"Excuses, excuses, excuses" my mother used to say.
My response was always the same, it usually started with a "Yeah but mom".
The sad thing is most of us carry our "Yeah buts" around for the rest of our lives.
"Yeah buts" give us a temporary feeling of being justified in not achieving all that we can with our lives.
Rationalization is our own way of creating victory out of nothing.
Newbie real estate investors often suffer from very bad cases of Yeahbutitus.
They tell themselves "I would start investing, but the market is slow right now", or the classic "I will start investing but I need to research a little bit more".
Do not get me wrong, research has it's place, but once you have spent 2 or 3 months "Researching" it might be time to get your feet wet.
We all want to feel good about our lives, but short term feel good, can easily lead to a life of mediocrity.
The excuses that we feed ourselves, are always created out of the need to avoid pain, and seek pleasure.
Rationalization helps us to avoid the perceived pain that comes with the risk of investing.
Along with pain avoidance, we gain temporary pleasure from the short term victory that we feel after we are finished with justifying our current position in life.
Identifying our own excuses, before we start working towards a new goal, will go a long way towards the achievement of that goal.
Once we know what lies our minds will tell us, we can avoid falling victim to them by simply saying to ourselves "Ah ha, I have heard that one before".
Take a moment and write out all of the lies you have been telling yourself.
The second step in defeating rationalization is to decide what we are going to do, instead of what our minds tell us to do.
If your mind tells you to "Wait another week before you go and look for houses", what are you going to do instead? In many cases the answer is to do just the opposite of what our minds try to tell us to do.
If our minds say "Wait till next week", then start today.
If our minds say "You were born poor, you'll never make it as an investor", then we should go to work on being an investor.
The third step in getting past rationalization is to change our focus.
Most of us who get caught in the rationalization trap, are there because our focus is directed at the most painful part of whatever it is that we are trying to achieve.
By directing our focus to what life will be like after we have achieved our goal we can begin to immediately experience the pleasure that will come from achievement.
If we focus on the greatness that will come, rather than the pain that "We think" will come, there will be no need to rationalize at all.
My response was always the same, it usually started with a "Yeah but mom".
The sad thing is most of us carry our "Yeah buts" around for the rest of our lives.
"Yeah buts" give us a temporary feeling of being justified in not achieving all that we can with our lives.
Rationalization is our own way of creating victory out of nothing.
Newbie real estate investors often suffer from very bad cases of Yeahbutitus.
They tell themselves "I would start investing, but the market is slow right now", or the classic "I will start investing but I need to research a little bit more".
Do not get me wrong, research has it's place, but once you have spent 2 or 3 months "Researching" it might be time to get your feet wet.
We all want to feel good about our lives, but short term feel good, can easily lead to a life of mediocrity.
The excuses that we feed ourselves, are always created out of the need to avoid pain, and seek pleasure.
Rationalization helps us to avoid the perceived pain that comes with the risk of investing.
Along with pain avoidance, we gain temporary pleasure from the short term victory that we feel after we are finished with justifying our current position in life.
Identifying our own excuses, before we start working towards a new goal, will go a long way towards the achievement of that goal.
Once we know what lies our minds will tell us, we can avoid falling victim to them by simply saying to ourselves "Ah ha, I have heard that one before".
Take a moment and write out all of the lies you have been telling yourself.
The second step in defeating rationalization is to decide what we are going to do, instead of what our minds tell us to do.
If your mind tells you to "Wait another week before you go and look for houses", what are you going to do instead? In many cases the answer is to do just the opposite of what our minds try to tell us to do.
If our minds say "Wait till next week", then start today.
If our minds say "You were born poor, you'll never make it as an investor", then we should go to work on being an investor.
The third step in getting past rationalization is to change our focus.
Most of us who get caught in the rationalization trap, are there because our focus is directed at the most painful part of whatever it is that we are trying to achieve.
By directing our focus to what life will be like after we have achieved our goal we can begin to immediately experience the pleasure that will come from achievement.
If we focus on the greatness that will come, rather than the pain that "We think" will come, there will be no need to rationalize at all.
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