The unvarnished truth is always better than the best-dressed lie....
Many years ago on a safari trip together with some staff from the office, my workmate Lisa and I stayed up sitting by the campfire discussing our thoughts. We thought everyone had gone to bed and that our conversations were private at this point. Naively, we decided to speak about the office. We left no stone unturned and discussed our opinion about everyone starting with the receptionist and including what was wrong with the way our MD ran his company. We were brutally honest as we thought we were having a private conversation. After two hours of us discussing our criticisms (we were both only in our 20's!), Our MD yells out from his tent to stop gossiping as he was sick of listening to us and he wanted to go to sleep. No one could imagine what went through our heads at that point. Lisa and I were sick to our stomachs.
You could cut the tension with a knife in the morning at breakfast. Neither Lisa nor I could look The MD in the face. He certainly was not feeling so great about what he had heard either. Later that morning as Our MD was pumping fuel into the coach, he told me that he was not at all shocked at what I had said. In fact, he told me he knew most of what I had said already and that it wasn’t a surprise to him. What had shocked him though were Lisa’s comments. He could hardly believe it. He always knew he got my opinion upfront. Lisa, however, had always been the type of employee who told you what you wanted to hear and not what she really thought. He now knew what she thought loud and clear!
I told him that my mother had always said “people who listen at keyholes (or outside tents) get their own just desserts.”
All human beings should try to learn before they die
what they are running from, and to, and why.
~ James Thurber
Language is a funny thing. Humans have come up with a way of communicating that allows us to paint pictures - very emotional pictures - with a bunch of black squiggles on white paper, or from a combination of sounds that come from our mouths. We describe what we see (or sense with any of the senses), what we feel and what we are thinking and doing, using language. We have built our thought processes around words.
I would like to share with you that words can have different meanings and different impacts on different people. We all have a fairly large vocabulary that we use to convey ideas. But these words are meaningless to us without the emotions that go with them.
For example, think about the phrases, “Let’s go dancing!” You understand the sounds that are spoken, but ‘dancing’ has an emotional connotation to it, too. If you love dancing, this phrase would convey excitement and happiness... but if you have two left feet and don’t enjoy going out, you might feel anxious and start looking for excuses not to go. The phrase has different emotional meaning to different people.
The point of this is: recognise that one person’s emotional interpretation of a word or phrase can be completely different from your own, and it all depends on their conditioning. You can find the word “dance” in the dictionary, defined as “the rhythmic movement of the body to music.” But you won’t find an emotional definition, because that is created by each individual.
Imagine the potential for chaos and misunderstanding when we say one thing and to us it means exactly that one thing... and another person hears what you say but to them it’s a completely different meaning!
The unvarnished truth is always better than the best-dressed lie.
~ Ann Landers
One word that is extremely emotion-packed is “truth.” We think of truth as loyalty, accuracy, faithfulness, rightness, etc. The word itself makes sense, yet when we look at each other’s emotional interpretation of what is true... wow, do we get into a soup of conflicting ideas!
I encourage you to contemplate this:
What is true to you? What is your truth? What do you KNOW? What do you think is “right” and “wrong” in the world, not just morally but in terms of what you accept about yourself and “the way things are”? What is your truth regarding your dreams and your potential? What do you know about relationships, love, success, achievement, etc.?