Do You Know When You Are Lying to Yourself?

I have a question for you. How often do you promise yourself that you are going to do something, but know that deep down in your gut that you are lying to yourself?

You tell yourself you are going to do your task, but you know it’s a lie.

Worse than that is the fact that you convince yourself that you are telling the truth. You don’t even recognize when you are lying to yourself.

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Often, we tell ourselves we will do our task after we have done something else. You might promise to start once you have finished watching an episode of your favorite show on Netflix. Or you might promise to get started after you grab lunch.

But it’s all a lie.

Of course, we don’t just lie to ourselves about when we are going to complete a certain task. We lie to ourselves about a wide range of things.

Here are just a few of the lies we tell ourselves.

I will stop smoking.
I will start eating healthier
I will start exercising more
I will get out of my bad relationship
I will work less
I will spend more quality time with my family
I will spend more time on my creative hobbies.

Without even realizing it, we lie to ourselves a LOT. We also tend to tell ourselves the same lies over and over again.

Have an honest think about this. How often do you lie to yourself? Have you lied to yourself today about your thoughts, feelings, or actions?

One good way to tell if you are lying to yourself is by checking yourself for excuses. Often, without realizing it, we will already have our excuse lined up and ready to go for why we didn’t deliver.

You can imagine how endless our list of excuses can be. When we are good at lying to ourselves, we become experts at excuses.

Related post – 6 Ways to Ditch Your Excuses

The odd thing about lying is that many of us can spot when someone else is lying, but are completely oblivious to when we are lying to ourselves.

So how do we stop lying to ourselves?

We start with awareness. We can’t actively stop a behavior if we are not aware of what we are doing in the first place.

Admit when you are lying to yourself.

Challenge yourself for a week. Listen to your thoughts and words and really start pulling yourself up on them.

Understand the difference between when you are lying to yourself and when life genuinely gets in the way of stopping you from delivering on a promise you made to yourself (or to other people).

I finished reading a great book, The Motivation Manifesto by Brendon Burchard. This book covers 9 declarations, one being We Shall Not Break Integrity, which deals with lying to others as well as lying to ourselves. It’s an excellent read, so grab yourself a copy.

Lying to yourself eats away at your sense of self-worth and self-trust.

Not trusting yourself eats away at your self-confidence. Know when you are lying to yourself and modify your behavior. Become a person you can trust.

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