Honesty needs wisdom to handle.

We all know that being honest is the right thing to do. People feel good when they’re honest and they feel bad when they lie. Self-interest and self-image are both powerful factors influencing a person’s decision to be honest. This makes, being honest difficult, and puts a cost on being honest very high.

If we set a high moral ground, as per Kant the great philosopher, being dishonest to someone is disrespecting the person. A person deserves to know the truth, irrespective of the outcome.

In the current context, the question to be raised is, do we praise and reward honesty enough? Unfortunately, when we are honest and the outcome is not desired, very often we are slammed and scolded. This encourages us to be dishonest.

We are in a society mostly we say what the other person wants to hear.

In the book written by monk Ajahn brahm in which he narrated an interesting incident “A young female came to the Ajahn brahm who was pretty tensed she revealed to him that she was pregnant for over 3 months and she did not know what to do, and she was very scared to discuss with her parents”

This actually raises an important question, shouldn’t at times of difficulty a child should have the comfort to approach his or her parents without any fear. Over the years unknowingly we have been treating mistakes very harshly and that becomes a serious deterrent for being honest. Under stress we all end up taking foolish decisions a matured head in this case, the child parent can take a stable decision. In the above example the female was scared being honest to her own parents for obvious reasons. Shouldn’t there be an immunity if a person is honest or else how are we going to promote honesty as a behavior.

Mistakes are bound to happen. So when we make mistakes, you want people to accept the mistakes with wisdom and some degree of acceptance.

Reacting harshly to mistakes comes from the strong urge to control,?we try to control the output which is not easy to control because there are lot of dynamics involved. So when the output is not as planned, we get upset and angry. Mistakes will happen, it depends upon us how we react, because how we react determines peoples behavior.

You would wonder I am far from reality, let me quote a paragraph from Ray Dalio book PRINCIPLES which is very relevant to build my case further.

“Ross who was in charge of trading at the time forgot to put in a trade for a client and the money just sat there in cash. By the time the mistake was discovered the damage was several hundred thousand dollars.

It was a terrible and costly error and I could have done something dramatic like fire Ross to set a tone that mistake would not be tolerated. But since mistakes happen all the time, that would have only encouraged other people to hide theirs, which would have led them to even bigger and costlier errors. I believe strongly that we should bring problems and disagreement to the surface to learn what should be done to make things better.

So Ross and I worked to build out an error log in the trading department. From then on anytime there was any kind of bad outcome the traders would make a record of and we would follow up. As we consistently tracked and addressed the issue our trade execution machine continually improved. Having a process that ensures problems are brought to the surface and the root causes diagnosed assures that continual improvement occurs.

My rule was simple if something went badly, you had to put it in the log characterised it severity and make clear who was responsible for it. If a mistake happens and u logged it u were okay. If u didn’t you would be in trouble. “

Being honest needs courage and accepting it needs wisdom. The examples above show that there are lots to gain for either side by nurturing a culture of honesty. Honesty is a virtue which strongly needs to be promoted in our day to day dealing.

?References

Ray Dalio (2017)?PRINCIPLES, Newyork: Simon & Schuster.