Personal Responsibility 101: Why Is It So Hard to Own Up to Our Mistakes?

February 18, 2013 

“All this has been my fault. I asked more of my men than should have been asked of them.” –Robert E. Lee, after heavy Confederate losses at Pickett’s Charge

“I had the opportunity and the information and I failed to make use of it. I don’t know what an inquest or a court of law would say, but I stand condemned in the court of my own conscience to be guilty of not preventing the Columbia disaster…The bottom line is that I failed to understand what I was being told; I failed to stand up and be counted. Therefore look no further; I am guilty of allowing the Columbia to crash.” –Launch Integration Manager N. Wayne Hale Jr., after the Columbia space shuttle explosion which killed seven astronauts

The stark honesty of these men in taking responsibility for their failures is striking, all the more so because similar statements are so rare. In recent years we have seen the heads of the nation’s corporations and banks testify before Congress as to their role, or rather lack thereof, in the implosion of the economy, and could only shake our heads as they passed the buck, admitted vaguely that “mistakes were made,” and yet failed to name anything specific for which they were personally at fault.

In our day-to-day lives, we all know folks who constantly blame their failures on everything but themselves. They were fired because their supervisor was jealous of them. They got dumped because their girlfriend is nuts. They failed an exam because the questions the professor asked were unfair. The dog hasn’t just eaten their homework – it’s devoured their whole lives.

Plenty of folks decry this shirking of personal responsibility, and declare that “people need to own up to their mistakes!” But what does this vague injunction really mean and how do you start doing it? Unfortunately, most people rarely go beyond the slogans, essentially saying: “You should do this. Okay, now do it.”

Today we’re going to take a look the very real cognitive reasons for the difficulty in owning up to your mistakes. Understanding leads to greater awareness of the blind spots our brains develop as to when we’re at fault, and this awareness is the first step in learning to overcome them. As we explore this topic, we’ll come to see that while it’s awfully satisfying to point out the motes in others’ eyes, we all justify our failures to one degree or another.

Then tomorrow we’ll explore why owning our mistakes is so important and how we can work to counter our natural tendency to shirk responsibility. Taking ownership of our mistakes and shortcomings requires both humility and courage; as such, it is one of the true hallmarks ofmature manhood.

Why Is It So Difficult to Take Responsibility for Our Mistakes?

All humans are essentially ego-driven creatures. Starting from a young age we develop an identity — a self-concept and self-image — constructed of our beliefs and how we view ourselves. Most of us think of ourselves as pretty decent people, better than average in certain areas, maybe a little worse than average in a few, but always trying to do our best. We believe we see the world realistically, and act rationally.

When our own thoughts and behaviors, or the accusation of another, challenges our cherished self-concept, we experience what is called cognitive dissonance – a form of mental discomfort and tension. Cognitive dissonance arises when you attempt to hold two conflicting beliefs/attitudes/ideas/opinions at the same time. For example: “I know smoking is bad for me…but I smoke a pack a day anyway.” Because our minds crave consonance and clarity over contradiction and conflict, we immediately seek to dissipate the mental tension created by cognitive dissonance. The smoker can reduce their dissonance either by throwing the cigarettes away and trying to quit, or by thinking to himself as he lights up, “People say that smoking is bad, but my grandfather smoked two packs a day for fifty years and never got cancer. It’s fine.”

When we make mistakes, the gap between our questionable behavior and our sterling self-concept creates cognitive dissonance. We can allay this dissonance either by admitting that we made a mistake and revaluating our self-concept in light of it, or by justifying the behavior as not in conflict with our self-concept after all. Here are some examples:

• You think of yourself as an honest man, but you cheated on your last exam. You can either: 

Admit that cheating is wrong and that maybe you’re not as honest as you thought. Or, 

Justify the cheating by saying that a lot of other students were doing it too, so it really just leveled the playing field. 

• You think of yourself as a decent guy and have been casually sleeping with a girl over the course of a few months. You’ve never talked about the relationship, and when she admits she has feelings for you, and you shut her down, she’s pretty crushed. You can either: 

Acknowledge that you should have set clear parameters for the relationship and admit you had a role to play in her hurt feelings and didn’t treat her decently. Or, 

Tell yourself that you never said anything about a relationship and that it was entirely her fault for letting herself get attached. 

• You think of yourself as a good friend but one night when you’re out drinking with your buddy you bring up your bitter feelings about something he did in the past, and try to start a fight with him. You can either: 

Admit that you’ve been nursing a grudge and didn’t tell him, which isn’t something a good friend would do. Or, 

Say that you were totally trashed and didn’t know what you were doing. 

• You think of yourself as a smart, cutting-edge academic, but when you present a paper you’ve been working on for years, your colleagues point out numerous errors in your conclusions. You can either: 

Acknowledge the mistakes and reevaluate your theory and research methods. Or, 

Accuse your colleagues of jealously, narrow-mindedness, or bias. 

Unsurprisingly, many people, when push comes to shove, lean towards option #2. When our behavior threatens our self-concept, our ego automatically goes into hyper-defense mode, circles the wagons, and begins issuing self-justifications designed to protect itself. The higher the moral, financial, and emotional stakes, the more our self-concept – our very identity — is threatened, the greater the dissonance that arises, the harder it is to admit a mistake, and the more we seek to justify ourselves to preserve our self-image. Self-justifications are not lies, where we know we’re being dishonest, nor are they excuses; rather, we believe the justifications to be true, and truly think that they show we are not to blame. Self-justifications can take many forms: 

If X had happened, I would have been right. (“My predictions for the economy would have been correct if A had won the election rather than B. No one could have seen that coming.”) 

It really wasn’t wrong. (“The company doesn’t pay me enough anyway, so taking those supplies just evens things out.”) 

It wasn’t that big of a deal in the long run and didn’t have lasting consequences. (“I’m sorry I treated her the way I did, but she’s happily married now and probably doesn’t ever think of me.”) 

I can’t help it, this is just who I am. (“My father has a temper, and my grandfather had a temper, and my great-grandfather too! It’s a family tradition!”) 

I was provoked. (“No one could have heard what he said without punching him out.”) 

The situation was to blame. (“Everyone was yelling and it was total chaos – I couldn’t even think straight and felt paralyzed.”) 

That was the old me and happened in the past. (“I’ve changed a lot since then. I’m not the same person.”) 

It was an isolated incident and is over and done with. (“I’ve never acted that way before, and haven’t since.”) 

My mood/state was to blame. (“I had just gotten over the flu and just wasn’t feeling like myself.” Or, “I was really drunk and don’t remember what happened.” Or, “I had been crazy stressed for weeks and that was just the straw that broke the camel’s back.”) 

Regardless of what form self-justification takes, it’s designed to keep your self-concept and self-esteem intact by reducing your responsibility for the mistake or failure.

While I cited more “dramatic” examples of mistakes above, self-justifying happens every day in small ways, and everyone does it. When we cut off someone while speeding to work we tell ourselves that we don’t normally drive this way but have to get to work on time or we’ll get in trouble with the boss. When we’re gruff with our kids when we get home, we tell ourselves that we’ve had a long, hard day and are tired.

Whether self-justifications kick in over big mistakes or small, we don’t really notice it happening, especially if we haven’t been cultivating an awareness of them. They work much like an ego thermostat – making small adjustments throughout the day to keep our self-concept nice and comfortable.

The Tricks Our Memory Play

When it comes to piecing together justifications to mitigate our feelings of responsibility and protect our self-concept, our faulty memory can be our greatest “ally.”

It used to be thought that memory was like a filing cabinet which stored everything that ever happened to us. Sometimes it was hard to find a specific file at a later date, but it was all in there somewhere, waiting for us to pull out nearly whole cloth. Memory was seen as an accurate film strip of past events that would fade over time, but could be replayed whenever we wished.

We now know that our experiences are broken up into pieces, and that these fragments of memory are stored in different parts of the brain. Not every detail of a memory is stored, just the most salient bits. When we later try to remember something, our brains reconstitute the memory, pulling together the pieces it has stored, and filling in the blanks in a way it feels make sense – splicing in background information from other memories, stories our friends have told us, childhood photographs, old home movies, and even Hollywood films and tv shows, along with your own dreams. The memory doesn’t feel like a composite, however; the whole thing feels very accurate and real to us, a feeling which only increases the more we recall that version of the memory and rehearse it to others.

For example, in a study that asked participants to read stories about two roommates, and then to write either a letter of recommendation or of complaint about one of them, they invariably added their own details to the letter that did not appear in the original stories. When they were later asked to recall the original stories as accurately as possible, they remembered the details they had added to the letters as being part of the original, and they forgot details of the original story that conflicted with the kind of letter they had written. The act of telling a story about the past had successfully revised that past. If you’ve ever seen a convicted criminal passionately proclaim his innocence, despite a mountain of evidence against him, he probably isn’t knowingly lying; years of rehearsing a version of events where he isn’t culpable has likely replaced the memory of what really happened, and he himself now believes in his innocence through and through.

While we all firmly believe our memories are accurate, and such things would never happen to us, as Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson report in Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me), studies have shown that “memories are distorted in a self-enhancing direction in all sorts of ways”:

“Men and women alike remember having had fewer sexual partners than they really did…People also remember voting in elections they didn’t vote in, they remember voting for the winning candidate rather than the politician they did vote for, they remember giving more to charity than they really did, they remember that their children walked and talked at an earlier age than they did.”

Another interesting fact: 73% of college students surveyed remember seeing the first plane crash into the World Trade Center on 9/11…even though footage of that event was in fact not aired until the next day.

If you’ve ever been sure that you remembered an episode of your past correctly, only to later find evidence that your version of events couldn’t possibly have been true, you know how disturbing it is, and how much dissonance arises when you realize your memory isn’t as reliable as you once thought.

The Role Memory Plays in Our Self-Justifications

“‘I have done that,’ says my memory. ‘I cannot have done that,’ says my pride, and remains inexorable. Eventually–memory yields.” -Friedrich Nietzsche

The pieces the brain chooses to compose our memories are those that best preserve and protect our self-concept. We have all had experiences where our memory of an event differed from that of another person. While the ensuing argument often presumes that one person is remembering it accurately, and one is not, what is more likely is that each is remembering it from their own angle – one that highlights their innocence as opposed to culpability.

Memories also change over time, as our present experiences and attitudes alter and shape how we see the past. This bears reiteration: Our memory of the past doesn’t simply shape who we are today, we also shape the memory according to how we’re doing in the present.

For example, a study asked teenagers and parents to come into a lab and list their areas of disagreement, then spend ten minutes discussing the conflict together and trying to resolve it. The teenagers would then rate how they felt about the conflict and their parents. Six weeks later, the teenagers were asked to remember how they felt about the conflict at the time of their first visit to the lab; those who were currently feeling close to their parents remembered the rating they had given as lower than it was, while those whose relationships to their parents were more strained remembered their rating as being worse than it was. Their current feelings altered the memory of how they had felt in the past.

This distortion can be magnified as we think over the sweep of our lives. Every person feels the need to fit their personal history into a narrative. The lead-up, the turning points, the bad guys and good guys, our triumphs over obstacles that made us who we are. For instance, “I grew up in a very religious family with uber-strict parents. I never questioned what they taught me until I got to college in New York. And then I became an atheist, and my family disowned me. And I’ve had to make it on my own but it’s made me stronger.”

We explain our lives through the filter of this narrative. And if we’re currently in a chapter of the story where we feel more down-and-out than triumphant, we’re inclined to remember episodes of the past that we believe led to our current struggles and confirm our narrative, and forget details that are dissonant with it. This is often the case for those who blame their parents for how they’ve turned out. As Tavris and Aronson explain:

“We tell our stories with the confidence that the listener will not dispute them or ask for contradictory evidence, which means we rarely have an incentive to scrutinize them for accuracy. You have memories about your father that are salient to you and that represent the man he was and the relationship you had with him. What have you forgotten? You remember that time when you were disobedient and he swatted you, and you are still angry that he didn’t explain why he was disciplining you. But could you have been the kind of kid a father couldn’t explain things to, because you were impatient and impulsive and didn’t listen? When we tell a story, we tend to leave ourselves out: My father did thus-and-such because of who he was, not because of the kind of kid I was. That’s the self-justification of memory.”

The problem with our memory is it invariably paints us in the best possible light, and confirms our chosen narrative, while leaving out the details that threaten our self-concept and contradict that narrative — the mitigating factors, the strengths of others that balanced their flaws, our own role in a situation. Those we blame for our current woes, like our parents, become not complex human beings but one-dimensional symbols for why we’ve turned out the way we have and everything that’s gone wrong in our lives.

Confirmation Bias & Sunk Cost Fallacy

Two other cognitive distortions that keep us from owning up to our mistakes bear mentioning: confirmation bias and sunk cost fallacy.

Confirmation bias explains the way in which our brains seek information that ratifies our preexisting beliefs, and spurns that which contradicts them. When we come across information that aligns with our own opinions, we readily believe it to be true (“This is brilliant!), but when we’re confronted with information that challenges our opinions, cognitive dissonance rears its head, and researchers have actually found that the reasoning parts of our brain shut down. We seek out flaws, however small, in the conflicting information that enables us to summarily dismiss it (“This is utter garbage!”). Once we do, consonance is restored, and the emotional parts of our brain light up with happiness. The result is that being confronted with information that contradicts our ideas can actually leave us more sure of them than before. Confirmation bias explains how a Republican and Democrat can watch the same debate, and both walk away feeling confident that their candidate scored big points, while the opponent was smarmy and dishonest-looking. We look for and latch onto the things that confirm what we already believe, while that which contradicts us flies under the radar – as if one is made of velcro and the other teflon. The confirmation bias explains why it is difficult to change our minds once we’ve made them up.

The sunk cost fallacy explains how the more we invest in something, the more we fear losing that investment, and will thus continue doing it even we don’t really want to, in order to avoid knowing we wasted our time, money, and/or effort. The law student who decides halfway through his three years that he definitely doesn’t want to be a lawyer, will feel he’s invested too much to drop out now. The man who knows his girlfriend of nine years isn’t right for him can’t bring himself to break up with her and face feeling like that near-decade was a waste. The man who’s been devoting all his free time to serving his church can’t bring himself to leave even when a sordid scandal involving the minister blows up. Each is suffering from the sunk-cost fallacy. Each will tell themselves sensible-sounding justifications for why they should continue in their path, when at the heart of it, they really fear losing their investment and feeling like they made a mistake and wasted time, money, and effort. If they continue on, they may come to waste much more, but that’s in the future and the abstract, and is much easier to deal with.

Related to the sunk cost fallacy is the fact that studies have shown that the more pain, effort, and embarrassment you go through to get something, the happier you will be with your choice. Your mind doesn’t want to believe you went through all that for nothing, so it keeps telling you that the reward is truly worthwhile and you made the right decision. This is why hazing rituals are so effective. It would create too much dissonance to think that the painful and embarrassing hazing you went through to get into a group was all for naught, so your brain says, “I am so glad I did this. This group is awesome.” If it’s really not so awesome, and not right for you, and you’ve made a mistake in joining, it becomes very hard to admit.

But Not Everything My Brains Tells Me Isn’t True!

We’ve now established the way in which your mind works overtime to shield your cherished self-concept from any threats. Self-justifications and distorted memories create veritable blind spots in our brains that keep us from seeing a completely accurate picture of how we operate in the world and to what degree we are responsible for what happens to us.

You may be thinking, “Well, I guess I do come up with justifications to wriggle out of responsibility sometimes, but there’s often plenty of truth to them too! A lot of other studentswere cheating! My friend deserved that grudge I had against him! I was stressed out when I snapped at her! I was unduly provoked when I got in that fight! My parents were distant when I was growing up! I am happy with my fraternity!

Self-justifications distort reality, but they typically do not supplant it. There often are indeed kernels of truth to them. Yet the whole truth of the matter tends to lie somewhere in-between what we tell ourselves happened, and what really happened. Taking ownership of your mistakes means being able to reflect on, and sift through, what our role and responsibility in a situation was. Does the number of students who cheat have a bearing on the moral rightness or wrongness of the decision? What could have been your friend’s motivations for doing what he did? Is it possible to control your temper even when you’re stressed? Did you do anything to provoke the other person’s provocations? Are you forgetting some of the good things your parents did for you too?

Conclusion

Our brain’s blind spots are actually not entirely bad – they do serve a purpose. Without these ego defense systems, we wouldn’t be able to function and would endlessly ruminate about things we did wrong, embarrassments we experienced, and hurts we caused others. We would agonize over whether we made the right decisions and become paralyzed by regret. Self-justifications preserve our confidence and self-esteem and help keep us plunging ahead.

However, too much self-justification can lead to truly deleterious effects on our lives. Tomorrow we will talk about the importance of owning up to your mistakes as much as possible, and also offer strategies on how you can fight the self-justification beast, take ownership of your life, and mature into manhood.

PS-As you were reading this article, did your brain think at certain parts, “That totally reminds me of ____. She always does that.” That’s your responsibility-shirking brain in action again! We readily think of how admonitions apply to others rather than ourselves. Try to think of how this applies to you too!

February 19, 2013 A Man's Life, On Manhood, On Virtue, Personal Development

Personal Responsibility 102: The Importance of Owning Up to Your Mistakes and How to Do It 

Yesterday we discussed the cognitive blind spots our brains generate that can make it difficult for us to honestly assess our actions and determine our responsibility for those actions and their consequences. We discovered the way in which our brains are inclined to flatter and shield our egos from blame when we make mistakes.

Despite how difficult it is to counter the mechanisms of our ego defense system, the task is not wholly insurmountable. Every man who wishes to take on the mantle of manhood must make the effort. In doing so, you will find that striving to take responsibility for your life and ownership of your mistakes is incredibly worthwhile for many reasons:

Allows you to make better decisions. Self-justifications distort reality. The more you use them, the more you create an alternate universe for yourself. This leads to a decreased ability to make good choices, as the information you’re using to do so is warped. This can keep you from the people and pursuits that could have been good for you – if only you had been able to see them clearly for what they were. For example, that professor who was “out to get you” might have become an incredible mentor, if you had seen his criticism as a desire to help, rather than an attack.

Most dangerously, one self-justification begets another, setting off a domino effect that sends you more and more off track. Once you justify one decision, you’re deeper into it, and to get rid the dissonance you’ll feel worrying if was the right choice, you’ll make a decision that digs you even further into it. And the cycle continues. For example if you bully a kid at school, you’ll then feel some dissonance in the aftermath for hurting someone (no one likes to think of themselves as cruel), so you’ll justify that decision by saying the kid is an annoying crybaby who deserved it. The more you dwell on those justifications, the more convinced of them you’ll become, and the more you’ll feel like bullying him again.

Keeps little problems from turning into big ones. Related to the point above, if you can own up to a mistake as soon as you make it and do your best to correct it or make it right, you can prevent it from turning into a huge problem that’s going to be difficult to solve. A snowballed mistake may torpedo various aspects of your relationships and career before you can get yourself out from under it.

Allows you to learn from your mistakes. Simple — you can’t learn from your mistakes if you can’t acknowledge you’ve made them! And if you don’t learn from your mistakes, you’re destined to repeat them. That’s a recipe for quickly going nowhere in life.

Engenders the respect of others. We often hide our mistakes from other people because we worry they will think less of us once they’ve seen that we’ve messed up. But, frankly acknowledging your mistakes, apologizing for them, and then earnestly working to make things right almost always has the opposite effect – people respect you for it. There might still be consequences, of course, but people will appreciate your honesty. If they use your confession as a way to belittle and use you, those are probably not the kind of people you want to work/live with anyway. It’s actually when you hide your mistakes, and they’re found out anyway, that people lose their respect and their trust in you.

Strengthens relationships. Self-justification is a cold, hard relationship killer, as it causes us to build a case of total blame against the other person when things are going poorly between you.

There are two ways to explain mistakes: the person did what they did because of thesituation, or, because of who they are. We use the former explanation with ourselves — “I forgot her birthday because I have so much on my mind right now.” We tend to use the second explanation on others — “She forgot my birthday because she’s so self-centered.” We don’t critique their behavior, but their character – they don’t do bad stuff, they are bad. This kind of blanket condemnation is called a global label. The person is stupid, crazy, useless, selfish, immature, bitchy, evil, lazy, etc. They’re a failed human being.

Global labels are almost never accurate, but your brain finds them very satisfying to develop and spew. They allow you to see your partner as deliberately hurting you — as intentionally sinking the relationship. It’s their fault, and you’re the victim, so you feel entitled to punish and attack them.

Once you give someone a global label – “She’s self-centered” – you focus on gathering evidence to confirm your conclusion, and overlook all evidence to the contrary. Velcro and Teflon. You keep mulling over how she forgot your birthday, but don’t think about how just yesterday she canceled plans with her friends to stay home and help you finish a paper. As you strengthen your “case” against her, you’re filled with self-righteous indignation, which allows you to go on the attack. Then, when you see you’ve hurt her, dissonance arises (again nobody likes to think of themselves as mean or heartless), so you gather more evidence to justify your attacks as well-deserved. And on it goes. When the global label becomes firmly entrenched, you come to see the person as hopelessly flawed and unable to change (“You’re just like your father!”), which leads to you feeling contempt for them, one of the death knells of a relationship.

Conversely, being able to admit fault, being able to acknowledge one’s role in the current health of the relationship, and having empathy for why your partner might do what she does from time to time without being hopelessly flawed (just like you!), leads to strong, healthy relationships.

The Bottom Line: Owning up to our mistakes allows us to take responsibility for our lives. If we can’t accurately perceive who we are, how we behave (and how others behave towards us), and how our behavior affects others and our own lives, life will always feel like something that’s happening to us, rather than something we are in control of. Men with aninternal locus of control — those who believe they can shape life through their own decisions and actions — are more confident, more likely to seek learning and be leaders, more disciplined, and better able to deal with stress and challenges. Men with an external locus of control, on the other hand, believe the course of their life is determined by luck and other people, and see themselves as victims. They are prone to problems with both their physical and mental health, and often plagued by stress, anxiety, and depression. When they make mistakes, they are apt to think, “Why is this happening to me?”

Men with an internal locus of control are achievement-oriented and more likely to find academic and professional success. Instead of remaining in a childish mindset, they grow into mature manhood. Instead of seeing themselves as the victim and blaming others for their failures, they learn from their mistakes and use them as stepping stones to getting stronger and moving ahead.

How to Take Greater Ownership of Your Mistakes

“The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.” -Thomas Carlyle

It’s not possible to be aware of all of our self-justification blind spots. You probably wouldn’t want to be, actually, lest you become unable to extricate yourself from a fetal position of regret. But it is possible, and desirable, to cultivate a greater awareness and ownership of our behavior and mistakes, especially those of a meaningful nature; you don’t need to rehearse the time you farted during class in the second grade over and over, but you do need to get at the root of why you always end up cheating on your girlfriends.

The common denominator in the points below is humility. It is those who are most confident, to the point of narcissism, who have the most trouble admitting their shortcomings; the gap between their behavior and their self-image is so wide, the dissonance so strong, that they readily reach for justifications that keep their ego intact. (People will low-esteem experience dissonance when something good happens to them and will try to explain it away, and even sabotage it to dissipate the dissonance: “Why is this hot chick into me? Maybe she made a bet with her friends.”)

If it seems like responsibility-shirking is on the rise, it may not be your imagination. Narcissism has risen 30% among college students since 1979, and studies show their self-confidence is at an all-time high. The majority of college students think they are above average when it comes to social and intellectual confidence, leadership qualities, and the drive to succeed, even though this is statistically impossible, and belied by the facts; the students who rate themselves highly often do not have the grades to back that claim, and things like writing ability and number of hours spent studying has gone down over the last few decades, not up.

Confidence is a great thing, but it must also be linked to honest self-assessment and actual achievement. It must be leavened by clear-eyed humility. Otherwise, narcissism will keep us from seeing, and correcting for, our shortcomings. How do we find that wise humility?

Just like it may not be possible to eliminate every blind spot while you’re driving, but you can catch most with a look over your shoulder, you can catch your self-justifications with some extra care and reflection. Here’s how to shoulder-check your mistakes:

Nip it in the bud. As mentioned above, justifying a little mistake can allow it to grow into a huge one. And the more the emotional, financial, and moral stakes of a mistake mount, the harder it becomes to admit. So own up to a mistake when it’s small and do it as soon as possible after it happens. This is the oh-so-easy-to-justify-because-it’s-no-big-deal stage, but you have to ignore that temptation and nip it in the bud before it slowly grows into the this-mistake-is-destroying-my-life stage. How do you do that? You:

Tune into, and hold onto, the niggling feeling of dissonance. Unless you’re a sociopath, when you make a mistake you’ll feel cognitive dissonance — some might call it your conscience — kick in. For most people, it’s only a flash before they push it away with immediate justifications for why they’re not at fault. Our ego defense system kicks in automatically. In order to take greater ownership of your mistakes, you need to be able to locate that dissonance signal amongst all the self-justifications playing a soothing piper’s tune, and then tune in and hold it there. No one likes mental discomfort, so it really takes a kind of courage to be able to simply sit with that tension even as your brain screams to make it go away.

Try to sort through why your conscience is panged. While your immediate reaction may be to blame the situation or the other person, take an honest look at what role you may have had in precipitating that situation, or handling it poorly, and what you may have done to provoke the other person and what may have led to them reacting the way they did. Examine things from a different angle and from the other person’s perspective.

Have people in your life who keep you accountable. People who shirk responsibility for their behavior surround themselves with yes men who never contradict their justifications. Without any honest feedback, they fall further and further into the rabbit hole of their ego-driven delusions. Every man needs people in his life who are willing to give it to him straight, who are willing to call him out when he’s messed up, and who do it out of love. It’s tempting to avoid these people and retreat into your echo chamber of excuses, but they’re the kind of people who will truly help you thrive.

Fight the confirmation bias. If you remember from last time, the confirmation bias describes our brain’s tendency to latch onto information that flatters our preexisting beliefs, and to shun information that contradicts it. Knowing this, we need to consciously tamp down our knee-jerk reaction to an opposing viewpoint and try to listen open-mindedly before rendering judgment. We must in fact actively and purposefully seek out those different viewpoints, even when our brain keeps trying to drag us back to the comfortable confines of our like-minded tribe.

Don’t play the “if only” game. Men who play the “if only” game justify their failures and struggles by saying they would turn things around if only x, y, or z would happen. “If only I had more time in the morning, I’d work out and lose all this weight.” “If only I had a less stressful job, I wouldn’t be so short with my kids.”

The only variable you have total control over is you. If you let your co-workers/friends/girlfriend “make” you feel a certain way, you’ve stopped being an active agent in your life, and become a victim.

Increase your problem-solving skills. The “expectancy-value theory” of psychology says that a person’s likelihood of taking an action is dependent on how much the person values a particular outcome and how much the person believes that taking the action will produce that outcome. To put that in simple terms: We blame others and play the victim when we don’t believe that we can solve a problem ourselves. The more confident we feel in our problem-solving abilities and the more skills we have at our disposal, the more likely we are to take responsibility for turning something around.

Put yourself in the others’ shoes. Tavris and Aronson argue that “the couples who grow together over the years have figured out a way to live with a minimum of self-justification, which is another way of saying that they are able to put empathy for the partner ahead of defending their own territory.” How do they do that? “They are able to yield, just enough, on the self-justifying excuse, ‘That’s the kind of person I am.’” When we give someone else a global label, we do it with the idea that they’re hopelessly flawed. But when one is thrown at us, we defend it as a cherished part of our identity! “That’s who I am! You have to accept it!” But you have to be able to take an honest look at how “who you are” might be detrimental to those you love and your life as a whole. And your partner, in turn, must have some empathy for those traits that are indeed deeply ingrained – for better or worse — within you.

For example, Kate comes from a line of feisty Italians who think yelling about things big and small is totally normal. My family, on the other hand, is pretty quiet and passive. When she and I argue, or even have an animated discussion, she often starts raising her voice. If I say, “Why are you so angry? Why are you yelling?” she’ll say, “I’m not angry and I’m not yelling. I’m just talking excitedly! This is normal!” I’d tell her that raising her voice made the discussion feel hostile to me and she would respond with, “Well that’s the way I am.” And I’d say, “Well it feels stressful to me. That’s the way I am.”

“That’s the way I am” is an easy way to protect our egos, and to keep us from having to do the hard work of trying to change. Once you think about it though, do the things we do that hurt those we love need to be held onto as cherished parts of our identities? Kate and I have both tried to have more empathy for each other on this issue. She tries not to yell, or, uh, talk excitedly as much, and I try not to equate a raised voice with hostility and high stakes. It is indeed hard to make big changes, but little steps, showing you’re trying, can make a big difference.

Get over the idea that making mistakes=being stupid. When a couple of researchers were observing a Japanese classroom back in the 70s they were astounded to see a student very calmly work through a problem on the chalkboard, in front of his peers, for 45 minutes. They were amazed to realize that they felt more uncomfortable for him than he felt himself!

A prominent idea in the West, especially America, is that abilities like intelligence are largely innate. The Japanese, on the other hand, see intelligence as a function of effort. Thus, when Americans make mistakes, they see it as a failure of who they are, while the Japanese view mistakes as simply part of the learning process and evidence that you can work through something and improve.

Studies by psychologist Carol Dweck have shown that students praised for general qualities like intelligence and self-worth (“You are special!”) give up quicker and enjoy learning less than those praised for their effort. The former group, because they see intelligence and other traits as innate qualities you either have or don’t have, will feel dissonance when they struggle with a problem – if they’re having a hard time, does that they mean they’re not as effortlessly bright and special as they’ve been told they are? They thus end up giving up altogether rather than risking a failure that would damage and call into question their self-concept. Students commended for their effort, on the other hand, end up doing better in the long run because they see their struggles as simply part of the process of getting better, not as a reflection on their core identity.

Students praised for how bright and talented and special they are end up as adults who struggle to take personal responsibility for their mistakes. Admitting to any kind of failure feels like admitting that they’re not the exceptional person their parents told them they were.

The more you see success not as a function of inherent traits, but of effort and work, the less threatening making mistakes becomes. We must, as Tavris and Aronson put it, “learn to see mistakes not as terrible personal failings to be denied or justified, but as inevitable aspects of life that help us grow, and grow up.”