Why It's So Hard to Tell the Truth

Suppose this year you did something radical?

Suppose that this year you decided to make decisions based on the truth. Not some absolute truth but your truth – the truth that you know “inside” – the truth that your inner “rightness” meter knows.

No analyzing the pros and cons, no researching best practices.

Suppose you led your professional life and your personal life totally based on your inner rightness meter?

Your gut. Suppose you left your verbal mind out of it? Suppose it was your body that was the boss and your mind was just a helper?

If you are saying “your inner what?” you are not alone.

If you are like most people you’ve been taught to ignore the sensations of your body – bypass them and jump immediately into your analytical mind. Our formative years are spent being shifted from feelers – sensing information through our intuitions, emotions and body sensations to thinkers – relying solely on our analytical brains. In fact some people believe that the best use of their body is for carrying their heads around.

Wrong.

Your non-verbal body takes in far more information about the world than your verbal mind does. Your mind processes a respectable 40 bits of information per second. The non-verbal body (intuition, physical sensations) totally blows this number out of the water. It takes in 11million bits of information per second.

Shocking.

If you aren’t using your body to make decisions you are probably working way too hard and making many decisions that are wrong for you.

I've created a list of common truthblockers - reasons people don't listen to their body's wisdom.  If awareness can lead to insight, this might help.

Truthblockers:

You already have a plan and don’t want to dump it, or change it and the outcome of another choice is uncertain. You don’t like uncertainty – like 99% or the human race, and you don’t want to experience it so you ignore the nagging discontent.

The decision that you are making makes perfect sense. Everything is well thought out; the ducks are all lined up. When you tell the story about this decision it sounds so perfect that you decide it is truer than the tiny quiet voice in your gut that you hear from time to time. Unfortunately, the tiny quiet voice in your gut is always your truth.

You’ve wanted this “thing” for so long and you don’t want to listen to the possibility that the solution you have is not the right one – for you. Your ego wants to be right. Your ego will speak so loudly in your head that it will block out the tiny quiet voice in your gut. Don’t let it.

You are busy orchestrating the universe and too exhausted, overwhelmed, tense, and hyper focused to even notice that you are feeling like crap. Overwhelm is an alarm signal that you need to investigate. You need to take a mini-time out to listen to your gut and figure out what is going on.

You are afraid that listening to your gut means you’ll hurt someone else and you never want to do that. Stay in your business. You have a right to your truth even if it makes other people unhappy. And maybe “other people” will just be disappointed, not hurt. And maybe “other people” will recover quickly and move on. Your job is to give yourself oxygen first, because if you don’t you won’t be able to breathe.

You don’t want to feel bad. You don’t want to feel sad, grieve, cry, be hurt, disappointed, feel vulnerable or lose something that you really wanted. You don’t want to feel. Period. But it’ll hurt worse later. You’ll end up hurting yourself and disappointing others more later when the truth comes out.

Radical honesty.

Telling your truth.

Truth happens in your gut – in your psyche – in your body sensations. Truth belongs to you. Your truth isn’t necessarily the same as someone else’s. It isn’t objectively verifiable. It’s personal.

It’s hard to tell the truth all the time. I admit that. But if you want to create your life's work and live the life you were made to live, it's essential. 

Start listening for yours.