they help us feel good.  Our mind develops a complicated support system to honor the things we know will help us to feel good.  Our mind will creatively find all kinds of ways to make the things we like to do become common habits to how we respond to the changing things all around us.  Our complicated mind will protect us from the things that interfere with any of our 'feel good' patterns.  All we want to do is feel good about what we are doing.  We are not necessarily interested in whether or not it is good for us to do what we are doing, just as long as it feels good for us to do.

This kind of approach to life can take over our patterns of knowing what is right and what is wrong.  We can actually do some very wrong things and justify why it is alright for us to do them.  The line between right and wrong can get so faint that we will decide to do the wrong things on a continuous basis and feel good about doing it.  We smoke cigarettes and do not even give it a thought.  Everything smoking does to make us feel good produces mental results that help us to justify why its alright to feel good about doing it.  That is easy for me to say because I am not a smoker.  I have my own vices, however.  I can live life just fine without ice cream, but I indulge in it more often than I should.  A gallon of ice cream will not last in my house for more than two days.  The same would hold true if I bought two gallons at a time.  Two days, that's it!

Smoking cigarettes is not good for us.  Period.  We do it because we like the feeling we get when we smoke.  We are exactly the same way with patterns at work.  We develop working patterns that are designed to help us feel better.  We are not as interested with how they destroy our future, we are just interested in how good they make us feel when we do them.  Can you see how we could develop interesting methods for rejecting good advice?  Good advice often times rubs against the patterns we have come to feel good about doing.  Advice is given to us as a means to help us correct the things we are doing that makes us feel good.  We do not always care as much about what we gain or do not gain by the things we do that makes us feel good.  We know many of the things that makes us feel good are not good for us to do.  We already know that.  Advice is something that only confirms what we already know.

If you are a business leader you already know what is good to do and what is not good to do in your business model.  Knowing these things does not always mean you will practice them properly.  We will do in the end what we want to do bad enough.  The things that make us feel good will be the things we decide to do the most.  These things are not always the right things to do to our business, however.  We know that.  We are not doing them to destroy our business efforts, but we like doing them more than we prefer to give them up.  I will always eat ice cream.  I refuse to give it up.  I do not care what anybody else says, I will eat ice cream when I want ice cream.

Why do we reject good advice?  We reject good advice because we will be expected to give up something that makes us feel good.  We are not going to do that.  We will break laws, destroy families, ruin checkbooks and ignore health in order to do the things that makes us feel good.  We do not need more good advice.  We already know what is right and what is wrong.  We do not need someone to come along and act like they know something we do not know.  As a result, we will reject good advice when it is given.  We already know.

What has actually happened here is that we have become more important than the things we are willing to give up when we ignore good advice.  We are bigger than the things we will lose if we continue to ignore what we should be doing, instead of doing what we should not be doing.  We have become bigger to us than that which we stand to lose.  We are bigger.  We need to please us before we can protect what is smaller.  This is how we easily reject good advice.  We reject protecting the smaller things than what is important to us, feeling good.  We are more important than the advice to change.  How we feel is more important than what we need to change.

Good advice can sound like a pattern that will inject some measures to prevent us from feeling good.  We do not want to risk killing the things we feel good about doing.  If we follow some good advice, we will likely need to risk giving up something that helps us to feel good.  Life is hard enough without intentionally killing the things that make us feel good, right?  Why would we do something like that?

Heck, we already know what we should be doing anyhow.  Is that not enough?  We know.  Good advice is just more people telling us what we already know.  If we change now, after all of this, we will have to admit we were wrong all along and that does not ever feel good.  So we decide it is not worth it.  We ignore good advice.  It isn't worth the hassle.  There is no way we can feel good about changing what we already know we need to change.  We ignore it.

We just want to feel good about the things we do in life.  We do not want to add suggestions that we hear about how we need to change some things that will alter how we feel.  It is too much to ask.  We therefore decide, good advice is not something we need to pay attention to.  It has too much to offer that we do not like.

Why do we reject good advice?

It's easy.  We just pay no attention to it and it will eventually go away.  We can get on with doing what we have always done and we will learn to live with whatever we need to learn to live with.  Easy.  That is why we reject good advice.  It is easy.  We cannot go to jail if we reject good advice.  There is no penalty cop standing by to slap handcuffs on us when we reject good advice.  Rejecting good advice carries no immediate penalty nor sudden sentencing.  Rejecting good advice is easy.  That is why we do it.  It is easy to do.  We can also reject good advice quietly.  We do not even need to talk about it.  We can keep it quiet.  It's easy.

What if we made rejection of good advice a major crime?  What if we treated it like murder?  What if rejecting good advice became the top local news story?  What if rejecting good advice became the center of an enormous investigation, publicly?  If this were the case, rejecting good advice would not be so easy, would it?  We would refrain from rejecting it if all of these rotten things were going to occur by us skipping to follow some good advice.  What if we rejected some good advice and it became the local public outcry?
I think we might react to good advice differently under these circumstances.  We reject good advice because it is easy.

One disclaimer, however, exists.  If your business is forced to live with the continued pattern of ignoring good advice, you will reach the stage eventually when you will become a small part of the public eye.  You will need to admit you did not make it in business.  You will need to admit you failed.  We see over-weight people every day, we see people die from smoking related cancer every day...but we do not always meet someone who failed at business.  If you continue to ignore good advice in business, you will sooner or later be forced to face those who know you failed at business.  We probably can blame the economy to hide the truth, but we still have to admit we failed at business.

Pay attention to good advice.  It will help you to feel better about how your business is doing.  Good business owners follow good advice.  It is what they do best.  In a business model, it is not easy to skip good advice, it is only expensive.

Until next time...