When you make a mistake or behave in a way that conflicts with your values, what’s your response? For most people, the urge to make excuses—to justify your actions—is strong. However, self-justification can pull you into a cycle that is hard to escape.
You might realize you won’t have time to finish a project you’d promised to a family member, friend, or colleague. You get into an argument with them. You start thinking of all the ways you could have completed it, if only something—or someone else—hadn’t prevented you.
This is the type of excuse that ignites the cycle of justification. Time ticks on, and pretty soon you start spiraling even deeper. Now, you’re not only looking for justifications for why you’re not meeting your target; you’re beginning to churn with some very negative emotions. You feel unnoticed, unappreciated, and unjustly put upon.
How self-justification feeds on itself
This self-pity wells up despite the fact that what’s really bothering you is that your actions don’t reflect the person you are. In place of owning up to what you know you’re capable of doing and should have committed to getting done, you’re frantically scrambling for any other explanation. You begin putting together a narrative from another dimension, one in which you are the wronged party, incapable of making a mistake and completely in the right. You accuse everything and everyone around you.
What’s more, you might start doubling down from there. Even if confronted with objective evidence that you missed the deadline, misunderstood the agreement, and let the ball drop, you become oblivious to the facts and keep creating ever more unrealistic ways of justifying yourself.
Stew in this toxic emotional broth for long enough, and you’ll start feeling disgusted and disconnected from a job you love. Or you’ll begin to feel alienated from the people you love and care for the most.
Is it really worth it? Or is there a way to escape the justification spiral by having a straightforward conversation, refocusing or renegotiating what you need to do, and holding up your part of the bargain to get it done?
A deceptively easy way out
Self-justification is a pretty common psychological state, so you’re not alone. Experts tell us that it’s an instinctive defense mechanism. Contrary to what you might assume, it’s not really about making a chain of excuses or weaving a tapestry of lies. Instead, self-justification is just a route toward an easy out.
It allows you to feel that your actions missing the mark actually made sense and were correct. It helps you solve the problem of the guilt you feel for falling short. It relieves the stressful tension you feel when you must hold two contradictory ideas about yourself in your mind. It lets you truly believe you were right—and that anyone who doesn’t acknowledge this needs to mend their ways, not you.
This is the deceptive allure of self-justification in a nutshell. It relieves you of the need to examine your behavior, accept the consequences of your actions, and take the hard but ultimately more fulfilling road toward improving yourself.
If you’ve read this far, you may be starting to see how living a cycle of self-justification prevents you from apologizing, seeking forgiveness, and honoring your commitments. How can you do any of these things if you can’t even acknowledge to yourself when you’ve made a mistake?
It’s a hard road ahead, but it’s worth it
Pulling yourself out of the self-justification spiral starts with finding the courage to admit your mistakes—and to embrace the possibilities they offer for becoming the responsible, accountable, and respected person you want to be.
In addition to developing the insight to own up to and learn from mistakes, you need to discover your ability to break free of unhelpful behavior patterns if you want to release yourself from the self-justification cycle.
We are all products of our environments and experiences, and these often blind us to both our strengths and our weaknesses. Negative experiences can cause us to live inside the criticisms and limiting opinions of other people, doing long-lasting damage.
So, it’s necessary to dig deep and confront our own negative behavior patterns and their causes, if we are ever to uproot them. This confrontation can be painful, but it gives us the freedom to remake our personalities and identities in a more constructive and helpful pattern. We can then move forward with a commitment to staying honest with ourselves and others—and to staying accountable to ourselves and others.
On this firmer ground, you’ll begin to see possibilities for growth and abundance all around you. These possibilities were always there, but, in a metaphor used by Klemmer founder Brian Klemmer, you were wearing “sunglasses” based on a worn-out, limited, and negative image of yourself and the world.
Klemmer’s philosophy of coaching and personal development, as exemplified in its Personal Mastery and other trainings, centers on removing these limiting beliefs, discarding false narratives of scarcity and limitation, and acknowledging the mistakes that make you human. Only then can you embrace the lessons from those mistakes and discover your potential to grow in character and commitment.
That’s how you break the justification cycle and become the strong, compassionate leader you were always meant to be.
