There is an old expression that says, “When you cheat you are only cheating yourself.” This is certainly true when trying to make improvements in your life.
What does it mean to cheat? I am not talking about something illegal or unethical. I am also not referring to the damage you may be doing to your psyche by failing to be true to yourself. I am referring to taking shortcuts or being dishonest when the only victim is your self-discipline, like when you cheat on your diet. You hurt no one else. Really no one cares if you slip yourself a doughnut to go with that morning coffee. And really does it matter if you have an extra couple of hundred calories to contend with that day? It is not really the doughnut that is causing the problem. It is the story you are telling yourself to excuse yourself to feel better today at the expense of the real reward of making progress in the future.
My wife started to take up golf a few years ago. We felt it may be something we would like to do as a family; our kids were expressing an interest in it and we had a little course near our summer home that made for a pleasant day for the four of us. As many of you can appreciate from personal experience, golf can be a frustrating game even for those that have played, if perhaps inconsistently, for many years as I have done. And golf is the perfect opportunity to cheat; there are no referees and no big scoreboard; just you, a pencil, and a scorecard.
The temptation to skip over a couple of penalty strokes, or not count the whiff that fails to travel out of the tee box or give yourself a mulligan for the wild slice out of bounds is almost insurmountable.
But this is not the approach my wife took. No, she argued that she would count every stroke on every hole. “What do you get on that hole dear?”. "I got 13”, she would say, including lost balls and a drop for an unplayable lie, and whatever other misfortune befell her from tee to green. Now while she was not referring to the Rules of Golf to determine the penalties to be applied, she did penalize herself in a consistent manner. She was still cheating according to the rules, but she was not cheating herself.
You may ask why she would beat herself up on every hole just to be consistent? At the end of the round, she would count her score and compare to previous scores. She was not concerned about the score on the day. She was comparing herself to the score she had the last time she played and her best scores in the past. She was able to celebrate improvements game-over-game because they were real improvements. She knew that if she was inconsistent in keeping her score she would not be able to recognize when she had a better round. If she counted a maximum of 10 on a hole when she really had 12, she would have to shoot three strokes better the next time to show any improvement. She would sacrifice the satisfaction she felt when she made incremental improvement game over game. This celebration of improvement was far more important than the damage to her pride when her score was not what she hoped. That smile, when she was able to celebrate the small victories, made our golf much more enjoyable.
What damage is done by this sort of cheating?
The act of avoiding the real score, however you are measuring your current state, is affecting your improvement process in the following ways
- You are rewarding the wrong behavior which can entrench habits you will need to break later.
- You are failing to reward yourself for the real improvements you are making, thus disrupting the habit-forming you really want to do.
You can think of habits as simply our mind telling our bodies to repeat the same behaviors consistently in order to achieve the same rewards it received previously. If we satisfy our mid-morning hunger sensations by eating a donut, we get a wonderful sugar rush. We have created a simple cue-reward cycle that our bodies would be happy to repeat tomorrow. If we compound our error by failing to record the donut in our food log, we will celebrate reaching our daily goal. We defeat the only real mechanism we had to keep ourselves accountable. And then we will step on the scale, become frustrated that we did not achieve our weight loss goal, and skip our next weigh-in to avoid the guilt and self-punishment.
If, on the other hand, we record the donut in our food log at the time, we can actually defeat the reward we get from the satisfaction of our sugar high. Taking responsibility at the time of the crime can help to defeat the formation of the bad habit. Perhaps, as a result, we forgo the donut the at the next opportunity. When we step on the scale at our next weigh-in, we observe that we did not achieve our goal but we are already looking forward to the next time because we know that we have broken the habit that affected our weight today.
Keeping accurate scores prevents us from celebrating the wrong actions at the wrong times. We want to celebrate the positive outcomes that result from performing the actions we know to be best for us. If we cheat on recording the score, we celebrate a perceived success for a short-term benefit and sacrifice our long-term goals.
So, I interpret “cheating” to mean “depriving yourself of the opportunity to celebrate when you make real improvements”. You really are cheating yourself.