Wedding Business Solutions

Are you suffering from confirmation bias?

• Alan Berg, CSP, Global Speaking Fellow

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Are you suffering from confirmation bias?

Are you stuck looking for proof that the way you do things is right? When was the last time you challenged your own business habits, or asked if there might be a better way to respond to wedding inquiries or create new offerings? In this episode, I dig into confirmation bias—why we cling to familiar strategies, how rejecting change might be holding you back, and what happens when you finally open yourself up to different perspectives and new solutions.

Listen to this new 7-minute episode for fresh advice on breaking out of old patterns, weighing new options, and finding better ways to grow your wedding business.

If you have any questions about anything in this, or any of my podcasts, or have a suggestion for a topic or guest, please reach out directly to me at Alan@WeddingBusinessSolutions.com or visit my website Podcast.AlanBerg.com 

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View the full transcript on Alan’s site: https://alanberg.com/blog/



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I'm Alan Berg. Thanks for listening. If you have any questions about this or if you'd like to suggest other topics for "The Wedding Business Solutions Podcast" please let me know. My email is Alan@WeddingBusinessSolutions.com. Look forward to seeing you on the next episode. Thanks.

Listen to this and all episodes on Apple Podcast, YouTube or your favorite app/site:

©2025 Wedding Business Solutions LLC & AlanBerg.com

Are you suffering from confirmation bias? Listen to this episode. See what I'm talking about.

Hey, it's Alan Berg. Welcome back to another episode of the Wedding Business Solutions podcast. I was listening to yet another book on decision making. I love listening to books about how people make decisions because it just involves everything that we do.

They were talking about decisions and were talking about confirmation bias, which is that we look for information that supports what we already believe to support us. Now, I'm not talking political here. I am not getting political. I'm talking about in business and in life.

So if you are trying to think about how to respond to inquiries, and you've been responding by attaching a brochure or putting links or asking right away for a phone call or whatever—all things which I've said not to do in my books and things like that—and you're dead set that this is the right way to do it, you're going to look for information that supports that. You're going to look for an article, look for something online, look for a video or somebody, preferably somebody with some authority, that will say that what you're doing is the right thing. It's just human nature. We look for things that support what we already believe. We tend to reject the things that go against what we believe because it makes us accept the fact that we were incorrect.

Now, the truth is we might not have been incorrect all along, but as in so many things in business and in life, life changes, things change. The world changes, other people are changing, technology changes. And what used to work may not work now. If you've ever read the book Who Moved My Cheese?—if you've not read that little book, I highly recommend it. It's a book on change. It's exactly what we're talking about here.

If you believe something which, in the book Who Moved My Cheese?, you believe that your cheese will be in a certain place in this maze—it’s two little rats in a maze in a lab—then you will keep going back there until your cheese goes back, because that's where it's supposed to be. And when somebody says, “I'm going to go find cheese elsewhere,” or in the case of the book, “I have found cheese elsewhere,” the one mouse or rat rejects that because their belief is that it should be where it is and shouldn't be someplace else.

So we're looking for confirmation bias. We're looking for things that support what we already believe. The problem with that is we have to get outside of our own knowledge very often in life and in business to be able to see things from a different perspective. That's why if you bring a diverse group of people to the table, you're going to get more views of the way things are seen in the world.

I've said this before on the podcast: I grew up in Queens in New York City, which is part of Long Island. That's my view of the world. I have a certain ethnicity, I went to certain schools, I had certain friends. It's my view of the world. And every one of you has your own view of the world. You don't see the world the way that I do. I don't see the world the way that you do. And it's when we're open to seeing it differently that we can come up with different ideas.

So whether it's something in your business, you're trying to create a new product, you're like, okay, this is the way to do this. Well, maybe it is, but maybe there are other ideas, maybe there are other ways to do it. It's the curiosity of being open to “maybe there's a better way than what I have” that breaks this confirmation bias and says, okay, maybe I'll see things that support what I do, maybe I'll see things that don't. And if you're getting both sides of that, you can lean either way.

Confirmation bias is something that hinders every one of us all the time, because we're not looking for, “Is this the only way to do this or the only way to look at this?” We're looking for, “Hey, I want somebody to prove me right. I think the smartest company heads, the smartest CEOs, the smartest managers, the smartest leaders are looking for somebody to poke holes in something. Because if we can see that now, before we go too far down the line, maybe we'll realize, “We haven't gone that far, we're going to go in a different direction right now.” We're not afraid to change direction.

Sunk cost is another thing that goes along very similarly with this confirmation bias. You've spent money on something, you invested time in something, and then you find out that there could be a different way or maybe there's even a better way. But you don't want to let go of what you've done because you've put money and time into that. And you're looking at that money and time, but that's gone. It's called a sunk cost.

There are times when you just need to stop throwing more money at that and put the money towards something that's going to give you the result you want. If you're old enough to remember or have heard about the supersonic airplanes, the SSTs, the supersonic transport, the Concorde that British Airways and Air France had—these could fly across the ocean in less than half the time that a regular jet could do it. It's a perfect example of sunk cost. Those planes were losing money every time they flew. They didn't hold a lot of people; it was very cramped inside. They should have stopped way sooner than they did, but they just kept throwing money at it, kept throwing money at it, kept throwing money at it until they just couldn't afford the losses anymore and realized, we need to stop here.

We do that in business all the time too. We keep throwing money and throwing money and then we look elsewhere. We just recently did that with our TV services at home. Not going to get into the whole detail about that, but this is what we've been doing. We've been paying for this service and this service and this service. And I'm like, wait a minute. We're not using most of that. Literally in our house, other than the paid services that we do, we watch two channels. That's it. We watch ABC to watch Jeopardy and my wife watches Turner Classic Movies. It's on all day long. That's her background. It's on all day long. Literally, those are the only two channels. Everything else we do is on a paid service.

So why am I paying for 100 channels, 200 channels, 500 channels, when we literally watch two? I finally called up and I was going to cancel and they said, “Oh, you can just do this plan.” And I did. I cut down the plan. But I thought, really? The last time I called and said I only needed two channels, you told me I still had to have this plan. I didn't know what had changed. So I just thought that's the way it was and there was no better option. I found out there was a better option.

So the next time you're looking for information and you're trying to see if what you're doing is right, try to look for information that supports what you're doing, but also try to look for: is there information that goes against what you're doing? Then you can weigh the validity of those and come up with the best solution instead of just putting on your blinders and saying, this is the way, and that also says it's the way, and that's all there is—even though there might be even more evidence you should be going in a different direction.

You know I love listening to books. I love getting on and talking about things that I heard in them. I heard this this morning—confirmation bias—and thought, gosh, we're all victim to this all the time.

So hope it helps. Thanks for listening.


I’m Alan Berg. Thanks for listening. If you have any questions about this or if you’d like to suggest other topics for “The Wedding Business Solutions Podcast” please let me know. My email is Alan@WeddingBusinessSolutions.com or you can  text, use the short form on this page, or call +1.732.422.6362, international 001 732 422 6362. I look forward to seeing you on the next episode. Thanks.

Listen to this and all episodes on Apple Podcast, YouTube or your favorite app/site:

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Alan Berg, CSP, Global Speaking Fellow

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