You can’t trust yourself!
You can surprise yourself
Do you remember that day when something unexpected happened to you? And the only thing you could remember was, “Why did I do this?” Yes! That incident was catastrophic, unprecedented, and surprising. But what left you in awe was your attitude.
Your reaction to that problem amazed you. You couldn’t believe you could do something that bad or grievous. Sadly, you did it anyway.
I bet you’ve heard people speak on social media- with the least opportunity they get- on why it is reasonable to question everything around you (Your beliefs, dreams, opinions, actions, etc.) to make sure that they are ideal. If you haven’t heard anything of that sort, you’ve heard it today.
Why can’t you trust yourself?
You can’t firmly hold on to your beliefs or perceptions as reliable and true. For all you know, they may be meaningless, irrational, and influenced by your life experiences. They may not necessarily be based on facts.
That’s why it is important to be flexible in welcoming opinions – it is essential to be comfortable with uncertainty or ambiguity, or with questioning your beliefs, and most importantly, yourself.
To support these assertions, here are four solid reasons why you can’t trust yourself as an individual, and the more reason for you to keep working on yourself every single day.
4 reasons you can’t trust yourself
- You can’t rely on your memory.
We rely on our memory for everyday activities, and if our memory serves us right, life will be meaningful. Imagine studying for an examination and being able to recollect every single word you memorized for the exams at the exam hall. How exciting it will be for you! Here is the fact, the memory is not reliable.
It can break your heart. Especially when you need it the most.
Again, imagine learning fully for an examination. And you are certain that you can reproduce what you’ve learned. Imagine all the excitement and enthusiasm you will have for the exam, and when you finally receive the paper in front of you, you’ve got nothing.
You can’t remember anything. That would hurt you very much. You would be disappointed in yourself.
According to the lumen (Lumen Boundless Psychology), memory is not perfect. Storing memory and also retrieving it later contains both biological and psychological processes, and the connection between the two is not entirely understood.
Memories are influenced by how a person personalizes events through perceptions, interpretations, and emotions.
This can cause a bifurcation between what is internalized as memory and what truly happened in reality; it can also trigger events to encode incorrectly, or not at all. Memory is not stationary.
One study shows that an eyewitness’ account cannot be entirely reliable since memory does not perform like a video recorder. People do not cipher or recover every aspect of an event flawlessly.
What a person cipher depends on his or her priorities, his or her past experience, his or her expectations, and the current requests.
What people recollect about an incident can also depend on what happened after the incident, their biases and expectations, and rumors from others (p. 30).
- You are easily influenced to make bad decisions.
Have you had to do something you didn’t like just because you had to return a favor? How do you feel or what comes to mind when someone does something you wouldn’t do in your current position? You would be like “What is wrong with him or her?”
Well, the feelings and perceptions hit differently when it’s you in that position. Everyone is prone to making bad decisions. This happens because of certain things we’ve been through, certain knowledge we’ve acquired, our expectations in life, and our eagerness to achieve our desires.
Faisal (2019) Posits that decision-making is a significant part of research in cognitive psychology. The comprehension of the process a person employs to make a decision is vital to understanding the decisions they make.
Many factors influence decision-making. Those factors include past experiences, cognitive biases, age and individual differences, belief in personal relevance, and an escalation of commitment.
- You find reasons to back your preconceptions.
It is sometimes funny how we find many reasons to justify our actions or support our idiotic notions. It doesn’t matter how unreasonable our perceptions are. So far as there is some information that supports them, we are good to go.
That is why it is easier to procrastinate, hate, steal, cheat, kill, insult, fight, etc.
- You procrastinate because you think there is more time.
- You steal money because you are poor and you need to survive.
- You cheat on your husband because you think all men are cheats.
- You kill someone because of their race.
- You hate a particular tribe because of what you have heard about them.
- You dislike a person because of the way he or she talks- because people who talk confidently are proud.
You always harbor a mentality that feels right or makes you feel good about yourself. So, you find facts to support it and maintain that mentality. Ignorantly, you are only making a joke out of yourself.
- You are selfish without knowing.
Everybody is selfish. Yes! You are selfish when you go to the hospital and you manage to see the doctor without joining others in the line. What if the person you overtook died because he didn’t see the doctor on time?
To you, you were in a hurry, but to those who saw you cut the line, you were selfish and maybe wicked. There is a ‘twi’ saying that “etua wo nyonko ho a etua dua mu”- it literally means when it’s in another person, it’s in a tree.
It implies that when you are not the one experiencing it, you do not care or you don’t feel anything about it. Selfishness is within all of us. so far as it’s not others, it’s not selfish.
Because, with our actions, we had a reason for them.
The motive is to bring to your attention that you are not perfect, and you can’t rely on yourself as much as you can’t rely on others.
The major hindrance to your self-improvement, success, and self-realization is you. It takes you to make you fail. You are not perfect. Embrace that and find a way to improve. When you realize that you’re leaning too much on yourself, remember that you can’t trust yourself.
If you feel like postponing important stuff, remember; that you can’t trust yourself. When you’re making big promises; you can’t trust yourself.
sources
Cynthia P. May & Gilles O. Einstein. (2013). Memory: A Five-Day Unit Lesson Plan for High School Psychology Teachers. American Psychological Association, 1-64.
Faisal, S. M. (2019). Factors Affect on human Decision-making process. Inquiries journals, 1-6.
Lumen Boundless Psychology. (n.d.). Memory: The process of forgetting. https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-psychology/chapter/the-process-of-forgetting/.
