Reasons vs. Reasoning

The Doobie Brothers sang the lyrics "No wise man has the power to reason away . . . " When your reasons are just excuses, you can never move forward because excuses kill solutions.

 Grasshopper Notes are the writings from America's Best Known Hypnotherapist John Morgan. His podcasts contain his most responded to essays and blog posts from the past two decades. 

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Transcript

Reasons vs. Reasoning

Okay . . . call me way late to the party, but this just hit me.

The word reason has a double meaning — and I don’t think I ever really noticed it until now.

I mean, sure, back in grade school I knew it could be a noun and a verb. That much was on the test. But I never went any deeper than that. Not really.

Take this sentence:
 “The reason I was late was due to a traffic jam on Route 95.”

That version of reason? That’s an excuse. A legitimate one, maybe — but still an excuse.

Now reasoning is different. Reasoning is the act of thinking something through. Logically. Sensibly. Solution-oriented.

And that got me thinking about this bold and accurate statement:
 We can spend our lives piling up reasons… or we can use reasoning to discover that most of our reasons don’t actually get us anywhere.

Honestly, that thought alone should be reason enough to at least consider a new way forward.

Think back for a second.

You could probably come up with fifteen different reasons why you were flunking algebra . . . but somehow never landed on a reasoned solution.

“The teacher hates me.”
 “Everybody’s failing.”
 “The textbook is too heavy.”
 “I’m just not a math person.”

Pick your poison. You’ll never run out of reasons — and every one of them does a great job of killing the solution.

Here’s an unvarnished fact:
 It takes courage to stop giving excuses (reasons).

It takes courage to say, “Okay . . . what actually fixes this?”

Because reasoning gets you to a solution faster.

I’ll close with something my fourth-grade teacher, Miss Wagner, used to say — and it’s stuck with me ever since:

“You can have what you want . . . or your reasons why not.”

All the best,

John