You Need To Start Lying To Yourself
Kale Houser
Co-Founder & CEO at Kale Houser Leadership | 10X Grant Cardone Certified Licensee | Leadership Coach
I was reading a book, and this statement made its mark on me: “Sometimes self-deception and optimism are indistinguishable.”
Let’s break down my understanding of what optimism is. To me, it’s the hopefulness of a good outcome. The expectation that something positive is going to happen. It’s the hope of something positive and good.
We all understand that, but then how does self-deception play into that? It is so fascinating of a concept because that’s what optimism is. In some cases, it may happen that you are deceiving yourself into believing that a positive outcome is possible, plausible, and is going to happen.
I want to lead into what is the right time for optimism and then what is the right time for deception. Is there ever a good time to lie to yourself?
Certainly, this always depends on the type of situation and on a lot of external factors, but I would argue to a degree that?almost all optimism starts with a little bit of self-deception.
We are in a society that espouses honesty and it’s taken as a critical part of our culture. We all understand the effects of when honesty is not present in relationships, business and the negative effects of that.
However, being a little dishonest with yourself can sometimes bring some positives. I would argue there is a degree of when we lie to ourselves about something for the right reasons and for the right motivations, then yes, that can be a good thing.
It does require however a certain amount of maturity and actual purpose. You can’t just go as you are eating pizza and donuts and keep telling yourself that you are a beautiful butterfly.
That’s not an optimistic self-deception.
Self-deception can be a good thing when you are trying to push yourself to be better. There are certain personalities that will rise to the occasion.
Certain things you do in your life can lead to having that higher sense of believing in the impossible, instead of just accepting the tangible that’s right in front of you.
Grant Cardone, one of my mentors, has this quote that also really stuck out to me when he’s talking about goals.
He says: “Lie to yourself about your goals until you find out you cheated yourself”. Instead of saying: ”My goal is to earn $50,000 this year” say: “My goal is to earn $200,000 a year”.
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You have no idea how, but that’s your goal. Lie to yourself that you are going to be able to do it. Lie to yourself that you’re going to make $200,000 a year, until you find out that you are actually making a million dollars a year.
Until you find out you lied to yourself and that your goals aren’t big enough. It is that little bit of self-deception. I don’t know how I’m going to do this, I don’t know how I’m going to make a million dollars a year, but I know it’s possible.
I’m going to work through it, and that’s my goal. It’s something that should be worthy of working towards, for whatever reason that is to you and for your goals. Sometimes we don’t realize that we were always capable of so much more, we just didn’t know it.
It’s just something magical that happens when we start declaring and writing down our goals. The realm of possibility just expands. Sometimes what you need to start achieving these goals is that little bit of lying to yourself.
We have to believe in something despite potentially everyone around us telling us otherwise. No matter what, there will always be those naysayers and doubters.
You have to be able to do it in a positive way as far as the self-deception part, to where that is a perfect marriage between optimism and self-deception.
And remember, without optimism, self-deception without the end goals to work for is just deceiving yourself that you live in this world that you think is real.
Please share with us an experience that you have had with self-deception. Did you learn from this experience? Or was it, in the end, what got you through to achieve certain goals?
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