Safeguards are tools you must master to stay in control and manage your weaknesses.
A part of taking control of your life is controlling the things you can. Another part is managing the things you can’t. This includes your vulnerabilities or weaknesses.
James Clear rightly put it as “Life gets easier when you don’t blame other people and focus on what you can control.
Knowing Your Weakness
We all have weaknesses, and most of them are built into our biology.
For instance, we can become hungry, thirsty, fatigued, sleep-deprived, emotional, distracted, or stressed.
In most situations, all these conditions prompt us to react without reason. And instead of thinking clearly in these situations, it can blind us to the deciding moments of our lives.
Yet, some of our weaknesses aren’t built into our biology.
Instead, they are acquired through habit and stay with us by force of comfort. For example, if you drink a bottle of Coke or skip a workout today, you’re not going to go from healthy to unhealthy suddenly.
However, these choices can end up becoming bad habits through repetition and accumulate into a disaster.
Because bad habits are easy to acquire when there is a delay between action and consequence.
Don’t make Bad Choices all the time
The formula for failure is to consistently repeat a few small errors.
Just because the results aren’t immediately felt doesn’t mean consequences aren’t coming. Be smart enough to know the potential results of decisions. While good choices repeated make time your friend, bad ones make it your enemy.
Whatever your weaknesses and whatever their origins, don’t let the autopilots take command of your life.
The autopilots are the enemies stopping you from making the right decisions, and they are:
- The Emotional Autopilot: We react based on how we feel instead of what’s true.
- The Ego Autopilot: We get defensive when our ego or status feels attacked.
- The Social Autopilot: We go along with what everyone else is doing.
- The Comfort Autopilot: We stick with what’s familiar and avoid change.
I explained this in full detail in a previous article HERE.
The Two Ways of Managing Your Weaknesses
There are two ways to manage your weaknesses.
- Build your strengths to help you overcome the weaknesses you’ve acquired.
- Implement safeguards to help you manage any weaknesses you’re having trouble overcoming with strength alone.
The formula is simple: To think clearly and make good life-changing decisions, manage your inbuilt Weaknesses (e.g. hunger, thirst etc.) with safeguards. Then manage your acquired weaknesses (e.g. refusing to start something because of fear or coasting on your talent without hard work) by combining your safeguards with your strengths.
Safeguards: The Two Ways of Managing Your Weaknesses
But there is something you must understand first…
Why We Fail to See Our Weaknesses?
We fail to see our own weaknesses for three main reasons.
- These weaknesses can be hard for us to detect because they’re part of the way we’re accustomed to thinking, feeling, and acting.
- Seeing our weaknesses bruises our egos. especially when they are behaviours that are deeply part of us.
- We have a limited perspective because it is very hard to understand a system that we are a part of.
When we fail to see our weaknesses, there is a gap in our thinking that comes from believing that the way we see the world is the way the world really works.
It’s only when you change your perspective and look at the situation through the eyes of other people; that’s when you realize what we’re missing. You begin to appreciate your own blind spots and see what we’ve been missing.
What are Safeguards and How to Protect Yourself with Them
Safeguards are tools for protecting yourself from yourself.
They help you overcome weaknesses that you don’t have the strength to overcome. Safeguards increase the amount of “friction” required to do something that’s contrary to your long-term goals. Removing all junk food from your house to encourage healthy living is an example of a safeguarding strategy.
Here are a few safeguards to consider.
Safeguard Strategy 1: Prevention
This aims to prevent problems before they happen.
One way to do this is to avoid decision-making in unfavourable conditions. You can use the principles behind HALT as a safeguard for making better decisions. HALT is an acronym for Hungry, Angry, Lonely and Tired.
If you have an important decision to make, ask yourself:
- Am I hungry?
- Am I angry or emotional?
- Am I lonely or stressed by my circumstances, such as being in an unfamiliar environment or pressed for time?
- Am I tired, sleep-deprived, or physically fatigued?
If the answer is yes to any of these questions, avoid making the decision if you can. Wait for a more opportune time. Otherwise, your autopilots will take over.
Safeguard Strategy 2: Automatic Rules for Success
There is an unexpected way to improve your decision-making processes and think clearly.
Replace your decisions with rules. Nothing forces you to accept the default behaviours and rules from your upbringing and life circumstances. You can decide to eliminate them at any time and replace them with better ones.
It turns out that rules can help automate your behaviour to put you in a position to achieve success and accomplish your goals.
Have you noticed that when you make decisions, you often think of the goals you want to achieve and work backwards to identify the means of achieving them?
If you want to save more money, you might hide part of your salary from yourself at the end of the month. You use your willpower to accomplish these goals. Once they’re accomplished, you often go back to the default behaviour you had before.
Eventually, you realise you’re back where you don’t want to be and begin the entire process again.
The Benefit of Automating Your Behaviour with Rules and Safeguards
This approach is flawed because it involves constant decision-making and effort. Choosing goals is necessary but not sufficient for accomplishing them. You also need to pursue those goals consistently and make daily choices in pursuit of your goals.
As these choices add up, it becomes harder, not easier, to consistently make choices that move you toward your goals and not away from them.
Why not bypass individual choices altogether and create an automatic behaviour that requires no decision-making in the moment and that gets no pushback from others? This automatic behaviour becomes a rule.
For instance, let’s say your goal is to drink less soda.
Rather than deciding on a case-by-case basis whether you’re going to drink soda (something that requires a lot of effort and that is prone to error), make a rule instead.
For example, “I only drink soda at dinner on Friday,” or maybe, “I don’t drink soda at all.”
Having a rule means not having to decide at every meal. The execution path is short and less prone to errors.
Safeguards Strategy 2 (Example): Automatic Rules for Success
Creating personal rules is a powerful technique for protecting yourself from your own weaknesses and limitations. Sometimes those rules have surprising benefits.
Safeguard Strategy 3: Creating Friction
Another safeguarding strategy is to increase the amount of effort it takes to do things that are contrary to your goals.
If there were a recipe for accumulated disaster, it would be giving the best of ourselves to the least important things and the worst of ourselves to the most important things.
The path to breaking bad habits is making your desired behaviour the default behaviour.
It’s easy to underestimate the role ease plays in decision-making. Since behavior follows the path of least resistance, a surprisingly successful approach is to add friction where you find yourself doing things you don’t want to do.
Safeguard Strategy 4: Putting in Guardrails
Another safeguarding strategy is to create operating procedures for yourself because you know from hard experience when your autopilots tend to override your decision-making.
The autopilots prevent us from seeing what’s happening and from responding in ways aligned with our best self-image.
Checklists, for instance, offer a simple way to override your autopilots.
Pilots go through a preflight checklist every time they fly. The checklist acts as a safeguard, forcing us to slow down whatever we’re doing and go back to basics:
- What am I trying to accomplish?
- And what are the things I need to accomplish it?
Questions like these are the guardrails that will keep you on the road to success.
Safeguard Strategy 5: Shifting Your Perspective
Each of us sees things only from a particular point of view.
Nobody can see everything. That doesn’t mean, however, that we can’t shift the way we see things in any given situation. Having an outside perspective on your situation allows you to see more of what’s happening.
Changing your perspective changes what you see.
How to Handle Mistakes
Mistakes are an unavoidable part of life; even the most skilled people make mistakes.
Most times, mistakes happen because there are so many factors beyond our knowledge and control that impact our success. This is true especially when we’re pushing the boundaries of knowledge or potential.
If you got some results you didn’t want, the world is telling you at least one of two things:
- You were unlucky
- Your ideas about how things work were wrong.
If you were unlucky, trying again with the same approach should lead to a different outcome. When you repeatedly don’t get the outcomes you want, though, the world is telling you to update your understanding.
Mistakes Present Us with a Choice
As with anything else, there are better and worse ways of handling mistakes.
The world doesn’t stop just because you made a mistake. Life goes on, and you need to go on too. You can’t simply throw your hands up and walk away.
There are other decisions to make, other things to accomplish, and hopefully you won’t repeat that kind of mistake in the future.
Everyone makes mistakes because everyone has limitations. Even you. Trying to avoid responsibility for your decisions, your actions, or their outcomes, though, is equivalent to pretending you don’t have limitations.
One thing that sets exceptional people apart from the crowd is how they handle mistakes and whether they learn from them and do better as a result.
Mistakes present a choice: whether to update your ideas, or ignore the failures they’ve produced and keep believing what you’ve always believed. More than a few of us choose the latter.
The Biggest Mistake That You Can Make
The biggest mistake people make typically isn’t their initial mistake.
It’s the mistake of trying to cover up and avoid responsibility for it. The first mistake is expensive. The second one costs a fortune.
There are three problems with covering up your mistakes.
- You can’t learn if you ignore your mistakes.
- Hiding them becomes a habit.
- The cover-up makes a bad situation worse.
Admitting errors and correcting yourself is a time-saver that empowers you to avoid making more mistakes in the future.
However, mistakes also provide rare opportunities for getting closer to the kind of person you want to be, should you choose to heed their lessons.
Use those opportunities wisely! Don’t squander them.
The Four Steps to Handling Mistakes
The four steps to handling mistakes more effectively are as follows:
- Accept responsibility
- Learn from the mistake
- Commit to doing better
- Repair the damage as best you can.
Step 1: Accept Responsibility
If you’ve taken command of your life, you need to acknowledge any contribution you’ve made to a mistake and take responsibility for what happens afterwards.
Even if the mistake isn’t entirely your fault, it’s still your problem, and you still have a role to play in handling it.
Step 2: Learn from the Mistake
Take time to reflect on what contributed to the mistake by exploring the various thoughts, feelings, and actions that got you here.
If it’s an emergency, and you don’t have time to reflect now, be sure to come back to it. If you don’t identify the problem’s causes, after all, you can’t fix them.
And if you can’t fix them, you can’t do better in the future. Instead, you’ll be doomed to repeat the same mistake.
If you reach this stage and you find yourself blaming other people or saying things like, “This isn’t fair!” or “Why did this happen to me?” then you haven’t accepted responsibility for the mistake. You need to go back to Step 1.
Step 3: Commit to Doing Better
Create a plan for doing better in the future.
It could be a matter of building a strength like greater self-accountability or greater self-confidence. This step focuses on planning to do better in the future and follow through on that plan.
Only then will you be able to change how you do things and avoid repeating the mistakes of the past.
Step 4: Repair the Damage as Best You Can
The key here is not letting a bad situation become a worse situation.
Mistakes turn into anchors if you don’t accept them. A part of accepting your mistakes is learning from them and then letting them go.
You can’t change the past, but you can work to undo the effects it’s had on the future.
PS.: This is Part 3 for my review on the Book – Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Moments by Shane Parrish.
In case you missed the previous parts before learning about safeguards, here are the links:
Part 1 – Clear Thinking: How and Why Do People Make Bad Decisions?
Part 2 – High Standards: Building Strength for Clear Thinking
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