Exercise 2

Improving Our Honesty

 

Purpose

This exercise on improving our honesty is one of the exercises on the site for a good reason. Working on our honesty goes hand in hand with growth and development. In the first exercise, you were asked to examine your beliefs. In doing so, you likely noticed that honestly figuring out what you believe as honest as possible had its challenges. You may have come up with one idea, and then changed or refined it, perhaps more than once. Were you lying the first time? In terms of absolute honesty you were. You went with the notion of what you believed to be the truth, but it was not. There are subtleties to honesty and they can take time to grasp, as you can see from this example.

Working on honesty is much like peeling an onion, you do it layer by layer. I have already mentioned that honesty is one of the key elements of growth. Honesty is not just important in what we say and think. It plays a pivotal role in our observation, interpretation and integration of experiences. This leads to what we think, say and do. Dishonesty is an enormous hindrance to our growth, hence recognizing our dishonesty is a pointer to an issue or flaw in our rational minds programming.

The purpose of this exercise is to give you some ideas on how to recognize where you struggle with honesty. Having found them you can begin the process of resolving them and healing old wounds. Improving ones honesty will also help when you work through the other exercises and of course in your life. If you repeat the exercises, as you should from time to time, you will notice the shift and improvement in your honesty from the last time.

Duration

40 to 50 minutes (10 to 20 minutes to complete the table and 30 minutes to consider it)

 

Prerequisites

Readings

  • Section 2A: Core Growth Elements

Additional Readings


Background

The Honesty Table: Improving Your Honesty Level

Living in our lies locks us down, inhibits growth and development and causes other issues. This fact does not make it any easier to become more honest. To move down the path of personal honesty one must first decide that it is their goal, and to work towards it. It is often best to start small by picking one or two areas of honesty to focus on. I suggest considering any areas that you must improve on or else face serious consequences. Otherwise, begin with the area(s) where you feel confident you would like to improve or believe can improve and where you are prepared to deal with the consequences of honesty.

To assist you in determining where to focus your attention use the technique below. This technique or tool uses what I refer to as “The Honesty Table”.

Note: To assist you in this an Honesty Table spreadsheet, created in Microsoft Excel, and the associated process to do your Honesty Table are available in the Exercise Section.

  • This exercise will help you with examining your honesty and give you the chance to practice it. Take advantage of this.
  • Use the list of Areas of Honesty included in the sample below (as in the Excel spreadsheet), unless you already know of a specific area and it is not included.
  • When you try to determine your degree of honesty, consider all the ways we can be “untruthful”, including not lying directly or through omission or inference.

 

For convenience, the lists below, as covered in the Honesty section, are included at the end of this exercise:

  • The Levels or Relationships of our Honesty Table:
  • Areas of Honesty
  • Degrees of Honesty

 

Method

We will use an Honesty Table to do this exercise. As mentioned in the section on Honesty, this table has Relationships as the rows, and Areas of Honesty as the columns. The values we will place in the table, at the intersection of a row and column are the Degrees of Honesty associated with them. The exercise consists of determining our degree of honesty for each combination of relationship and topic or issue by answering the question – “how often I am honest in a particular area based on the relationship level I have with the person I’m speaking to”.

1. Follow one of these links to open the Honesty Table spreadsheet:

  • Microsoft Excel 2003 version
  • Microsoft Excel 2007/2010 version
  • Microsoft (current version)

Note: When you open the Excel spread sheet it opens on the Tab titled "How to Use and Help". Step one is where you create a copy of the spreadsheet and rename it (I recommend including the date in the name you give the copy). You can skip this and simply use the Blank Honesty Table; however, making a copy is more helpful. The reason is it's more effective when done more than once over a period of time and a copy allows you to keep multiple versions. Doing so means you can not just see your progress but also look at how you answered before. When you do you may notice that you assign different values when nothing has changed. This can help you as it indicates that you were uncertainty as to what value to give it or your response was not the honesty answer (not being relaxed and clear minded can also affect your answers). Both can give you extra insights into yourself.

 

2. Start with what is in the spreadsheet. Use the same column heads for your Areas of Honesty, and the same titles at the left end of the rows that represent the Levels of Relationships. The sample should have adequate Areas of Honesty for you to begin. While you can substitute your own areas for those suggested, I recommend you only do so after you have been through the Honesty Table as is. Rule some out as the source of honesty issues before substituting or adding others.

3. Review the headings of the columns or rows and pick an area to start with. I recommend you work on one column at a time; however, if you find it easier to consider your honesty by the type of relationship first then work through it one row at a time. In this case, work on one row at a time.

4. Begin in the first cell of the selected column or row and consider the area of honesty and the relationship. Ask yourself questions in the following manner – “How honesty am I about <Area: my feelings> with <Level: people I do not know>”.  

5. Use the Degrees of Honesty scale to determine what number, from 0 to 6 represents your degree of honesty and put that into the cell. Remember that a “0” means you never ever tell the truth in the described circumstance to “6” which means you always tell the truth without exception. Do not rush too fast or hesitate for too long as both of these tend to lead to a less honest answer. 

6. Continue down the column or across the row until you have completed it. Move to the next column or row and repeat the process until the table is completed.

 

The totals for each row and column as well as the Summary Information at the bottom will be calculated for you. When you are done you should end up with a chart like the following example with, of course, the degrees of honesty you filled in):

 

 

Analysis of the chart can lead you to a greater understanding of you where you have problems with honesty and why. The first task in your analysis is to look for areas or levels where the totals are low. These are the areas where you find honesty a challenge. The next step is self-examination with the purpose being to explore the reason(s) why you may have these issues. Just as you may not be consciously aware of when you are untruthful, in many cases you may not know your own reasons for your lack of honesty. It may take some time to unravel your reasons; meditation is perhaps the best way to do this.

The knowledge of what issues drive our dishonesty and meditations on why we do will not necessarily remove the issue; however, they are necessary if we want to clear the source issue.

There are many ways to use the information contained in the Honesty Table. I will outline a general approach as follows:

  1. Locate the highest totals for both rows and columns, these represent the areas where you feel most honest, and likely the safest and most secure.
  2. Rows with the highest totals identify the people with or types of relationships where you are your most honest and likely feel secure.
  3. Columns with the highest totals identify the area of your life in which you are most honest with yourself and others, and as above, likely feel secure.
  4. Now examine the chart for the areas or levels where you have difficulty with honesty, these are the ones with the lowest row and column totals. They represent areas where you have your strongest issues with being honest.

NOTE: For each of the areas where your honesty level is low consider what kinds of events, thoughts or experiences are associated with these areas.

 

The results you get from any exercise are dependent on what you put into them. The true value of this exercise is that we take advantage of our efforts to develop objectivity, sensitivity and our ability to be objective observers to improve our honesty. That is we want to use our awareness of how we observe to what we observe. As mentioned before, observation is not simply perception; a process divorced from personal valuation or interpretation. We often imagine ourselves to be different people than we really are and this exercise is one that can start to bring down the mental barriers that have us doing so.

 

Follow-up

After the exercise read what you wrote down in the table by going through each row and column one at a time. It does not matter where you start so long as you go through the entire table. As you read through do the following:

  • Leave what you wrote untouched (no second guessing after the fact).
  • Consider what you wrote.
  • Monitor your feelings and thoughts as you read it.
  • Note your reaction to it separately so they are not mistaken for your original responses.
  • Ask yourself if your response was accurate and pay attention to how you feel as you ask.


After reading through all the items in both columns, the next step is to consider our responses as a whole.

  • Look to see if you avoided, focused on or glossed over any areas.
  • In cases where you were not accurate, remember that it is just as important to acknowledge that your answer was not accurate as it is to know what the “correct” answer should have been.
  • Look at your answers and ask yourself, “Is this the kind of person I would like to be?”


The efforts you are putting into this exercise will, in conjunction with the other steps you are taking, help you to growth and develop yourself. This exercise and the others are part of our process of self-examination. The goal is to expose those aspects of ourselves that we may have overlooked, ones that cause us issues so we can then focus on and resolve them. We cannot fix what we do not see and it is difficult to benefit from the better aspects of ourselves that we do not acknowledge.

You will get as much out of this exercise as you put into it. If you do it haphazardly then your results will reflect this. We do not have hundreds of issues; we have a number of core issues that manifest in hundreds of ways. We fix our issues with honesty, for example, by learning to identify, understand, work through and resolve the reasons why we lie. We get at our reasons by examining and exploring our dishonesty without judging ourselves for what appear to be errors of the past. Be positive even though you may want to judge yourself, for self-judgments will not benefit you. If we could have been honest in the past, we would have been. We do not beat up on ourselves for our ignorance as this tends to increase our reluctance and resistance to growth and adds new issues in the process.

When you do your review, pay particular attention to any points you edited, or questioned. Try to understand why you did so, or at least how you justified the point. We are not looking for right or wrong, or to judge our honesty, we are interested in noticing our lack of it.

We should have a dialogue with ourselves by questioning ourselves on our responses. As much as this exercise is to help us identify areas where we struggle with honesty, we also want to notice our uncertainty over answers, as this is indicative of an emotional reaction to the point. We should ask ourselves why we feel we need to be dishonest with others and ourselves. Only by recognizing our lack of honesty can we begin to understand our motivations so that we can work towards changing them. We will develop a new awareness of ourselves only through digging deeper into our thinking processes so that we can identify what our lives are telling us we need to work on.

When you examine the completed table, you will start to see your problem areas. For example, low numbers in the first and second rows indicates that you do not concern yourself with the consequences of the lying to people you do not know. Low numbers in rows five to eight indicate strong issues of honesty with those closest to you. Honesty issues with those close to us are more serious and will have a greater affect on our lives than those we meet but will never see again. That does not mean one ignores dishonesty with those whom we have our weakest relationships.

During your examination, spend some time considering the implications of the variations in your level of honesty. For instance, why might one be honest about a topic when speaking to people they know but are less so with people they do not know? It could be because of issues related to self-esteem, or it could mean we are being less than honest with those we know and just are not seeing it. Of course, we may also be doing so for any number of other reasons.

The key to using the table to aid in developing ones honesty is to look at variations in the numbers across rows and columns and to consider what it means. This applies even when, upon reviewing their table, one notices there is little variation in the degrees of honesty. This is common during the first attempts at this exercise. It does indicate a lack of honesty, though it is not necessarily due to lying. A lack of honesty does not necessarily mean we are consciously being dishonest anymore than it means we are consistently honest to a particular degree (as indicated by the degree of honesty). It could be that, among other things:

  • We are not used to thinking in terms of honesty.
  • We lack the sensitivity to notice when we are not being honest.
  • We did not focus on being honest as we went through the exercise.
  • We are not accustomed to self examination.
  • We are so used to being the way we are that we are not able to be objective.


You will get out of this exercise what you put into it. When you first start out the lack of variation in degree of honesty across rows and columns is likely an indicator that one does not notice or is unaware of their lack of honesty. This may sound damning; however, .

Do spend time looking at your Honesty Table. You may have underestimated or overestimated the values. This is natural when you first start out. We do not know ourselves as well as we think we do. I also recommend you do not adjust the values up or down, instead do a new chart. Save your tables so you have the original values from each run through so you have a history of your progress.

This process takes some time to go through. Each time you go through the table helps you to refine your values, and keep you focused on your goal. Paying more attention to our experiences as they happen gives us the opportunity to see our level of honesty “in the light of day”. Not doing so hampers our work and progress. If you are diligent, and take the time to meditate on what you discover, you will observe your values change, and notice changes in your life.

 

Follow up-exercises

Detecting our Rational Mind Editor

Our rational mind controls what we are conscious of and this has a direct bearing on our honesty. We looked at our how our own minds create the blocks and filters that affect what we are conscious of in the essay The Limiting Aspects of the Rational Mind. Blocks and filters are part of what one could figuratively refer to as the Rational Mind Editor. It is this editor that decides what we notice, what is too sensitive to consider and even what thoughts we think. It did not take over this function on its own, we have allowed it to do so. By improving our honesty we begin to take a more conscious role in our minds editing process.

In the essay on Honesty we looked at the honesty involved when one is answering the question of "how are you feeling/doing" and how our typical answer is not the most honest one. To understand why this is so we will step through the process our mind goes through to answer the question.

Initially our rational mind hears the question and, as it does with any input such as a thought an emotion or an experience, it begins to process what it hears, even before we are conscious of it. In the time between when we hear it and we think about what we heard our rational mind has already processed the information and if it is a question, it has the answer. It then compares the answer with its programmed responses. If it is something we are unwilling to look at it goes to the second most honest answer and so on until it comes to one that passes all the filters and blocks. Only then are we consciously aware of it. We then consciously edit this response a few more times for any number of reasons.

It might surprise you to know that most of the time the answer people are conscious of is at least the tenth most honest on the list or lower. The most people might notice of the edit process being some form of hesitation. We would have hundreds of thoughts during even a brief hesitation. Most of these thoughts happen too quickly to be perceptible. What we notice are those deemed acceptable by the programming of our rational mind. The act of examining our honesty gives a clear signal to our rational mind that we are losing our fear of the truth. This is the first step in changing the programming established by how we have reacted to our experiences.

To start to get a better understanding your editor, do the following:

  1. Find a nice spot to sit and relax and if you meditate do that now. If you do not a chair or cushion on the floor will suffice.
  2. When you are relaxed. get a feel for your overall state of mind, whatever perceptions you have of you and try to remember what you feel.
  3. Ask yourself "How do I feel?" and then answer it.
  4. As you answer try to be conscious of how you feel and what thoughts go through you mind as you answer it.
  5. Compare this to how you felt before you asked the question. If you are sensitive enough you should notice a shift, hesitation or perhaps a slight flush in the chest or a tightening in the lower stomach area. There is always a shift unless you are very well centered. Do not be concerned if you did not notice one, in this case try to note what you thought. Try to articulate the potential answers of which you are aware. Consider the different answers for a moment. Do they share any commonalities?
  6. After a short period, ask yourself if the answers from the previous step are the most honest answer and notice how you feel as you answer, as you did for the previous question. Go through the same deliberation as the previous step for another short period.
  7. Go back to step 2 and repeat the process with this new awareness.

 

How you approach and go through this process is most revealing. Hesitation to do so is an obvious sign of some concerns about ones degree of honesty; though do not be too hard on yourself. There are times when we all would prefer to lie to ourselves; however, it is important to know that we are. Developing our sensitivity to our editor is a big step in the process of attaining a high level of honesty. By improving our honesty. we begin to remove the illusion our minds have created for us. You should notice you intuition improves as the less encumbered our mind is the less it filters and edits what we are conscious of.

The rational mind does the same for all input, which is why we are not consciously aware of very much of the totality of what we experience. What we experience includes all sensory input regardless of the level; hence, it includes our emotions, our thoughts and those manifested as we integrate our experiences. Even what comes from within be it an intuitive thought or awareness, or external such as the thoughts of others that we receive when we encounter the energy of those thoughts.

Learning to understand how our rational mind edits the "information" before we become aware of it is a key element of developing our awareness. Meditation is of great value here as in such a posture we have less thoughts hence we are more able to perceive this edit process. We start by grasping the concept, move from that to noticing it and then to working to lower how much the rational mind filters, blocks and edits what it perceives. It is a gradual process. To be successful at it, we must be committed in our intent to lower the number by becoming more honest and put our desire behind this intent.

The quieter our mind is the better chance we have of noticing our hesitation, which is a powerful tool to noticing when the engaging of our rational mind editor. It tends to do so in areas that are “sensitive” about, have deemed less relevant, or have chosen to block. Once you have started to work with your editor you can, if your mind is quieter, notice when it kicks in even as you go about your daily activities.

 

Note: In relation to the above, there are a couple essays that will help you gain a deeper understanding of how our mind edits what thoughts we are conscious of, which includes we our perceptions. They are Paying Attention to Our Attention and Intuitive Indulgences and are listed in Additional Readings at the start of this exercise.

 

 

Reference Lists

The Levels or Relationships for the Honesty Table are (row labels):

  • to people we do not know and will never see again
  • to people we are acquainted with
  • to people we work with
  • to our friends
  • to our intimate or close relationships
  • to our family
  • to our spouse or significant other
  • to our selves

 

Fundamental Areas of Honesty (column headings):

Note: you can substitute some for areas you want to explore

  • Our intelligence (do we pretend to be smarter than we feel we are)
  • How knowledgeable we are about various topics
  • Our job (do we make our jobs appear better than they are?)
  • Our job skills (making ourselves look great at what we do, saying how good we are...better than others)
  • Our love life (a big issue for men is their virility, their ability to attract any women)
  • Our sexual orientation
  • Our personal habits (you can pick one or look at them in general)
  • Our religious beliefs or lack thereof
  • Who we care about
  • Our history or background
  • Our feelings
  • Our wealth or what we own (cars, boats etc.)
  • Our behavior
  • What we think and believe

 

Degrees of Honesty:

Enter the number in brackets into the spreadsheet

  • never (0) * means never ever without exception
  • rarely (1)
  • on occasion (2)
  • half the time (3)
  • usually (4)
  • nearly always (5)
  • always (6) * means always without exception

 

© 2009 Allan Beveridge

 

Last Updated June 6, 2019 

 

Main Menu

Extras