Honesty is tougher than you think sometimes.\u00a0 We had a saying back when I was building communication systems for a large government agency.\u00a0 “The nice thing about standards is there are so many to choose from.”\u00a0 There are many kinds of honesty as well.<\/p>\n
The top three definitions from our friends at dictionary.com are:<\/p>\n
1. the quality or fact of being honest; uprightness and fairness<\/p>\n
2. truthfulness, sincerity, or frankness<\/p>\n
3. freedom from deceit or fraud<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The concept of honesty must be confusing for a child. Think about it.\u00a0 We chew a child out for telling us a lie — “Who ate the cookies?”\u00a0 “Not me!”\u00a0 Yet, when a child will rather loudly observe in crowded room, “Look, Mommy, that man is fat!” (Most likely a true statement.)\u00a0 The child is shushed and told rather hurriedly that it’s not nice to say such things out loud.\u00a0 Kind of a mixed message, isn’t it?\u00a0 Most of us learn to tactfully not tell the whole truth.\u00a0 We sometimes learn to omit certain facts if they are likely to hurt someone.\u00a0 If you’re a man in a relationship with a woman of any kind, you’ve likely heard the question, “Honey, do these pants make my butt look big?”\u00a0 Just how honestly do you answer that question?\u00a0 A lot depends upon the relationship you have with the woman and her relationship with you.\u00a0 There can be a tactfully true answer, but sometimes the person really doesn’t want to hear the truth.\u00a0 Or, maybe more correctly, the person can’t handle the truth (in the words of Jack Nicholson’s character in a certain movie).<\/p>\n
I think the real challenge is recognizing there are different kinds of honesty and knowing that sometimes, it’s more important to be kind.\u00a0 If you can do that, then recognizing when kindness trumps honesty and applying the appropriate action is the next challenge.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Honesty is tougher than you think sometimes.\u00a0 We had a saying back when I was building communication systems for a large government agency.\u00a0 “The nice thing about standards is there are so many to choose from.”\u00a0 There are many kinds of honesty as well. The top three definitions from our …<\/span> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-526","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-a-z-challenge"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/526","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=526"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/526\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=526"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=526"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeanschara.com\/pmtoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=526"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}