Cognitive Dissonance WILL Get You

This is the thing that I wasn’t really aware of until probably in the last year or so…

I heard about this, but I never really fully understood it.

It’s this concept of cognitive dissonance…

Cognitive dissonance is something that gets everybody.

It’s not something that you can escape.

It’s not like smart people don’t get it.

Everyone gets it.

It’s the way that human mind interacts with base reality…

Cognitive dissonance is mental discomfort experienced by a person who simultaneously holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas or values.

So I want to grow my business, but I won’t reach out to people that I know who could be great clients…

The occurrence of cognitive dissonance is a consequence of a person performing an action that contradicts personal beliefs, ideas or values, and also occurs when confronted with new information that contradicts those beliefs…

So we have all these reasons why we haven’t been reaching out to these people.

“Well, I want to protect my reputation…”

Then I say, well, just do this simple thing…

And deep down you kind of know that it should be done…

You kind of know that it should be done.

When I was sitting across from Shay when we did our one day on Thursday…

I said, “Oh Neil, we’re going to message Neil.”

“I will not message Neil! I will not.”

Now if I said Shay, you got to get out right now.

You gotta go out here, you got to go rent a car and you got to drive to Alaska right now.

No reaction…

Because it sounds stupid.

It’s just an irrelevant suggestion.

But when I snap Shay onto something that she knows she needs to do…

But something about her mindset and her beliefs tell her she can’t do it.

She gets triggered.

She gets all shaky and shivery.

If I’d said to go to Alaska, she would just think, well that’s kind of just weird and pointless.

I don’t even know why I’m in this mastermind.

This is stupid advice, right?

But because I said you need to reach out to Neil…

Which is something that obviously needs to be done…

It’s like the brain just goes into this weird place where your mind is completely detached from the reality in which you’re living in.

And so when we won’t message Don…

There’s no stress,…

There’s no stress with it.

Like there’s no real reason why we should be hold back.

We’re paying Don money…

We’re giving money…

But we can’t take money from Don.

We can’t help Don even though we know our service is valuable and helps people.

And so the problem is people have all these excuses.

It goes back to this too.

They have all these excuses on why they can’t do it and it holds them back.

That’s why I have a therapist.

That’s why I have an amazing wife.

This is why I have multiple business coaches…

It’s because I’m always trying to get other people to check my own problems because everybody gets this.

Everybody experiences cognitive dissonance…

Where you make up bullshit, fake excuses that are detached from reality…

And typically a really good sign of it is when people have a lot of reasons and a lot of stories…

“Oh, well it’s my reputation and if I do this…”

And “oh, but I got to work on my existing clients and I have no time…”

They’re not living in reality in that moment.

Their mind is completely detached from what’s right in front of them because by the time we actually just do it and take action it’s done.

We don’t even need to worry about it.

That’s why I walked around to a lot of people yesterday.

You might not realize this…

I said, “yeah, that’s just psychological…”

That’s just a psychological problem.

There’s no real problem that you’re experiencing.

It’s just a psychological issue.

That’s what I’m saying with Don.

It’s like there’s no real reason to not reach out to Don other than a psychological break from your ability to attach with reality.

There’s a little circuit breaker and there’s circuit breakers attached to reality and that it’s not attached to reality…

We’re always trying to get it back there

Honestly being a human and having a conscious experience is a little bit like holding a slippery weasel.

You can’t keep it forever.

It does get out of your hands.

It just kinda squirrels out on you.

But the more that you can hold onto it, the more successful you’re going to be.

But it’s really a difficult thing.

If I can’t get those emails today, blind copied to me, it’s going to be difficult.

It’s going to be difficult.

He comes up to me yesterday…

He says, “I’m still waiting for more results in the program…”

It’s been a year.

I said, “dude, message Don right now.”

He said, “no, I’m not going to message them right now.”

I said, “I can’t help you.”

There’s nothing I can do because the fact that we won’t do something simple…

It means there’s no way we can achieve complex things.

I’m sorry to pick on you, but it’s a great example.

I’m doing it for everybody else’s benefit.

You know the way of interacting where we won’t reach out to this one person

if we have all that hesitation, all that fear, she doesn’t want to reach out to Neil.

That’s going to reflect in LinkedIn marketing, Facebook marketing, client interactions…

You’re going to sabotage the whole thing and it’s hard for me to really explain all the little ways that you’ll do it, but you’ll find a way.

You’ll always find a way.