The Data That Lied

Here's the thing about cognitive distortions: they don't announce themselves. They don't arrive with warning labels. They dress up as logic. As intuition. As "gut feeling backed by evidence."

You build the case. You gather the proof. You make the decision.

And somewhere in that process, you ignore the one variable that would've changed everything.

Not because you didn't see it. Because seeing it would've meant admitting you wanted a different answer.

I watched someone close to me unravel a career choice last week. On paper, it was perfect. The salary matched. The role aligned. The timing felt right.

Except it wasn't.

And when they sat down to trace back why they chose it in the first place, they found three invisible lenses:

• •Confirmation bias. They'd only asked people who would agree.
• •Personalization. They assumed rejection of the offer meant rejection of them.
• •All-or-nothing thinking. It was either this role or failure.

The data didn't lie. But the way they needed the data to behave? That did.

Strip emotion from a past choice: not to punish yourself, but to see clearly.

Pick one decision you believed was purely logical. A job. A relationship boundary. A project direction.

Now remove the feelings attached to the outcome.

What changes?

This is the Decision Autopsy: a method of dissecting not the what, but the why beneath the why.

You're not looking for blame. You're looking for the lens.

Which filter did you use? Strategy? Emotion? Pattern-matching from a wound you didn't realize was still open?

We talk about objectivity like it's a switch. Like you can just decide to see clearly and: boom: clarity arrives.

But objectivity is a skill. A discipline. A muscle you build by confronting the stories you tell yourself about what the facts should mean.

The lie isn't in the numbers. It's in the narrative you wrapped around them.

And the hardest part? You won't always know you're doing it.

That's why the practice matters. That's why revisiting decisions without the weight of emotion isn't about being cold: it's about being honest.

One of the architects I work with keeps a decision log. Not for wins. For misses.

Every wrong call gets a line:

• *What I believed.
• *What I ignored.
• *Which distortion clouded the lens.

It's not self-flagellation. It's pattern recognition. It's learning to see the invisible scaffolding of your own thinking.

Here's the whisper underneath it all:

What belief of mine has shaped how I interpret facts?

You don't see the world as it is. You see it through the architecture of everything you've survived, avoided, hoped for, and feared.

And until you audit that architecture, you'll keep planting red herrings in your own path: convinced they're clues.

The data won't lie.

But the story you need it to tell? That will.