Know Thy Self
“Harsh Reality is Better than False Hope.”
I’m Going to Cut to the Chase…
The number one problem, the number one thing that has kept me from any success or goal in my life, has been my willingness to lie to myself. I’ve lied to myself about the amount of time I have to do something, I’ve lied to myself about my capabilities, I’ve lied to myself about the number of things I have to do, I’ve lied to myself about how I feel about something or someone. This obviously isn’t a good character trait. Why I developed this tendency and how it grew into something that was debilitating is probably something for another chapter. Right now just know there are several reasons why Lying to yourself can cause problems. I’m going to outline how it has hampered me and what I had to do to fix it.
Relationships
If you can’t keep it real with yourself it is VERY hard to stay real with other people. While lies and untruths are technically different, for the intent of lying to yourself they are, over time, they are the same. An untruth is something false that you believe to be true while a lie is something that you say knowing it to be false. The problem of untruths with other people is that they usually will believe you to be a liar (or at the very least incompetent) when you have a habit of telling untruths. Example: You believe it is going to rain today so you tell others it will rain. Even if you have an umbrella, if it doesn’t rain and you tell enough people that it will rain when it doesn’t, over time, they will no longer trust what you are saying. You believed it would rain and you were wrong. This distinction between the lie and the untruth almost ceases to exist when talking to other people. People expect others to be honest and moderately accurate most of the time and when that is no longer the case many relationships become strained and in many cases dissolve. In a professional setting, people may not tell you their view of you has changed, but you may have noticed you’re not invited to the happy hour and your assignments will have changed. All of this is because you have a perspective that isn’t rooted in reality. That’s not even to say anything about romantic/platonic relationships what lying to yourself to express in a negative relationship or lying about the negative aspects of other people, their effect on you, and what that does long term.
Growth
You can’t grow if you don’t know your shortcomings and you won’t know your shortcomings if you don’t acknowledge them. It’s okay to be morbidly obese, it’s okay to have a drinking problem, it’s okay to have an issue with your anger. These are all okay in two instances: When you are truly at peace with the adverse effects of those issues and if you are willing to own that is your issue. The most dangerous people are the ones who have problems but are lying to themselves about their problems. You can’t correct a problem you deny. The lie usually compounds and results in any action or inaction that is the opposite of what you really want. For example, I used to say “I’m going to get in shape” but I was lying to myself about it. I didn’t really commit to changing my diet or improving my exercise habits, so I didn’t improve or grow. I talked about this some in the last entry and the effects it caused to my psyche. Because I didn’t own the lack of commitment to changing I couldn’t address it and immediately work to resolve it. Lying to yourself isn’t just for goals you haven’t started, they can be for goals that you are already on a path to achieving. Let’s say you have a goal of getting to work on time and for the most part, you achieve it. However, you like to party hard on Sunday evenings and the hangover is making you late for work on Monday mornings pretty consistently. You want to get to work on time Monday but you have a tendency to tell yourself “ah, it’s just one more drink, I’ll be fine, I’ll tough it out and get up on time” on Sunday nights. You’re lying to yourself because clearly, you’re not doing that even though you’re telling yourself you will. You’re hampering yourself because you won't be realistic about your actions and the impact they have on your goals and life.
Competition
Lying to yourself is a fast way to kill your chances of winning when competing against others. Sure we all have to “run our own race” but sometimes it’s a zero-sum game. Those cases where getting a job, getting a promotion, earning a client, winning the race, hell even getting the girl are all situations where if you win the other people lost and vice versa. In these situations, you need to be at your best. How are you going to be at your best when you don’t know your weaknesses? When lying to yourself it’s very common to ignore your blind spots and soft points. In athletic competition, it’s usually known what your blind spots are because most people can see them. Often in these cases, we use other tools to compensate in the situation. A wide receiver that is a crappy route runner but has a really good release and decent hands can use those positives to overcome the negatives until others figure out how to take them away, which is the entire job of a defensive coordinator. Once he’s figured it out he can be rendered ineffective until improves those weak points. The soft points that I’m referring to are usually not the ones everyone else is aware of. You have a competitive advantage in dealing with yourself that no one else has: You have to live with yourself every single day. You know before anyone else does what your glaring deficiencies are, and they don’t go away just because you ignored them. If you know leading up to a pitch for a client that you don’t have what’s required to get something done for them, you can address it both in the pitch and with staffing and planning. If you lie to yourself about it being a deficiency, there is a good chance you won’t succeed in the pitch or, if you do get the client, you will underdeliver on what they need. Not only could this compromise your relationship with the client but it could compromise your reputation within the industry.
It gets even worse when you’re lying to yourself about your abilities and your competition is aware of your liabilities and that you aren’t addressing them. A good example is in the movie Drumline (ya’ll remember that Nick Cannon movie, don’t act brand new). This Hotshot snare drummer Devon Miles comes to an HBCU and gets on the drumline as the equivalent of a freshman starter. His section leader, Sean, is jealous of his talent and his ability to see someone else play and immediately play the same drum cadence. Devon is a strong drummer technically, he’s a bit cocky but he (understandably) believes that he is so talented that people will deal with his arrogance. However, Devon has another weakness: He can’t read music. He depends on hearing or watching others play to be able to play himself. He is well aware that he can’t read music. Instead of working on this known problem he lies to himself that his capabilities are such that it’s something he doesn’t need to work on. Eventually, his jealous section leader figures out that he can’t read music and exposes him to his entire section and to the band director. The clip below shows that back and forth that often happens with people that can’t be honest with themselves about their capabilities.
“Lying is what Got you Down here” - Dr. Lee
Solutioning
So how do we fix it? Well, that like all other issues, it depends on what you are trying to solve. What is “it”. If you are trying to fix an external problem, that’s one thing. If you are trying to fix the root problem that’s another entirely. Fixing the problem externally means positioning yourself in a way that appears to be complete or effective to other people. That would be like a person who is weak in one area using their strengths to allow them to still be effective. This makes the most sense if you have or are already addressing the weaknesses in your skillset. If you’re a 5k runner with good speed and cardio but bad form you can use the speed and cardio to get you by while working on your form. But as stated earlier, you can’t work on your form if you don’t acknowledge that you have bad form. If you believe that the speed and cardio will allow you to continue to be successful and you don’t work on speed and form you may be right, but just because you are the best in the field doesn’t mean you are your best self and that usually catches up with you (in my experience).
Grown Man Shxt is about being your best self and that means being honest with yourself AND following it up with action. What has worked for me (i’m still a work in progress) is the snowball method of goal attainment. That is start with the small things and work up to the big things. Losing weight was a big goal for me that I’m still working toward and was a work in progress, but that’s not where I started working on myself. It was with small things, like getting out of bed when my alarm went off. When you say “I’m going to wake up” at 6:00 am” and set your alarm for that time but you snooze until 6:15 am or 6:30 am you told yourself you were going to do something and didn’t. I’m not talking about waking up at 6:00 am feeling like crap and stumbling through the morning when you should’ve slept longer, but at the time if you didn’t sleep enough in that instance you need to do an analysis on why. Were you up late doing something else? Were you laying in bed on your phone too long? If you keep telling yourself to do something, you don’t, and you have the same crappy excuse as to why then you’re still lying to yourself.
I’ve found that many people (myself included) have a tendency to use the “snooze button” method on many items in life. You tell yourself you’re going to keep playing video games for 10 more minutes, you’re going to watch one more episode of a TV show, you’re going to talk on the phone for 5 more minutes, you’re going to scroll social media for a “little while” meanwhile that 10 minutes turned into 20, one more episode turned into 2, you're on the phone for 30 more minutes, that social media scrolling led down a 30-minute rabbit hole. I used to set alarms for tasks so I could tell myself to limit my time on something. That helped me with keeping myself honest about time-wasters. For those deeper things, it’s about wanting the goal more than staying away from the discomfort. Often those things we don’t want to address to get better require a sacrifice we don’t want to make. It’s in human nature to want the labor without wanting the baby, but life doesn’t work like that for almost anything worth having. For me, it’s about building a desire and constantly reminding myself of what I really want in life. When it came to the big stuff like changing my eating habits, I had to remind myself almost daily that I was sacrificing comfort now for comfort later. When it came to improving who I was as a man I had to tell myself that my actions are a reflection of some deficiencies that I am having and if I want to be a better person they have to be addressed.
The thing about lying to yourself is you see what the problem is. Devon Miles KNEW he couldn’t read music and chose not to do something about it. I KNEW that I had problems with the way I coped with the stress and I chose not to do anything about it. The lie is in thinking that you can get by and it’s not a big deal. The silver lining is that you saw the problem in the first place. Most of the time we see the problem, we just choose not to do anything about it. If you can see it, then you know it’s there, and if you know it’s there you can address it. Having the courage to address a deficiency is not easy and typically is built in one massive motivational push. It’s usually better to better to start small and build up.
As they say: Rome wasn’t built in a day and the way you eat an elephant is one bite at a time. You have what’s required to correct the behavior, do you have the courage to do so?
- Rob Immortal