Relentlessly telling the truth could be the hardest thing you do in your life.
Telling the truth all the time would mean to always express your feelings and thoughts to the fullest, never hold back and never filter or change any message to something more feasible because you want to prevent the other person from harm.
It would mean to always say the truth even if it means you will face embarrassment, an inconvenient argument with your spouse, the feeling of losing your face in front of your fellow people or maybe getting rejected by your loved ones.
Being honest is tough and that is the reason why so many people lie on a daily basis. Check out Brad Blanton’s book Radical Honesty
. It will definitely redefine your perspective on lying and withholding the truth and can for sure improve your general happiness in life!
But the main problem here is that lying will eventually consume you from the inside. Although you might get really good at it and even if everybody believes you, you are the only person that knows the truth. You are the one who still knows that you have been dishonest to the people around you and even to yourself (which is even worse).
Even if everybody around loves you, you are the one who cannot participate in that love, because you know. Whenever you are lying to somebody (or to yourself) you are diminishing your self-worth. You are basically telling yourself that your real YOU is not good enough and that you have to pretend something different for whatever reason. Most if not all motives for lying to somebody are ego-based.
So if you lose your ego, you also lose the need to lie. But we are often so caught up in the idea of keeping up the identity we think makes us shine the brightest in the eyes of the other people, that we forget who we really are. We believe that we might not be enough. We are scared to look “worse” or “less” than somebody else and fear that the person we would like to impress with or “protect” from the truth might get this feeling too.
It is basically our fear which is holding us back.
If you stop to judge yourself and others, they won’t feel that urge to hold on to their identity and might open up. If you give a person the impression that if he opens up to you, you will judge them badly, he will never open up to you fully. It is that exact fear of being criticized that stops us. Nobody wants others to look down on them, nobody wants others to see them as a “failure”. But it is always two parties who are playing this game and you can be the one who breaks out of if any time. All you have to do is tell the truth and deal with the consequences.
Drop your ego, face the facts, express your emotions and deal with the consequences. If you are holding something back just because you think it is easier this way and “you don’t want to harm” your significant other, go out there and tell that person. It will free you from that burden of carrying that issue with you and you create space for you and your mind. Do it first and face the consequences later. The worst that could happen is that this person might get angry, disappointed, or you feel embarrassed.
But if you leave your ego out of the equation, there is nothing you have to be afraid of. It is just the ego in you that gets threatened, because is spend so much time to build up this big and shiny identity.
Go out there and break your ego to pieces and you will see that something beautiful lies buried underneath.