This could be the most powerful five minutes of your life ❤️What I often propose…
What´s your favorite way of lying?
| I have a frank—and maybe unpleasant—question for you: What is your most common way of lying? Do you exaggerate, downplay, pretend, embellish in order to try to please others? Or do you just stay silent? Do you make jokes to try to make things lighter, less important when actually they are important to you? ? If so, then some good news for you: you are not so different from the rest of us. We all lie. We often lie without even realizing it in the moment, as it’s so ingrained in us. In Radical Honesty, we consider withholding important information to also be lying. We carefully share certain things about ourselves and not everything in an attempt to give a carefully crafted picture of ourselves, while trying avoid unpleasant, messy stuff. Like not liking the dinner your mom cooked or the new clothes of your friend, or the way your friend / partner / family member or boss was talking. And when we do this, unfortunately we tend to only end up feeling less connected to the other person. Lying is a lonely place. As Brad Blanton, the founder of Radical Honesty, puts it: “Lying is work and a pain in the ass and makes you lonesome as hell. We claim that lying is the major source of all human stress. It wears us out and eventually kills us. When people engage honestly, energy that was wasted maintaining a performance to make an impression is suddenly available for real creativity in playing together.” We all lie and pretend consciously or unconsciously, including to ourselves. While honesty is a virtue, it is also an impossible task. And yet it is worth striving for if you want to have happy close relationships and take care of your well-being. (There are studies showing that telling the truth increases physical and mental well-being. Makes a lot of sense in my opinion!) When you catch yourself telling a modified truth, in my opinion the best thing is to: Most likely uncomfortable and not as uncomfortable as your head tells you. The task is not always easy, as one’s own habits are often unconscious. Most of us have been taught well and are quite used to giving a polished picture of ourselves or what we did. However, no style of pretending really supports our connection to others, to our happiness or to our well-being. So why do we lie? ?♀️ We learn to lie already in childhood, through the upbringing and example of your parents and teachers. For example, when the parents cannot bear the child’s expression of anger or sadness, the child is also taught to suppress those emotions. The message from the parent is essentially: “You must not be demanding, difficult or loud. I love you the most when you are kind, easy and quiet.” We lie to fit in, to be loved or liked, to be accepted, to not be abandoned or excluded. In a way, lying is our way to survive in the world. And we use those strategies to lie or pretend our parents rewarded us for. Although lying is partly an instinctive coping mechanism, it is possible to change it by acting differently. Little by little. So let me ask you: Do you want to lie less and be more honest & open? Do you want to explore your patterns and let go out the patterns which are not serving you? Are you excited to learn and practice with other honesty fans in a systematic way? If you say yes, then Honesty Europe’s Practitioner Program might be for you. We have some more spots available for our year-long Practitioner Program starting in January. The applications will be closing 8th December. Message us to learn more! Coming back to lying and telling the truth, you might find this video about Telling the Truth useful. One more question: When was the last time that you lied to someone? How was that for you? How do you feel about going back to that person and telling the truth? Have a good weekend! Tuulia (& Pete) P.S. Did you already notice the last in-person events in 2022? Next week’s retreat in the Netherlands is fully booked yet we do have four more spots in the weekend workshop in Amsterdam (9-11 December)! The very last workshop of the year is a weekend workshop in Helsinki (16-18 December)! This workshop is in Finnish ??? Come and join the Finnish honesty fans for a good time and some practice! |
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