Gandhi’s autobiography is titled, The Story of My Experiments with Truth.
That is a powerful recommendation:
Experiment with the truth.
In an early chapter, he talks about going to a brothel and then being humiliated from being there, by his own desires. That is truth telling. He admits to having eaten meat as a teen and hiding it from his parents, which was a huge deal in his family.
Neil Strauss says, “Intimacy is sharing your reality with someone else and knowing you’re safe, and them being able to share their reality with you and also be safe.”
At a deeper level, truth is directly connected to love.
Pondering this shows you the immense power of telling the truth. To lie is to block access to connection and love.
Truth telling is about connecting to yourself first, and then to others.
Can I connect to what is true for me in this moment?
Then, can I say it out loud?
This is vulnerable and it will feel like a risk.
Truth will set you free only after you take a leap.
The surprise is that vulnerable truth often invites connection, rather than the other way around.
In the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes, the emperor is naked and nobody will say anything.
Then a child says the simple truth: “He isn’t wearing any clothes.”
The lesson is that the truth is often what is obvious and hiding in plain sight.
I see this all the time in business. People simply don’t want to say that the product sucks, or there is an issue, or that the incentives are all off. We often don’t tell the truth because we are getting some benefit from hiding. That benefit of any kind allows us to self-deceive.
A client used this analogy: Not telling the truth is like having stacks and stacks of papers on your desk that just keep piling up. The way to get the clutter off your desk is to tell a truth, and you can keep going and see where that leads.
Telling the truth doesn’t mean being mean or cruel. It simply means connecting to what’s true for you in this moment and being aware of that.
What’s true for you can be very simple.
The truth right now for you might be as simple as, “No, I didn’t order that salad.”
Or it could be something very deep, such as, “I have been wanting to move for a long time. I just couldn’t admit it to myself and others.”
Telling the truth is one of those ultimate values. It’s a value you can keep going deeper on and discovering more from every day.
This is the exploration.
When you are truthful, you are making yourself vulnerable by allowing parts of yourself to be seen or heard that previously you were scared to show.
When you’re truthful, you are aligning to one of the highest values.
Like religion, like giving yourself up to God, you become stronger when you tell the truth because less can touch or affect you.
Rather than thinking about what actions to take, what if instead you looked at which truths you needed to tell, first to yourself, and then possibly to others?
This can cut through months to years of accumulated clutter…
xx David