When did you last tell yourself the truth

When did you last tell yourself the truth

Well of course I always tell myself the truth I hear you say, however, what we say out loud and what we say to ourselves is often completely different

At an amusing level we have had clients who state they want to change their career (in an attempt to bring control in their lives) when in fact if they were truly honest with themselves, what they really wanted was definitely something else, i.e. divorce or separation. Perhaps a marriage guidance counselor would hear it the other way around.

The Wake-up Call

So why don't we say what's really truthful to us, from my own experience it's mostly fear of the consequences. My first memory of not telling the truth to myself which had consequences was in the early part of my self-employed career as a management trainer.

I was working from my bedroom office and for the first time realised I was missing the social contacts of my previous "full-time "job. I also knew others that had decided to go down the self-employed trainer route and we decided to get together to share our mixed bag of skills and perhaps get more work. We designed some business cards, gave ourselves a company name (named after the garden center in which we met lol ) we talked, we laughed a lot and drank more than a little tea and coffee, but never tried for any work and after a while, we just stopped meeting.

On reflection, I suspect the majority of the group including myself had very little idea of setting up a business; we were there because we needed to be around people, but we couldn't just admit it to ourselves.

Do I Truly Want This?

You could argue, what's wrong with that, well nothing on the surface, but how many of us have put time and energy into something that we know deep inside will never fly, and even if it did we really don't want to be part of. Although I took a lot of learning from that experience I must admit I went on to repeat the same mistake several times more on my journey, taking part in a number of other projects which my heart just wasn't in, and of course, as previously, they came to nothing.  

Finally the "penny dropped" and I realised that not telling myself the truth only leads to failure, success is about truth, and being true to myself is the only way of aligning my energy skills and resources.  So whether it's a project, career, relationship, asking yourself the question "do I truly want this?" is a very powerful question to ask yourself and can save you a lot of your valuable time.