Past Behaviours and Sunk Costs

As humans, we love to hold on to sunk costs and past behaviours.

A past behaviour becomes a sunk cost once we look back and see that the way we were doing something wasn’t serving us. We invested emotional capital and time into a lifestyle factor which wasn’t optimal.

BUT, because we did invest in it, we become attached to it.

I see this almost daily in the physical domain with training and exercise.

Last year I finally sold the 1992 Toyota Hilux that I had been coaxing along for a couple of years. It was hard to let go. I had invested in it. But, in the present moment and going forward, there was absolutely no reason to hold onto it.

We all have behavioural patterns that we know aren’t working and are in conflict with our dream direction. Saying that we’ve always been like this, or this is how I’ve always done it, is simply a resistance around accepting that we could have been doing things differently.

That’s OK. 

We don’t like to be wrong, but at the end of the day, holding onto sunk costs can be a huge limiter in forward progression. 

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