Right or Wrong? A Habitual Action
Source: armstrongeconomics
When human beings encounter anything that do not follow our direction and our will, we usually always stand on our own ground and start to push all responsibility to others. The human would spend time to start to reason out excuses to justify their own actions and push the responsibility to others. Unfortunately, most humans would not spend time to do reflection towards their own attitudes and behaviour. They have never asked themselves, is there anything wrong with them.
Do you know why this could happen? Do you know that humans need to repeat a certain behaviour to master the skill? Humans also need to repeat the same actions for a period for the action to become a habit. When an action becomes a habit, we would start to justify and rationalise our own behaviour. To illustrate, an old lady always complains and is not satisfied with people around them. Regardless, good or bad the old lady would definitely complain. In the long run, the old lady assumes that complaining is a norm. She has taken complaining as a habit and would continue to complain rather than thinking of how to solve the issue.
When a behaviour is transformed into a habit, humans would start to rationalise and normalise the wrong behaviour. In some cases, they would believe that the wrong behaviour as the right behaviour and they would tolerate with any of the behaviours. For example, when some people start to smoke, they would feel that smoking is irritating due to the bad odour and is considered a waste of money. However, when they repeat the action for several times, they would fall in love with it. Of course, in this case, nicotine plays an important role to reinforce the human behaviour. For smokers, they would not feel the irritation of smell anymore. To some extent, some smokers can even sacrifice food for them to have their cigarettes!
Last few days, one of my friends share his experience that his employees refuse to accept a show-cause letter issued by the department. The employee even replied with a long explanation to explain the scenario. Not only that, the employee even pushed the full responsibility back to the head of the department.
“The head of the department asked me to put it on hold. He even asked me to wait for the meeting. I have been waiting for the meeting but he has never come back to me! Now, the project is delayed, I don’t think I should be blamed.”
This employee has been in the operations department for more than five years. Within this five years, she has applied; pushing responsibility to others, not listening to others and always want everything to go her way. When anything goes wrong, all the blames were to be put on other people. What is the issue? She applied putting the blame on others till to extent that she believed and trusted that there was no problem with herself! As a result, her performance becomes really low. In her subconscious mind, it is not her fault, but other people have led her to her low productivity. As a result, for five years, the same error repeats and repeats! She has never learnt! Or in fact she has never wanted to learn from the beginning!
A smart person would reflect and change himself. A dumb person would keep giving more excuses to justify their own actions and repeat the same mistakes again and again. Do you want to be a smart person or a dumb person? The choice is in your hands!
