Why Being Honest with Ourselves is One of The Most Difficult Things

I once took on a professional role that I’m passionate about, only to find out that I had neither the natural strengths to be good at the role nor the sufficient time/energy to get better at the role. At a crossroads like this, I had to be honest with myself: this might not be for me, at least for now.

If there is one thing I learned over time is that being honest with ourselves is often more difficult than being honest with other people. Who are we when we detach ourselves from the social construct, other people’s opinions, and expectations? What do we stand for and what is important to us? What are we good at and not good at?

Many people say “you have to fake it until you make it”, but what they often don’t know is that people who successfully faked it until they made it did not fake it at all. To a certain extent, they already had the passion, strength, and energy to make it and some ideas on how things work. They just needed time and consistency to get better, but no one made it by being 100% fake.

A part of being a responsible leader is being honest with ourselves about how we can best contribute, so we don’t need to extremely fake it, because faking it could harm or damage our stakeholders (or at the very least, make our performance sub-optimal).

Example 1

Let’s say we have a business leader who is not honest with himself that finance is not his forte. He insists on being responsible for the Finance function in his company, while deep down knowing that working with numbers and being meticulous are his biggest weaknesses, and that he has a lot of things on his plate that make it impossible for him to invest the time/energy to learn Finance.

What would happen if he insist? He might ruin his company’s financial practice with messy bookkeeping, and he might not anticipate the risks that can come with not applying best practices in finance.

This guy might be a great leader in other functions, but because he was not honest about his area of strength, he became an irresponsible leader, and his dishonesty could ruin the company’s trajectory.

Example 2

As a former people-pleaser, I used to over-commit. I said yes to every invitation, appointment, and request while not following through on at least of half of them. As I got older and learned the importance of being responsible, I got better at estimating whether I can allocate my energy to something and said no more often.

Unfortunately, even at this age (I’m almost 30), I still find people wildly overcommitting to things they know they can’t do. Since the pandemic, I have seen people overbooking themselves to two meetings at the same time, while they can easily say no to one of them.

The worst thing, these people see themselves as productive and responsible, while in reality, they are “irresponsible”.

Being honest is not the same as having a fixed mindset

Upon reading this, some of you might think “but we would not grow if we never try areas we are not naturally good at or areas outside our comfort zone.”

While this statement is true, there is one caveat: being responsible means being willing to invest more time/energy when we are new to something. It is okay to try new things, as long as we are willing to put in more effort because otherwise our work/contribution will not be able to achieve the bare minimum required (like in Example 1, where the guy did not even know how to do bookkeeping properly).

Being honest is not the same as having a fixed mindset. A fixed mindset is thinking “I’m either good at it or not”. Being honest is thinking “I’m not good at it yet, that means if I want to be good at it, I have to put in more effort”.

A fixed mindset is thinking “I stick to what I know”. Being honest is thinking “I can try new things, but I need to seek help or let people know if my inability/lack of skill is hurting others”.

What makes being honest difficult

Being honest is difficult because many of us were conditioned to see “how things should be” and not “how things really are”. We are conditioned to believe “I should take on more responsibilities” or “Taking risks is necessary for growth”. These are all okay by nature, but become irresponsible action once it harms other people or the team/organization we are in.

This is advice I also need to tell myself: being honest with our capacity does not make us a coward, it helps us build a more sustainable reputation where we would be known as someone who commits fully to anything we choose to work on and as someone who is intentional with all his/her choices.

If we want to play the long-term game, being honest is the only way.