It’s hard to find a truly honest person. Most people who claim to be honest are usually telling white lies and omitting things.
True honesty is rare. I could make a comparison, but everything I think of is either too rare or not rare enough. Honestly, it’s hard to gauge the number of honest people in the world unless one person spends lots of time with everybody.
That’s not possible. You can conduct questionnaires and surveys to find a truly honest person, but you’re still going to be limited.
Unfortunately, and I say this with sadness, true honesty almost doesn’t exist if you’re speaking about telling the truth every single moment of your life.
Now, you do have those who tell fewer lies than others, and those who tell different kinds of lies than others, but it all just gets so complicated. Honesty is just rare, plain, and simple.
So, just to get an idea of what an honest person might act like, we can go over a few traits of a person who tries to tell the truth – you might say this kind of person has integrity.
Let’s start with this one. Have you noticed how some people get loud when you ask them a question? Well, I hate to tell you this, but there’s a high probability that the person is lying because they are being so defensive. It may not be true in every occasion, but I’ve noticed a correlation.
Honest people tend to have a calm tone of voice when asked a question. The reason for the difference – they have nothing to worry about or pressure to fabricate a story. Ask them a question and they will answer you in a consistent manner.
An honest person may sometimes come across as mean. This is because if you ask them a question, they usually tell the raw truth. Many truth-tellers don’t try to candy-coat the truth to preserve your feelings. They rather just get it over and done with so you will get the real information you need.
If you ask them a question, get ready for what might be a hard truth. It might sting, and they may seem like some of the rudest people ever, but it will be honesty.
A really good friend of integrity would also be an honest person. They tend to be there when you need them, and if they cannot be there for some reason, they will be honest about the reason.
If they have a problem with you or something you said, they will tell you to your face and not behind your back. While honest people may not have loads of friends, the ones they have are dependable like they are.
An honest person has a strong belief system. Their morals and standards are pretty much rock solid, and they don’t mind telling you about them. It’s sometimes hard for people like this to get a job because of the way they believe, but that just means the job isn’t good enough for them.
Employers with integrity may be taken aback by this honesty at first but appreciate this mindset after hiring an honest person. It usually benefits the company to have someone who goes against the majority sometimes.
These strong beliefs aren’t just good for the workplace, but they also work for weeding out the wrong people for relationships as well, plus many other situations.
If a person is honest, they have thick skin, not in the literal sense of course. But they have to be like this. Why? It’s because people who tell the truth are sometimes disliked for doing so.
The truth can be shocking to those with hidden insecurities because the truth contradicts the whole façade of the insecure person pretending to be okay with themselves.
When insecure people start getting defensive, watch out! They can be volatile, even becoming verbally abusive. Truth tellers use their thick skin to shield them from these things and preserve peace of mind.
I will say, sometimes an honest person has to grow this thick skin over time. They may not have it at first and may become wounded when telling the hard truth.
Are honest people trying to win the contest of most beautiful, most liked, or the coolest person around? Nah, they don’t care about that stuff.
If they do something, they do it for themselves, or to help others. While others fight for popularity, an honest person is busy trying to better themselves. They usually have amazing self-worth and know exactly who they are.
I covered some reasons why honesty is hard, but there are other reasons as well. Did you know that most of us who lie, do it to protect ourselves, not the feelings of others?
Since we, as humans, are into self-preservation, it’s easier to lie than tell the truth. And so many of us will choose the long term burden of a lie over the short term pain of the truth. Honesty is hard because many of us are cowards.
When we’ve done something wrong to someone, and they’ve been hurt, it takes a lot of energy to reconcile the truth to the person we’ve hurt. It takes the power of our thinking and emotion. What is a tactful way to tell them? How do I show I am sorry?
There are so many questions that need answers before we tell the truth. We could just blurt it out, and that would not be wrong, but tact and empathy are much better.
It’s sometimes hard, to tell the truth like this. So often, we use blame, projection, and other deceitful ways to shirk our responsibilities. But we almost always pay for it later.
It’s also hard to be honest because we’re not even honest with ourselves. Half the things we believe about ourselves are lies we’ve ingrained for years. It can take many more years of work to remove those lies.
Most people don’t want to do this work either. Look, meditation and such won’t even work without first facing who you are. Do you see how honesty can be so hard to practice?
Although these traits may seem daunting to learn, and the difficulty of truth may scare you, you should strive to be an honest person anyway. The world needs honesty.
Without people telling the truth about themselves, situations and others, we will never be able to solve all the problems we’ve gotten ourselves into. You would be surprised at how much influence honesty and lying has over your life.
Let’s start examining ourselves a bit better.
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I'm not alone in the world? Thank you