Ignoring advice when we need it

If you're on the wrong path and can avoid making a mistake, wouldn't you want to know about it? I would. But not everyone wants to. We can all be stubborn and hold onto our choices, as if they were golden, or as if we have to honor the choice we made and keep at it even if it's a bad choice. That's being foolish. Being wise is recognizing the wrong path in order to course-correct and take the right path.

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Many cling to their beliefs about how "right" they are, even when they are wrong. To admit wrong would mean to admit they made a mistake and made the wrong choice, and they think that makes them look weak and inferior to question their own choices and change their mind or direction. It's too much for their ego to admit that, so they want to keep their devotion to stick with the decision, not matter how flawed it is. This is the downside of pride and negative ego attachment.

We hold many biases that favor our own self-perception. We distort our view and ways of thinking in order to favor our own self-image, about how we don't make mistakes, about how right we always are. But this hinders our ability to learn and understand how things really are, both about ourselves and the world. We ignore and refuse to see our mistakes, our wrongs, and we ignore the advice of others who try to show us what we're doing that can be used to course-correct and help our lives for the better.

Something true or helpful can be rejected when it contradicts an attachment to a worldview or selfview. The new is rejected in favor of holding onto the old. The ego attachments are protected as we try to save face and maintain our self-esteem. We rationalize our decisions and beliefs that led to them, anything to not admit what we're doing is wrong.

We might as for advice, but then choose to do what we wanted anyways. We were only looking for someone to agree with us, to validate what we wanted to do, not offer up an alternative that might be better. Whatever confirms and reinforces our position, decision or belief is accepted, and whatever contradicts it is rejected. This is a confirmation bias.

Being presented with alternatives, or even facts that contradict what we've accepted or held onto produces negative/bad feelings of discomfort, insecurity, stress, anxiety, anger or fear. We want to feel good about what we accept, and when things don't fit that mold, we are made to feel bad.

To get rid of that feeling, we could resolve it by honestly comparing the old and the new to see which one is actually right, correct and true. But there is also another false path, and that is to hold onto the old and what's currently accepted to reject the new in order to get rid of that bad feeling we have. This is cognitive dissonance.

We can think that what we currently have is all there is. Once we accept something or decide to do something, we don't second guess or change out minds or actions. We just keep stubbornly going at it, not matter what. We overestimate the positives and downplay the negatives in order to keep at it. If we think we're always right and can't be wrong, we don't hear what others are saying. We think we're smarter and don't need to listen, as if there is nothing for us to learn from others. This is illusory superiority.

To avoid these issues, take in alternatives with critical thinking to see what you can learn from them. Move through the negative feeling to honestly assess new info and re-examine the old. Accept that you can learn from others. Life is learning. We are always ignorant of many things, as we don't know everything there is to know.

We are conditioned by our environment when we grow up. We don't know anything, and everything influences us. Parents, media, school, all play a part in feeding us information. It's the first that becomes available, then we become attached to it. But if we really want to know if it's accurate, we need to critically think about it, not blindly accept it as we did in our early years.

We have might have to unlearn what we learned. The world isn't as most people think it is. Information needs to be taken in, in order to see the contradiction between old and new, and see how we were fooled to no longer be fooled.

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Thank you for your time and attention. Peace.

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