125 How To Get Good At Telling The Truth

Last week, I spoke about why I've stopped using "vulnerability"... and why being truthful is a prerequisite for control of your reality. But if you have a history of "low fidelity" (anything from compulsive lying to being vague), becoming more truthful is easier said than done.

Transcript

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So last week I shared why I stopped using the word vulnerability and in that episode I spoke a lot about truth and the importance of telling truth not for some moral implications but what it actually does for your own psychology and your mastery of reality,

Your confidence,

Your self-esteem,

Your feeling of agency,

All that good stuff.

As I was putting it up on the internet I was searching for different tags to stick in there you know and one of the search terms that popped up I wouldn't have ever thought that people would even search was this phrase how to get good at telling the truth.

I definitely wouldn't have thought that like to me it's kind of just a decision right maybe some people need to be convinced of why they should tell the truth but the idea of like people not knowing how to tell the truth or be good at telling the truth that was kind of bizarre for me.

But I thought about it some more and I thought about people I know and thought about times in my own life that I maybe either outright lied when I didn't mean to or lied you know and did mean to but then felt shitty about it or more commonly these little white lies these little mistruths that we speak sometimes like exaggerating or changing the figures on something or not exactly sharing or being forthcoming with something that say someone we're close to would care about which maybe is not outright lying but it still comes down to the same type of truth telling that we're speaking about right like if you're clouding something that's true or you're hiding something that's true it's typically your shame that's doing that.

Of course that has negative implications on your psychology.

So I was thinking about that and I realized yeah I mean this is something that perhaps is hard for a lot of people obviously a lot of people are searching for this and it certainly ties in with what I've been speaking about a lot on the podcast which is the practical application of Nietzsche nobility.

My interpretation of Nietzsche nobility is the mindset or the perception of the perspective rather that you have the greatest influence over your reality your subjective experience not other people now other people say about you or think or what the collective deems is good or bad but actually what you decide is right for yourself that's essentially what the master archetype is.

So in this episode I'm going to speak about how to get really good at telling the truth because truth telling is a skill and I don't really care so much about the moral implications we're not telling the truth to be good little boys and girls but learning how to be good at the skill of telling the truth for the sake of increasing the fidelity of your reality of signaling to your own subconscious that you are the person you're the master of your experience essentially that's the whole point of all of this and the better and better that you can get at the scale of truth telling the more you can assert your influence on reality and by that I mean your subjective experience your emotions your sense of emotional security your assumption of agency and how much you actually get affected by other people and circumstances.

So there's two sticking points where most of us get diverted from the truth one is fear and the other in self-awareness so we speak about this second piece first self-awareness because most of us if you think about a time that you either outright lied or misspoke or somehow clouded the truth chances are you didn't mean to maybe right afterwards you're like oh yeah maybe I shouldn't have said that or or maybe you're like man why do I keep exaggerating the numbers in my stories and it's kind of a natural thing to do right I do this myself sometimes but if you think about any time that you clouded the truth it probably kind of just happened and the way that most of us cloud the truth when we do lie or deceive others it actually starts with self-deception and this actually goes down to evolutionary biology Robert Trivers who I hope to have on the podcast at some point this year has his theory of self-deception on how various animals including humans deceive themselves as an evolutionary behavior in order to get better and better at deceiving others which is of course useful for survival in situations specifically where the being is not in control of his environment which is critical for us in our psychology because we want to reaffirm to ourselves that we do have control over our environment and if you think about times in the past that you've lied chances are you did it to get out of some sort of trouble probably with an authority figure especially if you were a child and you know you're afraid of your parents wrath or teachers judgment or the collective your peers making fun of you or you know in some way policing you and making you feel bad in some way you might have lied just to get out of that trouble it's kind of an irrational behavior so obviously the solution to this self-deception is self-awareness however self-awareness is a lot easier said than done I mean to be brutally honest with yourself and what we're thinking about specifically is being brutally honest with yourself firstly about what you actually perceive right most of us have a hard time seeing what we perceive because we have all these judgments on top these can be positive judgments these can be negative judgments in order to really see to really perceive we have to view things neutrally which means accepting things as they are and I actually had an experience with this recently because um this friend of mine I overall like him very much but he has some great behaviors that get on my nerves and annoy me and throughout a lot of our friendship I've not wanted to think negatively about a friend a person I spent time with and overall like so I've kind of like I've kind of lied to myself of like oh this doesn't really bother me or you know if another person would mention this certain things about him I'd kind of defend him because you know I was deceiving myself I was trying to reinforce to myself that I actually didn't think this way or perceive these things but then I started noticing over time I was getting really irritated with him I was getting like these extra negative feelings I'm like should I call him out on this thing that would be truth-telling so I was obviously thinking about nobility here that seemed like overly hostile you know these are things that there's traits about him and you know it didn't seem like the right the right thing to do so I thought about this more and I realized I was doing this thing that I think a lot of people do in the name of trying to be a nice person which was kind of clouding my mind and clouding my perceptions in order to be inclusive right like I didn't want to have these negative judgmental thoughts so I lowered the fidelity of my reality and the result was I felt kind of out of control and like extra irritated around him in a way that seemed out of proportion with the situations and I let myself actually think all the judgments of him that I kind of suppressed because I didn't want to have negative thoughts I wanted to be a nice person and I listed all these things like he is this he is that I let myself feel those feelings and admit to myself what I actually judged about him and then I realized when I was thinking about all these things all these judgments they were all blanket statements that weren't specific right they're all is statements he is blank right and if you caught my Prometheus Rising episode I spoke about this extensively the importance of thinking in what's called English Prime and also writing in English Prime if you're journaling if you ever journal to introspect and learn about yourself or figure things out it's really important to use E Prime and not regular English and what essentially what E Prime is is English without the verb to be now the reason why to use English Prime is that the verb to be allows you to make absolute statements that are actually big like they don't say anything specific whereas if you practice thinking and writing without the verb to be it forces you to be very clear about your subject action verb and object now and it sounds like like boring you know nerdy English class but what this really is is it forces you to be specific about what you're saying because very few things are absolutely true in every context right that's the thing that gets lost when you make I am you are he is statements she is statements they don't allow for context and they remove nuance and if you look at a lot of the back and forth arguments between pundits on the internet very often they're overusing the to be statement so they're both yelling vague things at each other that can't be refuted because they're so vague that you can't like specifically say say something one way or another anyway the importance for your own mindset and emotional health and your own ability is by removing to be and thinking and speaking in English Prime you force yourself to get absolutely true with your perception so in this case I looked at all these judgments I had of this friend of mine and I realized they were violating English Prime and they were vague blanket statements that even though they were vague they were kind of getting me worked up and they're also an unfair perception of reality actually they're a judgment not a perception so I tried to switch them into perceptive statements removing the verb to be so essentially one of the ones I came up with was I which is the subject get annoyed when I pretend to be interested in things that are not interesting to me when such-and-such talks right and I had a couple other things right and even went deeper it's like I'm pretending to be interested because I want to be seen as a nice person and not an asshole right so I went through all of this stuff right I just was thinking about it you know just popping these ideas off these perceptions and I realized every single time I was choosing to be a way that I didn't actually feel like being and it really didn't have that much to do with him right like I could just not engage with that conversation I could leave I could talk about something else if I felt like I didn't have control or he you know he kept on talking I could be like hey I don't feel like talking about this right like once I became very real about the actual perceptions of what was actually going on I immediately stopped feeling annoyed with him because I realized this whole time I had control over this experience that I assumed I didn't have control with right like I was blaming him because of this assumption that somehow he was imposing his will on my reality and of course he wasn't actually right he was just doing what he felt like doing I wasn't doing what I felt like doing so I was the one who felt shitty allowing myself to get real with my actual perceptions returned the control to me and that removed my resentment you know like if you google Nietzsche nobility one of the terms that always comes up is raison ment it's the French word but it's the root of the word resentment this idea of resentment that you know Nietzsche was speaking more on a sociological level like the slave class of the underclass has this resentment of the overclass in our individual lives this raison ment or resentment comes from a similar assumption that we don't have control right like if you're a literal slave it's understandable for you to resent the master because you don't have control over your reality for most of us in most social situations we do have control we're just having this assumption that some other person is controlling our reality which of course makes us feel shitty makes us blame other people which causes this negative spiral of assuming we don't have control over ourselves or our experience whereas when you reclaim this agency when you return to control you get to see what actually is or the closest thing to objective reality and really what matters is where you get to see where you actually have choice and the coolest thing is that when you apply this level of self awareness it kind of takes away a lot of the fear which is the second part that we're going to speak about briefly when you can really perceive things the way they are a lot of your unconscious kind of sorts things out whether it's like you're feeling switching from feeling not good to feeling pretty good or feeling pessimistic to optimistic or feeling blocked to feeling creative again like sometimes all you need is to just see things the way they are and one of my favorite books on intuition the inner game of tennis by timothy galway he basically speaks about this as the process of learning skills better right you stop your judgments you stop forcing yourself to swing your racket a certain way metaphorically or literally you see exactly what's actually going on and just by doing that your unconscious kind of naturally finds the perfect stroke right and this comes out to the second piece which is the piece that most people will probably think about first when you think about well why do people lie or not tell the truth which is fear right that's the obvious one right like all of us can think anytime we consciously lied or chose to lie we were afraid of some consequence i just want to say like even though i'm obviously glorifying truth telling you know there's obviously certain situations where you know maybe you shouldn't like one one uh one that i can think of is when i when i was 19 i got pulled over i got pulled over for speeding a bunch of times but one time i got pulled over i actually spun off an icy road and a cop came and you know i had to get towed out and uh so so no one was there like i could have you know no one knew that i was speeding but the cop asked me how fast were you going and i don't know i just felt i was just maybe very innocent naive and i was like well i don't want to lie so i basically told him i was speeding and he gave me a ticket and he was kind of like if you just told me you weren't speeding we would have just towed you out and not given you a ticket but now i have to give you a ticket so anyway obviously i i don't i'm not saying you should tell the truth in such a situation but what is important is that if you're going to lie to avoid consequences at least be honest with yourself because if you start to lie to yourself that's where you start to lose your grip on reality that's where you start to give up your agency of what you're experiencing because even if you're lying in a social situation by simply admitting it to yourself by you know maybe lies are coming out of your mouth but you're like well you know what i am lying here because i want this result probably some short-term gain two things might happen one by being honest with yourself in that moment you might realize it's not really worth it to lie like the short-term gain that you're going to get or the avoidance of a certain consequence really isn't worth it it's not that big a deal you might as well tell the truth and you'll feel a lot freer afterwards and you won't internalize the shame that always comes when you lie to yourself because really what all this is about you know the the feel-good core of this and why this matters so much to me is that when you deceive yourself and ultimately whether it's to deceive other people or whatever you are ruining your own internal relationship that's a whole piece of nietzschean nobility that i really care about again like i don't care about telling the truth for some abstract moral reason to get into heaven or that people like you or whatever the reason for all this nietzschean nobility is that by telling the truth you are improving your relationship with yourself and most importantly you are signaling to your own subconscious that your relationship to yourself is more important than the stuff on the outside it's more important than being liked by the mediocre masses it's more important than getting the approval about some perceived or real authority figure the most important thing is your relationship to self and you know a lot of people speak about self-love and you know relationship with your higher self and all that stuff like you know to ground all that to you know make it a little more real is that when you care more about your internal relationship than all of this external stuff you're always at peace right the the most creative you can ever be comes from this relationship this is your source of inspiration of ideas of um of uh solution finding of things that you find interesting this is what turns up the fidelity of your reality and makes things more interesting and you know this is how i view things like your relationship to yourself is the most important thing and even if everything is taken away from you if you have a really good relationship with yourself you can rebuild all of it that's why all of this truth-telling is so important to me and why it's something that i'm trying to practice with higher and higher levels of precision personally thanks for watching listening go tell some truth goodbye

Reviews

I absolutely needed to hear this, thank you. I find my biggest truth-telling challenge is when my people-pleasing program wants to kick in.

This is a huge one for me. I have spent a lifetime lying, running, half truths, massive lies, to be in control, massive lies because of feeling fear and not being good enough, lies to pretend, to mask, to exaggerate, to people please, to stay safe and out of danger and small lying habits have remained through addiction that my ego hasn't let go of. So many different lies but, I'm not a liar. My core self, has hated myself for each and every single time I've manipulated the truth or coerced a situation to prevent a result or change a result. Most lies are to wriggle out of doing something, to people please or to hide, after years of my feelings being suppressed within the family dynamics, thoughts that my core self is an awful person, so let's build up walls of lies and pretence and then noone will see me, the real me.
I've never intentionally sat and looked at myself from this perspective, so this spiritual person I've created myself to be, was another pretence, because all the while I've been continuing to lie, still holding that control, still not being honest with myself or anyone. This isn't living, this is surviving on a huge lie. So many parts of my life a complete lie. My ego isn't happy right now. Thank you for your insight.

Wow, blown away by how much revelatory information you packed into this talk. Astounding, so on point! Thank you 💫