Episode 22: Tell the Whole Truth

Hello Friends, Welcome to episode 22. Today I wanted to talk about telling yourself the whole truth.

We live in the world of Instagram, Facebook, and many other forms of social media.

 We only tell the good parts.

We live in a place where everything is filtered, airbrushed, and staged. Where it all looks perfect. Always fun. Always exciting. Always good.

So we compare our reality.

I like to think that our reality is 50/50. We get 50% great, and 50% crappy. We feel great 50% of the time and not so great 50% of the time.

And we compare our reality to other people’s social media.

One other way I like to describe this is we compare our whole game to another person’s highlight reel.

We compare them like they are equals.

And our course our lives look horrible in comparison.

We feel horrible about ourselves because we are comparing others’ best moments to our mediocre moments.

It’s like taking your worst photo – you know the one with your eyes closed, when you are in mid-sentence, not paying attention, taken by a 3-year-old to someone else’s posed photograph taken and edited by a professional photographer.

Then we seem to believe that just the good is their reality and we get an actual 50/50 reality.

So I think there is power in telling the whole truth about your life.

Now I am not saying we need to share on social media when we get food poisoning on a work trip and end up throwing up all night in a bathroom with a spider on the roof.. that reality doesn’t need to make social media. But the power is in realizing that some days this is the reality for all of us. We all will have struggles. We all will get things wrong. We all will live through experiences that we would have preferred not to live through but we also have good moments too. We also have work trips where we don’t get sick, where we have a lot of fun, when we make the last-minute flight, and where things just work out perfectly.

Tell yourself the whole truth.

Tell yourself the good things.

Tell yourself the bad things.

Acknowledge things for exactly what they are.

Give them equal air time.

Good equal airtime.

Bad equal airtime.

Make our live 50/50.

So often we are just faking it. Just pretending it is all good.

Now there are times I fake it. Times when I am with people that I don’t have a trusting relationship with that I wouldn’t tell all my stories to. People I wouldn’t share stories where I have felt shame or humiliation.

Brené Brown talks a bit about sharing our stories only with those that earn the right to hear them because only those that have earned that right have shown that they can hold space without judgment and they can guide you through those tough experiences and support you thought them.

So am not saying just go share the struggles with anyone because sometimes the opposite can happen they compare their highlight reel to your blooper reel and judge you for it which can result in comments that make working through tough experiences harder.

But I do want you to see and acknowledge the whole truth of your life and see that others likely have both a highlight reel and a blooper reel just like you. There is a lot of value in seeing the good and the bad and recognizing that everyone has it.

One piece of advice that Mel Robins once shared was that if you feel triggered by someone’s social media simply stop following them. One feature of Facebook at least right now allows you to snooze people and those little things can be incredibly helpful in reducing triggering events and simply making it a bit easier by allowing us to not have to manage our minds around someone else’s highlight reel. We don’t have to cut people out of our lives but we can reduce the amount of influence that some people have in our lives.

There are different times that we will need different teachers, we will need different friends, we will be closer to different family members. There are times that we need different ideas -ideas that help us grow and develop.

We need to surround ourselves with people that are ahead of us so have some inspiration but not so far ahead of us that we get discouraged and give up.  People ahead of us will change over time as we develop and we will need to find different teachers.

There is value in learning how to process our own stories so that we are in a place with them where we can share them with others to help others who might be behind us.

There is value in being honest about our stories and our struggles and allowing those we trust to see that our lives are not always perfect though they may see our highlight reels on social media.

Hiking is a great analogy for this.

When I share photos of my hikes it is often the view of the destination or a beautiful spot along the way. You see the top, the lake, the perfect view.

But what you don’t realize is to get that view, there were a lot of steps, a lot of sweat, and sometimes tears.

You don’t see the 10 km bike ride followed by the 10 km hike.

You don’t see the 1500-meter elevation gain.

You don’t see the pounding heart or the very red face.

You just see the picture at the top.

We need to tell ourselves the truth about our lives. The truth is we have struggle and we have victory.

We have mountains to climb and we have mountain tops.

If hear someone expressing their mountains to climb and we are in the habit of telling ourselves the truth about our mountains to climb it will help us have compassion, and even empathy for them. Then we can be curious about what that experience is like for them and know that we have had experiences that felt like that too.

Now they may describe a mountain that they are struggling with and it may sound like a molehill to you but our experiences in this life are so real to us. We know what it is like to feel like something is a mountain. We can relate to them on that.

There is no experience that is more real than another. We may experience things differently but it doesn’t make our experience any less real to us nor does it make their experience any less real to them.

There is no struggle that is more real than another. Or no struggle that is more worthy than another.  

I was talking to a friend the other night about the struggles that we were going through.

We both have struggles. Very different struggles.

Struggles that we probably thought we would have each other’s struggles.

Life has a way of teaching you the things that you need to know by giving you the struggles that you need to have.

If you look at our struggles from a pure mindset perspective.

We were dealing with exactly the same thoughts.

We are often going though very different struggles on the outside but more often we are going through more similar struggles on the inside. We can relate to this inner struggle and support each other.

So try telling yourself the whole truth this week.

Acknowledge both the good and the bad. Give them equal air time.

It will be fun.

Have a wonderful week.