Good questions set us up for good decisions.

You are where you are because of the decisions you have made.

If you will Ask, Answer Honestly, and Act you will make better decisions.

You write the story of your life one decision at a time.

You are not the only person impacted by your decisions.

What do you think is the best decision in this case?
What do you think is the wise thing to do?

Good questions lead to better decisions.

Better decisions lead to fewer regrets.

Pausing to ponder is neither scheduled nor intuitive.

When we feel like we are being questioned our defenses go up and our learning aptitude goes down.

What is done in private eventually becomes public.

We are more prone to follow through with a decision we made than someone else’s advice.

Ask, Answer Honestly, and Act

The prudent see danger and seek refuge, but the simple keep going and pay the penalty.
-Proverbs 27:12

Our decisions determine the direction and quality of our life.

The easiest person to deceive is the person in the mirror.

You have talked yourself into every bad decision you have ever made.

You have probably done more to undermine your own success than any other individual on the planet.

The 5 questions we are going to ask are in conflict with the sales associate in your head.

The sales associate in your head, the one that gives you bad advice, wants you to act fast and impulsively.

He wants you to focus on the immediate rather than the ultimate.

The INTEGRITY Question
1. Am I being honest with myself…really?

You can’t lead yourself well, if you are deceiving yourself.

You can convince yourself of almost anything.

Tell yourself the truth even if it makes you feel bad about yourself.

There are worse things than feeling bad about yourself.

You will never get to where you need to be until you acknowledge where you actually are.

As soon as you start selling yourself on anything, you should hit pause.

We rarely have to sell ourselves on a good idea.

Cognitive Bias: Once we have decided something we look for facts, narratives, and information that affirm our opinion we have adopted.

King Jehoiakim, then King Jehoiachin, and then King Zedekiah

He did evil in the eyes of the Lord his God and did not humble himself before Jeremiah the prophet, who spoke the word of the Lord.
-2 Chronicles 36:12

The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure.
-Jeremiah 17:9

Deceit is difficult to detect.

It’s hard to justify a want. It’s not hard to justify a need.

Make yourself ask this question. Am I being honest with myself?… Really?

Most people aren’t honest with themselves. Don’t be most people.

I would love for you to make this commitment to yourself: “I will not lie to myself even if the truth makes me feel bad about myself.“

Am I telling myself the truth?
Or am I selling myself a regret?

This can be brutal, terrifying, but also clarifying, and liberating.

Jeremiah tells us that this doesn’t come naturally. Most things that are good for us don’t, do they?

Trouble is just one bad decision away.

You also could be one decision away from writing a better chapter & changing the course of your life.

The prudent see danger and seek refuge, but the simple keep going and pay the penalty.
-Proverbs 27:12

I will tell myself the truth, even if the truth makes me feel bad about myself.