The truth is of course a rather abstract concept. It is intensely personal which makes it rather difficult for anyone else to tell whether you are telling it or not - except subjectively. Which is, I guess where the problems start.
The only person who knows if you are telling the truth is you. Unless you are prepared to be the one who keeps an eye on it there is rarely any direct comeback on you for not telling the truth and so it often seems easier to lie.
In reality telling the truth is just about technique, in the same way that lying is. If you think about whatever you have to say there is an honest way to say it that will not cause needless pain. Frequently this means not imagining you already know the answer, but asking questions and discovering that a truth quite different to the one you were trying to hide emerges.
Unsurprisingly, for many of us, it is not quite as simple as that. Many of started lying at an early age. Lets take a typical parents lesson to their children in lying.
The threat. If you do that one more time I will… The problem here is that the threat is often hard for the parent to carry out and so they don't. The child instead of learning not to do the thing in question learns that their parents do not always tell the truth.
It is not just parents who teach us how to lie - teachers, TV advertising (remember the first time you persuaded your parents to buy you something you saw advertised on TV and were disappointed by it?) and later employers and politicians are all influential in teaching us dishonesty.
So what does telling the truth involve? And do we really want to anyway?
I believe that the first person that we need to learn to be honest with is ourselves. Until we can trust ourselves there is little chance of us being honest with others. We need to understand the myths that we create for ourselves to justifying doing things or not doing things.
Many of create one or more alter egos within which we live most of the time. These alter egos are defined by second guessing how we think others want us to behave. We the spend much of our time flipping between our work selves, our home selves and if we are lucky our real selves.
All of this sucks away at our energy and leaves us confused, unhappy and prey to the distractions of consumerism. It becomes easy for marketers to persuade us that we are too weak to resist temptations and that we will be happy if we buy that coke, beer, make-up, camera, car, whatever.
By learning to be honest with ourselves we become authentic and free up all of that energy we were previously using to maintain our alter egos. Unfortunately this is as difficult as it sounds. Many of us have spent years developing convincing alter egos and sub personalities that behave in particular ways with particular people and in particular situations. Persuading yourself to come clean is hard. The reality of doing it can be harder still.
The first step is to evaluate every area of your life. Your job, your partner, where you live and so on. In each case the evaluation must ask:
What am I doing?
Why?
What would I like to be doing?
Why not?
(I am indebted to Rob Weston rabw@organismics.com for the elegant simplicity of these questions)
Answering these questions is not the matter of an afternoon, more it is something to ponder over weeks and months. Something to discuss with trusted friends or unknown councillors. As the answers emerge so the choices will present themselves and you will stand at the crossroads that you have created.
There are three options.
- Stay at the cross roads - saves you having to make a choice but remains uncomfortable until you leave
- Take the easy path - submerge your doubts and carry on
- Take the hard path - go with the new answers and see what happens
Once you have been through all of this the truth will be the only option and you will be comfortable using the technique for telling the truth mentioned above.
Offer: Authentic Guides offer strategic planning, business and personal coaching to help your authentic business flourish for more details neil@authenticbusiness.co.uk.
The Author: Having raced cars, worked for and run small businesses in publishing and exhibitions Neil joined chbi a small internet company in Bermondsey in 1997, two years later it had transformed into Razorfish with 2000 employees in 13 offices around the world and Neil was responsible for their strategy offering to clients. Neil's book Authentic, how to make a living by being yourself is published by Wiley in October 2003.
Neil now lives in Bradford on Avon working on Authentic Business both as a newsletter and as to create an alternative infrastructure for a new authentic way of doing business.