Sometimes post ideas come from the most fleeting of thoughts and I have to be quick to get the essence of the idea down in a notebook that I carry.  (I was just at a conference where they reminded us all that science has found we forget about half of what we hear/see within 24 hours, and the forgetting just goes on exponentially from there.)

I meant to write down the occurrence behind this post idea, but it is lost.  Certainly this is a lesson that I tried to teach myself many, many times in my younger years.  I was steadfast in my practice of avoidance for too many years.  Foolishly, ridiculously so.  Until I finally saw the pattern.  And realized that truth can have power.

The movie quote, “You can’t handle the truth.” (Most men I know can practically recite the whole movie.  This quote is Jack Nicholson’s character in A Few Good Men) seems to sum up the way that many of us relate to the truth.  For whatever reason we create all sorts of alternate reality scenarios and often these get tripped up in one way or another and we are faced with myriad consequences.  Mostly unpleasant ones.

On the other hand, when people expect defensive behavior on your part you can regain control of a conversation when you tell the truth.  It has taken the wind out of more potential rants than I have kept count, people were actually disappointed because they had clearly practiced words for a protracted argument.  My simple, ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t realize my action x would lead to issue y for you.  How can we fix it?’ stopped them up.  Of course, even better is to go to them when you know something might affect them, and I learned this too, finally.

Your right now self might be tired, but your future self has other things to do than to clean up after you.

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Tagged: Communication, Information management, Learning, Life, Philosophy, Thinking, Working