Hey everybody, Andy here. Welcome to the Your Move podcast where we help you make better decisions and live with fewer regrets. Before we jump into today's content, I wanted to say thank you to all of you who support your move financially. It's the generosity of people like you who make this podcast possible. So if listening to the podcast has inspired you to make better decisions and hopefully live with fewer regrets, would you consider supporting your move with a tax deductible gift?

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So you may know the answer to this. I don't know, I should say, I'm not sure when it is that we begin lying to ourselves.

I think it's probably earlier than we imagine. And again, some of you may know the answer to this. I don't know when we stop lying to ourselves. It may coincide with our breathing.

You know, it's like when we stop breathing, we finally stop lying to ourselves. And, you know,

it doesn't take long. I mean, by the time you're in middle school or high school,

we get pretty good at catching other people when they're lying.

But we're not so good at catching ourselves when we're lying to other people. We're not so good at catching ourselves lying when we're lying to ourselves.

Now, lying to others, and please don't misunderstand this, lying to others is somewhat understandable. It's not excusable, but at least it's understandable.

But lying to ourselves, lying to ourselves, it's confusing. Lying to ourselves, I mean, how many selves do we have? I mean, who's lying to who? Right? Now, if you're listening to this thinking, well, Andy, I don't lie to

myself. Perhaps you just did. Okay? So that's the point. It's like, I know. And the reason you did and you don't know about it is because you're really, really good at it, and we're all really good at it. And one of the reasons we're so good at deceiving ourselves, which is another way of saying lying to ourselves, one of the reasons we're so good at deceiving ourselves is we don't call the lies that we tell ourselves lives. We call them something else. We dignify them, right? We call them reasons. We have reasons, which is reasonable. And we want to be reasonable because we don't want to be unreasonable because you work with somebody who's unreasonable. Perhaps you have some friends who, you know, you say you don't want to be unreasonable. So when we decide to do something we know we know we shouldn't do or something that we know there's probably another reason we're not doing, another reason we're actually doing it, instead of, you know, instead of throwing our hands up in the internet and say, I don't know why I did this, we'd come up with reasons. The reason I was late to work is it was traffic. It was traffic. Now, I did get up a little late, and I did piddle around, and I went down to, you know, Twitter rabbit hole. Then I went down at Instagram rabbit hole, and then I looked up and, oh goodness and but but really the reason I'm late is

traffic I'm just going to stick with traffic because traffic is reasonable so we come up with

reasons and then we believe these right um I'll just let you fill in a blank the the reason I too much

don't elbow anybody or say it out loud but the reason reason you didn't, and if I were to ask you,

why do you so much, you have a reason. But the reason you would give me, and more importantly

to our conversation today, the reason you give yourself may not actually be the reason. Because

the actual reason that you too much may be a secret,

this is the crazy part, a secret that you're keeping from yourself.

I know, to keep you from having to face the truth about yourself.

It really is crazy, and we all do it. Instead of telling ourselves the truth, we just make up stuff.

And that's what we've been talking about.

We manufacture or we make up or we create excuses.

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