Tell The Truth Now Or Be Forced To Later

You get the choice every so often to tell the truth or go an alternate route and speak dishonestly. Sometimes, dishonesty is great in the short term, possibly as short as a few milliseconds. What you might want to remember for the next time this choice comes up is that you can speak the truth now or be forced into doing so in a tougher condition at a future time.

The goal here is not to try to convince you to be more honest outright, but to point out the consequences of not being honest.

Dishonesty Represents Fear

One key point is that dishonesty is a sign of fear. Someone who had no fear would have no reason to be dishonest, because they wouldn’t be alleviating a short-term fear through it. Not only is it a signal of fear, your fear increases once the dishonesty has been shown, as you now have an added fear of someone finding out. If you want to get someone to start a cycle that will cause them huge problems in the future, try to convince them to lie about something. If your influence causes it to occur, you will have given them the seed of fear, which, unless they clear up quickly, will grow and hold them back from any substantial action.

You Will Know You Lied

When you don’t tell the truth at the first opportunity, and end up prevaricating, which is a quality word that means ‘lying’, the first person to know you lied is you. Then, you end up thinking about why you lied. This leads to feelings of disappointment, knowing that you viewed your interests and health as less valuable than that of appeasing the other person or people you were dishonest to. When you lie to someone, you are giving your power to them. It is like handing it over. If you lie to someone who doesn’t have your best intent in mind, and they find out, they will be quite glad because it represents weakness on your part.

Now You Try To Keep It Going

Once a lie is completed, you now have to use a certain percentage of your thinking capacity to maintain it. It stays in your mind, while all the other people you interact with don’t even know it is using up some of your cognitive ability. An item like this is one of the things that separates the results between a first-tier and second-tier individual of the same ability. While you might be equal to someone else, when it comes time to take action or show your ability, you may be 15% less able to do so due to a lie or two that is using up your energy. This then causes you to lose out to the other person, which further exacerbates your anguish in relation to the lie.

A Truth Tipping Point Is Reached

As this process continues, you may end up creating reason after reason to continue the deception. Each one adds on another percentage of thinking ability that is consumed maintaining your self-image in the face of continued demands. At a certain point, which might be called the tipping point, although that term is usually reserved for a cross into good territory, the lies take up more of your ability than you can handle to maintain your image. It is here that you switch to a fight-or-flight response. This is where your mind says that you have to release the truth because the cons now outweigh the pros of maintaining the deception, because you will soon break, and the truth will be released anyway. Once this point is hit, the truth comes out directly or indirectly, and the original consequences, plus added consequences from all the deception, show up to be responded to.

Lying versus telling the truth is another example of short-term thinking versus long-term thinking.  Here are some examples of what lying says to the world:

• I am too weak to deal with the consequences of the truth
• I think only in the short-term
• I am not interested in success
• I am fine with having bigger problems down the road

Successful People Know This

This also relates to why it is a pleasure to work with successful people. When you do so, you can be nearly 100% sure that they won’t lie to you, because they would not risk their success with such a mistake. They know one lie could be their downfall, so what you get from them is likely unadulterated thoughts from their stream of consciousness. This influences you to do the same.

Lying Versus “Truth Postponement”

Back to the original point, you have to remember that the choice is not whether you tell the truth or lie, but whether you tell the truth now or get forced into it in a tough way at a later time or date. Keeping that in mind as what the actual choice is makes ‘lying’ slightly less appealing. ‘Lying’ could have a new meaning of “truth postponement”.

Lying By Omission Leaves Others Unable To Help You

I almost forgot to add in this about lying by omission.  This type of lying is even worse than active lying because, at least in active lying, the person on the other end might help compel you to come clean and speak the truth later on.  When you lie by omission, the other person usually has no idea you even left something out.  They are then not able to provide some sort of corrective pressure on you.  While this is usually described as the less damaging type of lying, which it is with respect to the person being lied to, it is more damaging to you.  One way to think about it is that there is nothing you can say that is so bad that not saying it outweighs saying it in the long-term.

Tagged as: cognition, deception, lying, pressure, truth