As children, we are told again and again about the importance of telling the truth. Then, somewhere around late-elementary school, we discover that our parents have been telling some pretty big whoppers, about Santa Clause and the Easter Bunny and, well, the list goes on. So how important is the truth, really?
The answer is: it depends. It depends on who you are communicating with. It depends on the type of information being shared. It depends on the reasons for communicating. “Do these pants look good on me” is given different consideration than “where were you at 9:03pm on the night of the murder?”
The only real place the answer is consistent and knowable is with your relationship with yourself. In this one relationship, I believe that truth is essential. Every decision you ever make will be influenced by what you believe about your abilities, desires, and circumstances. If you feed yourself misleading information, you will make bad decisions. It’s that simple.
It’s not possible to be truthful all the time. After all, we are all biased by our past and present beliefs. But it is important to always want the truth for ourselves, to always seek the truth about ourselves. If you live your life with blinders on, you will only achieve success randomly and inconsistently.
How, then, do you find the truth?
It really comes down to paying attention. Observe yourself closely as you go through your day. Watch the actions you perform and the decisions you make, and become familiar with your habits and rituals. Listen to your internal dialog.
Record your day in as much detail as you need to in order to find the bigger patterns in your life. You will be surprised with what you find. For instance you might find that you watch way more TV than you had let yourself admit, or that you don’t stay focused on one task when you are working on a project. You may discover that you don’t follow your religious teachings the way you believe you should. By keeping a time journal of how you spend your time over a while, you will more readily see the patterns that you wouldn’t notice on a day-to-day basis.
Notice how effective you are at accomplishing what you set out to, and try to figure out what works and what doesn’t. Then ask yourself what changes you could make for better results.
One of the hardest, but potentially one of the most informative, ways to learn the truth about yourself is to ask the people close to you. Ask them to be gentle but open, to share with you what they see from their perspective. This kind of external feedback will help you bypass your own biases and uncover things that aren’t always obvious.
Ultimately, all these exercises are just different ways of collecting information about yourself. But there is one more important step: you must open your heart and your mind to what you will discover.
We don’t always like what we find about ourselves, and we tend to only look at the good. But to be truthful means to accept the weaknesses along with the strengths. It requires you be willing to be less than perfect, and even to find out that you are not the person you think of yourself as being.
As you learn more about who you are in different circumstances and situations, you can begin to make effective, significant changes in any direction you want. But first, you have to know where you are starting. And that means being truthful with yourself.
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Quote for the week
Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened. - Sir Winston Churchill
From the editor
It’s technically still summer, but already it’s starting to feel like fall. I’ve had to close all the windows at night, and now even during the day most of them are shut. Summer went by all-too-quickly this year. Time to pull out the fleece, I suppose.
Healthy thoughts,
Jeff
