Being Honest With Yourself

• With integrity you will develop a much better relationship with yourself.
• Most people lack integrity, deny reality and lie to themselves.
• Confront your fears and never give in! 

To have integrity means that you are an honest, moral and ethical person. Integrity and character therefore go hand in hand, and first begin with your relationship with yourself.

Once you have integrity and live a life that is aligned with your truest values and ideals, only then will you experience true happiness and satisfaction in life.

Are You Honest With Yourself?

Most people are not honest with themselves, and go to great expense to protect themselves from the reality around them. They do this by lying.

Lying is extremely appealing because in the short term it can make a bad situation seem better than it is, or disappear altogether. But in the long term it will only make things worse.

Here are a few common ways people lie to themselves and deny reality.

Repression

Refuse to think about something by trying to forget about it, and bury it deep inside the mind.

Projection

Associate their own negative qualities with someone else, by blaming circumstances or situations on another person.

Delusion

Refusing to accept the reality of a situation, by pretending things are different than they actually are.

Denial

This is the most common form of lying to oneself and involves a refusal to accept the truth.

The Purpose Of Lies              

Often when we experience unhappiness in life it is because there is something that we feel uncomfortable with, and are not fully facing or dealing with it.

The source of this unhappiness may be a bad relationship, a bad job or financial worries, and frequently people cope with these situations by lying to themselves.

These lies in the form of repression, projection, delusion or denial, all serve the purpose of protecting the person from their current reality, by making things appear better than they actually are.

Why Do People Lie To Themselves?

The main reason why people lie to themselves is fear.

Rather than confront a situation directly, it is often easier and less painful to simply to forget about it, or deal with it later.

However when you lie to yourself and refuse to tackle the situation head on, you do not make things better or go away. You only postpone the inevitable, and often make the final outcome much worse.

For example, many people who experience financial difficulties often refuse to accept the reality of the situation by repressing it, or deluding themselves that somehow everything will work itself out.

In reality by not dealing with the situation and choosing to ignore it, their financial situation gets worse until they are no longer able to cope. Often things get so bad these people feel there is no way out, and some even commit suicide.

Whilst this is an extreme example and not all problems you face will be of this magnitude, the same principle applies whenever you try to protect yourself from reality by lying to yourself.

Final Thoughts On Integrity

Every time we try to protect ourselves from reality by lying, we give into fear.

If we continue to give into fear it will become a habit, and over time our character and integrity will weaken or diminish completely.

Giving into fear and refusing to accept the situation for what it is, will also result in failure to take appropriate action that could have remedied the situation. As you have already seen, this can make things much worse than they originally were.

However if you confront your fears directly, the opposite will happen. Your integrity will grow and your character will strengthen.

The result will be a reduction in the severity of the situation, and consequently a reduction in the amount of anxiety experienced in the long term.

So the next time you are experiencing unhappiness in life, stop and ask yourself what is causing this unhappiness?

Then resolve to deal with it immediately, and avoid the temptation of short term comfort provided by projection, denial, delusion or repression of reality.