Honesty is going to take you places in life that you never could have dreamed and it’s the easiest thing you can practice in order to be happy, successful and fulfilled. Honesty is part of the foundation of my core values and principles. Honesty cuts through deception and knifes its way through deceit and lies. Honesty leads to a fulfilling, free life.

Honesty is not just about telling the truth. It’s about being real with yourself and others about who you are, what you want and what you need to live your most authentic life. Honesty promotes openness, empowers us and enables us to develop consistency in how we present the facts. Honesty sharpens our perception and allows us to observe everything around us with clarity.

The Tangled Web We Weave

The opposite of honesty is deception — or lying. Lying is equally bad whether you are deceiving others or yourself. When you lie, you delude yourself into believing what you’re saying. You start digging a hypothetical ditch, even if with an infant-sized spoon, that will keep getting bigger over time. You confuse yourself, confuse others, lose credibility and put yourself in harm.

The worst type of lying we practice, in order to deceive, is when we lie to ourselves. We start messing around with our concept of morality, right and wrong, as well as our dreams and desires. Times that I lied in order to do something that I knew was wrong, I could feel it. My inner core warred and rebelled against what I was mentally committing to doing because it was in contrast to who I really am.

When I look back on it, every time I lied (that I can recall) I was trying to excuse or misrepresent my own shortcomings or to compensate for something. I was trying to pursue a sinful desire that would only, at best, produce temporary pleasure. Lies I told were often due to a lack of effort, positive morals or thoughts.

Other times, I was convincing myself I wasn’t good enough or able to do something my heart was really set on. Lying or presuming I knew something I didn’t really know was the easy path. This discouraging thought manifested itself in ways that I couldn’t possibly perceive at the time. It set me back by delaying the pursuit of my dreams. It took away my ability to take chances that my heart was willing to take but my mind was blocking me from taking.

Despite its temptation, ease of use and false promises, lying gets us nowhere in the end. We stay right in our own tracks or much worse, go backwards.

Better Health

Honesty and seeking the truth is always the way to go. Honesty engenders confidence, faith, empowers our willpower and represents us in the best way for others to see and witness our example. Honesty improves our vitality. In an honesty experiment conducted by two University of Notre Dame professors, results showed that telling the truth is good for our health:

Telling the truth when tempted to lie can significantly improve a person’s mental and physical health, according to a “Science of Honesty” study.

The above results were presented at the American Psychological Association’s Annual Convention four years ago.

Respectable, admired behavior is always carried out with honesty. Telling the truth and backing it up with actions show respect for what’s right and an esteem for ethical and moral integrity. Honesty is one of the key components to character and one of the most admired traits of any successful, responsible person.

Success, for me, is not quantified in terms of dollars, sales or number of Facebook followers. Particularly not the latter! I value success in terms of character, self-awareness, honesty, emotional intelligence and hard work. How we treat ourselves, others and how we use our talents to improve the lives of others.

An emotionally intelligent person is a person of impeccable integrity and honesty; someone who can perceive and recognize the quality of honesty in another. Business transactions and the everyday transactions of human relations must be carried out with a code of trust and honesty or else everything will break down.

Christopher D. Connors

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