The Importance of Being Honest

By far, one of the most important things I've discovered about life is the importance of being honest. Except I don't mean being honest with others, but instead, being honest with yourself.

While the other kind of honesty, being honest with others, is very important, especially when it comes to friendships (and avoidance of getting into sticky situations with those you might not feel so loyal to), it all starts with being honest with yourself. Why?

For one, if you're not honest with yourself, it's going to be very difficult to make changes in your life. If you refuse to admit that something is causing a problem in your life, you can't even begin to touch the problem if you can't see it. While this obviously applies to such heavy-hitting situations as addiction, for example, it also applies to the most benign of problems. Take procrastination, for example. I'm sure when you've procrastinated, you've told yourself "I'm going to do this later... I'm obviously not going to let it go as far as I did before." But you are, and therein lies the problem. You aren't even aware that internally, you are refusing to take on a task. Once you admit "no, I do not want to do this, and I am not going to do this," you see the problem. If you realize you're not going to do something... that you don't want to do something, now you have something to work from. Once you can see what you're actually doing and feeling, you can now, in turn, feel something about this. "It bothers me that I'm not going to do what I'm supposed to do." What's after that? Up to you; you're moving forward if you can get to that point.

I think the idea that they may not turn out to be who they think they are scares most people. If you believe you're good at something, or moreover, you have some motivation to believe you're good at something ("oh, I may suck at classes, but I learn differently than everyone else, and I'm smarter"), it may be extraordinarily difficult to face that you may, in fact, be terrible at what you think you're good at. And this causes many problems. One sign is unnecessary defensiveness: when you lie to yourself, you know it, somewhere deep inside.

Often, there can be other motivating factors to surrounding yourself with beliefs that aren't true. What reason does one do this? Is it something from your past? Being honest with yourself can be one way to find these motivations. Once you uncover them, you can work on dealing with them. And this is all the more important, because these phantom motivations can often affect many diverse areas of our lives.

Your self esteem, and the very concept of who you are, can be heavily affected by dishonesty with yourself. If you cannot admit who you are to yourself, you do not know who you are. You may not even be aware of what you're capable of, both good and bad. Everything I talk about here can even cause you to build up a fake personality for yourself, based on your insecurities; once that personality is out in the world, interacting with external forces, what it believes is not going to be reinforced, and you'll further entrench yourself in your beliefs. Therefore, it can cause insecurities.

I find that once you are honest with yourself, it can improve your sense of worth and respect. I mean, after all, if you're important enough to yourself to work at getting to know, you might well be important to others, right?

I find that often, you cannot be honest with others if you're not honest with yourself. Obviously, you cannot admit that you have done something wrong, if you refuse to believe it yourself. Less obviously, it manifests itself in other behavior, such as overtly lying to someone. Often, lying to someone is much less about the other person than it is about yourself: if you believed you were capable of making a good decision, yet you had not made one, you may externally create a situation that makes it look more as if you had done the correct thing. One of the things you might do is lie to someone else you care about. To you, you were almost trying to fix the situation. But to them, all that they can see if that you let them down.

This is all in service of one thing: making it look to yourself as if you had, in fact, made the correct decision. You just don't want to face it. And then what happens? You never confront the reason you hadn't made the correct decision in the first place, so you have no opportunity to fix it.

Finally, and most importantly, when you lie to yourself, you don't learn. Failure is one of the most important aspects of learning. When you fail at something, either a goal that you set for youself, or a goal that someone else has set for you, you can glean some useful information out of this. There's usually a reason you failed, but if you refuse to admit you failed because the very idea of failure to you is unacceptable, you don't move forward. Often, people come up with reasons that avoid accepting that there was something they could have done, or something they would have wanted to do, to avoid failing: the results aren't applicable to me, the challenge wasn't fair, it was another person's fault. Sometimes, this is true, but you'll know when it is and when it isn't... if you're able to be honest with yourself, no matter how difficult that is.

This undermines the very idea of our lives, because life is a series of attempts and results. If you ignore those results when they can actually have some impact on you (a success is great and encouraging, but if you've succeeded, you don't really need to change anything, do you?), you're not living.

The more I think about things like this, the more I realize how counterintuitive it is. Everything we see is external: the things around us, the people around us, even the effects we have on external things. But it all begins internally, inside ourselves, where often, we cannot see what is going on.