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Belief vs Behaviour Audit
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Values are visible in a diary and a bank statement.
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Tool 81 · Develop yourself
Where does the account I give of my life round up?
A guided 15 to 19 minutes conversation, here in TAIU. Every account is doing a job. The question is what.
What is the story protecting?
Rounding up is not lying, and it still costs.
What would somebody who knows you say?
What you'll look at
- 01The account
- 02The evidence
- 03The gap
- 04The job
A note from Mark
I don't think people lie to themselves as often as they round up.
Nearly finished. Working on it. It's under control. Small adjustments that keep a story intact.
And the story is usually protecting something real. A marriage, a job, somebody's idea of you.
So the useful question isn't whether you're being honest. It's what the account is doing for you.
What you'll get
This will not sort you into a personality type.It will give you answers about your own life that you can test.
01
The account
02
The evidence
03
The gap
04
The job it does
+
Your TAIU handover: a summary of what the conversation found, written so you can take it with you.
See everything included ↓
- 01The account you give
- 02What the evidence shows
- 03Where they diverge
- 04What the story is doing for you
- 05Where you are already honest
- 06The rival reading
- 07What deserves protecting
- 08Where this goes next
When you finish
Bring it back to your tree.
Your tree is where TAIU keeps a picture of your whole life, in parts like work, money and health.
This session works on the whole of you, not one part of your life. Nothing is scored. At the end, you are asked once which part of your life this touched most. You can answer none.
The conversation writes this summary for you. Keep the sheet, print it or paste it into My Tree. Nothing from the conversation is stored by TAIU.
- Session
- Date
- The part of life this belongs to
- What we found
- The alternative we tested
- What deserves protecting
- What should change, if anything
- Next actions
- What to notice or find out
- What remains unresolved
What now?
01 · Save it
The account you give.
02 · Test it
Tell one person the accurate version.
See more ↓
What I would do
- 01
Write the account down as you normally tell it.
- 02
Put the month beside it, in facts.
- 03
Mark the places where the two do not meet.
- 04
Ask what the story is doing for you.
- 05
Say one thing accurately, out loud, to somebody.
Test it
- 01
What does the last month actually show?
- 02
What would somebody who knows you say?
- 03
What is the account protecting?
The alternative
The usual reading is that somebody is avoiding an uncomfortable truth. Sometimes the account is accurate and the discomfort comes from somebody else insisting it is not. The reverse also happens. The story has been told so often that it has replaced the record, and everybody around the person can see it except them.
Think about this
- The account you give of how things are.
- What last month actually shows.
- Where the two diverge.
- What somebody who knows you well would say.
- What the account is protecting.
Take this to Ask Mark
You have done the exercise. Now look again at what it found.
This looks at what you found and helps you understand it. It is not another exercise to repeat.
Take this to Ask Mark →Want to go further?
Recommended by the TAIU community
What helped you?
If you've read, watched, listened to or tried something that helped you think about this differently, we'd like to hear about it.
We review recommendations before sharing them with the community.
Finished the exercise?
What did this uncover?
Tell us whether it helped and what you discovered. It takes less than a minute.
Next tool
What am I avoiding?
If the account is holding something in place
Further thinking
A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance
Leon Festinger
Moral hypocrisy: appearing moral to oneself without being so
C. Daniel Batson and colleagues
The Seven Sins of Memory
Daniel Schacter
See the thinking ↓
Article
A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance
Leon Festinger
The finding that matters here is not that people feel uncomfortable when belief and behaviour diverge. It is what they do about it. Adjusting the belief is far cheaper than adjusting the conduct, and it happens without anybody noticing. If you have quietly stopped believing something you used to act on, this explains the mechanism.
Article
Moral hypocrisy: appearing moral to oneself without being so
C. Daniel Batson and colleagues
Batson's experiments put people in situations where acting fairly cost them something and nobody would know. Most preferred to appear moral to themselves rather than to be moral, and were remarkably good at not noticing. It is a useful piece of evidence to hold when you are describing the distance between what you say you value and what you did last month.
Book
The Seven Sins of Memory
Daniel Schacter
Schacter catalogues the specific ways memory fails, including bias, the tendency to rewrite the past so that it agrees with how you feel today. That is exactly the failure mode of an annual review conducted from the armchair. Knowing the mechanisms makes it much easier to notice when you are remembering the year through the mood of the week you are in.
Article
The trouble with overconfidence
Don Moore and Paul Healy
Moore and Healy separate three things people muddle together: overestimating your ability, overplacing yourself relative to others and being too certain you are right. The useful part is their finding that people tend to be overconfident on hard tasks and underconfident on easy ones, which predicts exactly the pattern where somebody is falsely modest about what they do daily and dangerously certain about what they have never done.
Book
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
Erving Goffman
Goffman watched ordinary social life the way somebody watches a play, and found that all of us run a front stage and a back stage. The front is not a lie. It is the working version of ourselves that a situation requires. Reading him takes most of the moral charge out of the question, and leaves a far better one behind: which of your performances is worth the effort it costs.