Ask AltoTRY · 12 MIN
Belief vs Behaviour Audit
TAIU
Values are visible in a diary and a bank statement.
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Tool 22 · Develop yourself
Where is the distance between belief and conduct?
A guided 20 to 30 minutes conversation, here in TAIU. This is not a moral audit. Most gaps between belief and conduct are structural, not personal. A few of them are simply the right answer for your circumstances.
If somebody read your calendar and your bank statement, what would they say you believe?
That answer is the one with evidence behind it.
Some gaps are constraints. Some are decisions you already made. Nothing needs changing is a legitimate result.
What you'll look at
- 01What last week actually consisted of
- 02Something you say matters that got no time last month
- 03Something you never claim to value that gets a lot of you
- 04A commitment you have quietly kept for years
A note from Mark
I have sat with a lot of people who felt like frauds. Almost none of them were.
What they usually had was a sentence about themselves that had stopped being true and had never been withdrawn. They were still describing a version of their priorities from a decade earlier. Then they felt guilty for not matching it.
The other common case is two genuine beliefs colliding. Provide properly and be there. Be honest and be loyal. That is not hypocrisy. That is an adult with more than one obligation. Calling it a values gap does nobody any good.
Read my full view ↓
Where I would push is on the third case, which is rarer and more real. You believe it, nothing is preventing you, and you have not done it. When that turns up, I would rather it were said plainly than dressed up as a scheduling problem.
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
What your week actually says
02
Where conduct already matches
03
Which gap is real
04
One change, not a programme
+
Your TAIU handover: a summary of what the conversation found, written so you can take it with you.
See everything included ↓
- 01What you came here with
- 02What your life actually shows
- 03Where belief and conduct agree
- 04Where they diverge
- 05What kind of gap each one is
- 06What appears to be driving it
- 07The rival explanation
- 08What the gap is costing you
- 09What deserves protecting
- 10The credible alternative
- 11What, if anything, should change
- 12What remains unresolved
- 13Where 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
What your life is actually organised around, from evidence rather than intention.
02 · Test it
Retire one sentence you no longer mean, out loud, to somebody who has heard you say it.
See more ↓
Before you start reorganising anything
One change, kept, does more than five attempted. If the exercise offered several, take the one with a date attached.
If the finding was that a belief has quietly expired, retiring it is real work and it counts. You do not have to replace it with anything.
What I would do
- 01
Read the ledger before the conscience. Time and money are less flattering and more accurate than intention.
- 02
Look for what already matches first. It is usually the bigger half and skipping it distorts everything after it.
- 03
Before calling a gap hypocrisy, check whether it is a constraint you did not choose or two beliefs in genuine conflict.
- 04
Consider retiring the belief rather than forcing the behaviour. Some sentences outlive the conviction behind them.
- 05
Take one change out of it. A programme of five is a way of doing none.
Test it
- 01
Take the belief you feel worst about and ask what would have to be true for the gap to be reasonable. Sometimes it already is.
- 02
Ask whether a stranger reading your calendar and bank statement would guess your stated priorities. If not, which would they guess?
- 03
Name one gap you have consciously decided to live with. If you cannot, you may be reopening decisions you already made.
The alternative
The obvious conclusion is that you are not living up to what you believe and need more discipline. It rarely survives contact with a real week. More often the belief was never yours, or it was yours ten years ago and you have not updated the sentence, or you are honouring it in a form you do not recognise because it does not look like the version you were sold. And occasionally the finding is the uncomfortable one: you could act on it, nothing is stopping you, and you have not. The exercise is willing to say that too.
Think about this
- What last week actually consisted of, rather than what a normal week is supposed to look like.
- The last three things you spent discretionary money on.
- Something you say matters that received no time at all this month.
- A commitment you keep rescheduling, and what wins every time it moves.
- Something you have quietly kept up for years without ever calling it a value.
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?
READ · ARTICLE
Identity-based habits
James Clear
Best for seeing why repeated action is better evidence than self-description.
Read more ↗
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READ · RESEARCH
A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance
Leon Festinger
Best for knowing what your mind does with a gap between belief and conduct.
Read more ↗
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Recommended by the TAIU community
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Finished the exercise?
What did this uncover?
Tell us whether it helped and what you discovered. It takes less than a minute.
Next tool
Your principles
If it found a belief you act on when it costs you
Further thinking
A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance
Leon Festinger
Moral hypocrisy: appearing moral to oneself without being so
C. Daniel Batson and colleagues
Identity-based habits
James Clear
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.
Article
Identity-based habits
James Clear
A short piece with one idea in it: every action is a small vote for the kind of person you believe you are, and the tally is more honest than the label. It is the clearest statement of the assumption this exercise runs on, which is that what you did tells you more than what you would say.