You enter an interview and your interview goes very well, you give meaningful answers to every question asked and you feel that you are influencing the other party. In the end, the job is yours. You know that the success behind this result is entirely your work.
However, if your interview is bad or you are eliminated, you immediately look for an external reason, blame the questions asked, the interviewers or anything else other than you, and you put all the responsibility on external factors. While most people readily accept that the architect of success is their own, they argue that failure or mistakes are caused by other people, circumstances, or external conspirators. This is due to the "self serving bias" in our cognitive system. In self-serving prejudice, one attributes its failures or mistakes to external factors while bragging about their achievements. Choosing not to see his own shortcomings or mistakes, he also misses the chance to learn and develop from them.
The biggest reason for this behavior is to protect our self-esteem. Self-esteem is the measure of how much a person values himself, how much he approves and appreciates himself. It is very important for the person to continue their success. When self-esteem is low, the person may feel defeated, weak or depressed. Even when his self-esteem is low, he can make bad decisions, bog his relationships, so he can be trapped in an impenetrable cycle. In self-esteem swelling, the person displays narcissistic characteristics, their empathy ability decreases, and their relationships begin to suffer. As in all matters, balance is also important here.
Here, self-serving bias is one of the factors that make us feel valuable and keep our self-esteem high. In a sense, while this enables us to add success to our successes, it may also cause us to overlook one point: The underlying reasons for failure ...
A person who puts the reason for his failures on the outside world cannot see that the fault is in himself. Since he cannot see his error, he cannot understand the underlying factors and have the opportunity to improve himself. Every person makes mistakes, but modern society has created the illusion that people can be faultless. This consciousness, which is placed with school in our childhood, appears before us both in our social environment and in our business life. A student who gets a low grade at school is punished or mistreated, the person who makes a mistake against his friend is excluded from the group, the person who makes a mistake with his lover is abandoned, and a mistake at work is never acceptable.
However, human nature and limited physical capacity are the main indicators that fault is in our nature. Think about your daily life, you have an item you forgot to take with you, your e-mails sent without an attachment, your getting on the wrong bus, your straying even on your way home… You can see dozens of these mistakes in every person's life. Assuming that we will not make mistakes while we are so open to making mistakes is actually a deceit that we prepare ourselves.
So what can you do?
In addition to protecting your self-esteem by experiencing the rightful joy of your successes, you can also evaluate your failures or mistakes in this way. As a result of a failure, first become aware of your "self-serving bias". For example, what could you change among the reasons you were not selected for that interview? What do you need to do better? What did this defeat teach you? What will you do differently from now on?
While recognizing, accepting and reflecting on failure or failure may feel good at first, failing to take action to improve them will damage your self-esteem after a while. While examining your mistakes, it is very important to learn realistic lessons, determine the actions you can take, and complete these actions to protect your self-esteem.
Depression
People need to see themselves and their situation in a positive way, but exceptions are also common. The "self-serving bias" equation I mentioned above works the other way around in people who are depressed or pessimistic. In other words, while these people think that they are the only responsible for the failure, they say that success comes entirely with luck.
Although they take responsibility for failure, they may not be able to find the strength to fix it. This situation feeds their depression by making their situation even more difficult. They can escape this cycle with the help of cognitive psychology therapy.
