Why do we lie to ourselves?

Have a think about the last time you lied to yourself………….

Now ask yourself “Why?”

I recently asked myself this question and was quite shocked by my own response.  I had been lying to myself to ensure someone else’s happiness.  Then after a while I asked myself why was it that I value myself that little that I put someone else’s happiness before my own?

You see, in life sometimes we are all in a situation where we feel uncomfortable and rather than stand up and say what we truly think or feel we find ourselves just going with the flow for fear of what others think of our honesty or for fear of hurting someone we care about.  To make things worse, if you are lying to yourself it can only make you unhappy.

If you are not truly honest, the smallest of lies can get bigger and the snowball effect kicks in, so that over time it engulfs everything and hurts everyone in its path.  The only way to stop this snowball is to stop lying to yourself.

It has taken me nearly 29 years to learn this and I did so whilst at a networking breakfast, I listened to a 4sight from Jim MacLeod, who is, I think, the most positive person I have met and I took one sentence from his 4sight that I had heard before but until that moment had never resonated with me.  “Change the things you cannot accept and accept the things that you cannot change” and hearing it that morning was like an alarm bell going off in my head.

Within a week I had made the biggest decision of my life thus far and decided to stop lying to myself.  It was hard to tell the truth, especially having lied to myself for so long.  Since then I have begun to challenge everything that I cannot accept.  I have to say that whilst the initial pain of making those decisions was hard to deal with and accept, I am a much happier person as a result of making those changes.

 “And, after all, what is a lie?  ’Tis but the truth in masquerade.” Lord Byron