Hi everybody welcome to Year Move where we help you make better decisions and live with fewer regrets. I'm Andy Stanley and I'll be your guide and let's face it.

The easiest person to deceive, the easiest person to deceive is the person in the mirror. It shouldn't be this way, but it is.

And today we're going to talk about why and what to do about it right here on your move. Stick around.

So here's a disturbing thought to get things kicked off today. The easiest person, the easiest person to deceive is the person in the mirror.

And it shouldn't be this way and we'll talk about why it's this way in a minute. It shouldn't be this way. But for the moment I just want you to let this sink in.

Actually I would like to kind of rub it in. You think about it. You have talked yourself into.

To the point of today's message, you have deceived yourself into. You have sold yourself on every bad decision you have ever made.

And of course, you are the mastermind. You thought this stuff up. You are the mastermind behind most regrettable decisions, whether they were financial, relational, professional, academic. You were there for all of them. Now granted there were outside pressures, there were other voices, people promising you stuff, trying to sell you stuff.

And you decided. And the reason I know so much about you is, well, I know so much about me because I'm equally guilty. Like you, there's a sales associate that lives in my head. And his voice sounds a lot like my voice. And although his logic is completely flawed and his sales pitches are amateur at best, I fall for him anyway.

So what's up with that? And what's wrong with me? And what's wrong with you? And what's wrong with us? And to the point of today's message, what can we do about it?

So the big idea of this series is the often overlooked relationship between good questions, good questions, and good decisions, good questions, and good decisions.

Good questions actually set us up for good or better decisions. And there's a sense in which our decisions are really never any better than the questions that we ask or actually don't think to ask. And I'm convinced, I'm absolutely convinced that if you will ask, if you will ask, and if you will answer honestly and then act on your answer to the five questions in this series, you will in fact make better decisions and you will live with fewer regrets.

And the people who look to you depend on you, their lives will be better as well because, and this is so important, let's face it, we aren't the only people impacted by our decisions.

And we aren't the only people impacted by our regrets either. And parents, grandparents, if you will teach your kids, and if you will teach your grandkids to ask these five questions, I promise, their lives will be better as well.

So let's jump in. The first of our five questions, question number one, I call it the integrity question, the integrity question. And to introduce this question, we need to drop back to my opening somewhat disturbing observation.

That the easiest person to deceive, the easiest person to deceive is the person in the mirror, which means, which means the most difficult person to lead is the person in the mirror as well. You cannot lead yourself well as long as you are deceiving or lying to yourself.

If you ever tried to lead a liar, it's pretty much impossible to lead a liar in a professional setting in the marketplace at work, you have to fire a liar. So today, I'm going to challenge you to fire the dishonest version of you and hire a new you, and honest you, a you that tells you the truth even when it makes you feel bad about you.

Now, you know from experience that dishonesty erodes credibility, right? I mean, in a similar way, and this is kind of odd to think about in a similar way, when we are dishonest with ourselves, it erodes credibility within ourselves.

I don't know that sounds strange, but think about it this way, when we lie out loud, and I'm not calling you a liar, but occasionally we all kind of stretch the truth, but when we lie out loud, what do we do immediately on the inside in our heads and our hearts?

We justify the lie, and who do we justify the lie to to ourselves? We have to. Otherwise, we're at odds with ourselves, something that us sane people can't do for very long.

So what we do is we create a narrative that justifies our lie or our half truth, and then this is the crazy part, we choose to believe it, which really is crazy.

I mean, why would you, why would we believe a narrative we basically just made up? Well, the non-technical, non-clinical answer to that question is this, you are a sucker for you.

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