Are you being honest with yourself?
Deep within each of us lies a hidden truth: a reality that we often ignore and evade to make ourselves feel better.
We know what we need to do, but we distract ourselves from confronting our weaknesses, shying away from accountability or abandoning pursuing a venture due to failure.
There are endless reasons why people choose not to be honest with themselves, but we must recognize that comfort in self-deception can be dangerous.
It takes courage to practice self-reflection and embrace honesty towards our thoughts, feelings, and actions.
Let’s not become deluded by our self-deceptions and illusions.
This could be through:
- Avoiding the conversation about the issue at hand
- casting doubt on the credibility of the information presented
Attempting to stay hidden from reality and preserve your established view of the world can affect you in the long run.
Therefore, we must investigate other aspects of our life that we may not be honest with ourselves.
Giving up
Consider a scenario, where you are engaged in a rigorous exercise session which involves performing 50 push-ups.
As exhaustion sets in your muscles become tired and feel a profound sense of exhaustion.
With each push-up becomes increasingly demanding.
You may convince yourself that you can only do 2 more before stopping.
But the question remains, Were those two final push-ups, your true limit or did you mentally give up?
Your mind may have perceived those two additional push-ups as an extremely challenging action, leading you to give up.
While it is important to listen to your body and to not push yourself to the point of injury or excessive strain.
Recognizing how the mind plays a powerful role in overcoming physical limits is extremely important.
By identifying times when you could have pushed past your limits even with the slightest but gave up.
These can serve as important reminders that you can achieve more than you thought possible.
By pushing yourself slightly further, you open the door to unlocking your true potential.
Allocating time to a task
We often assign ourselves to do a particular task whether that is 5 hours to write an essay or 2 hours to do our homework.
However, if we observed ourselves closely, we would be surprised to discover how little time you spent productively.
We can become distracted by wasting time, procrastinating, being lazy, eating or going to the toilet.
By timing ourselves during a particular activity, we can shed light on the reality of our productivity.
This might encourage you to not focus on how many hours you intend to spend on doing a task (quantity) but how much time you spend doing the task(quality).
Consider this:
Imagine giving yourself 6 hours to write a blog article you spend
- 1 hour doing the writing
- 5 hours wasting time, procrastinating, watching youtube
For instance, imagine giving yourself only one hour to write a blog article instead of six.
By doing so, you free up the remaining five hours to engage in other productive endeavours, such as self-care, spending time with family, or learning new skills
It is crucial to acknowledge that deluding ourselves with the notion that spending a significant amount of time on a task equates to productivity is misleading.
Utilizing the time available by being engaged with the task is where productivity is at its finest.
Identifying our weakness
imagine you are on a boat sailing a ship without your ability to change its course to navigate your direction to avoid an iceberg
If you are unable to steer you will hurt yourself.
This is the same concept when we look at our skills and abilities.
Ignoring our weaknesses whether that be our confidence, communication, social skills or character.
Having the ability to reflect identifies what elements are wrong and that we need to shape before they become detrimental to our overall growth and success.
Final thoughts
Our honesty with ourselves is the key to opening up opportunities to expand our personal development, gain new experiences and harness our ability to reach our full potential.
Having the dialogue with ourselves can be an opportunity to have that deep inspection of who we are at the moment and reflect on that step to adjust and change to become the person we want to be.
