Being honest with yourself is right up there with taking responsibility for your actions when it comes to challenges we encounter when we’re trying to grow. I’m sure there’s a case to be made for the fact that these two things go hand in hand. You’re not honest with yourself if you struggle to take responsibility for where you are in this moment and the decisions you made that brought you here.
Whether the choices and decisions you made were conscious or not didn’t minimize the part you played. Awareness is a choice. You can choose to become more aware of your motivations and how your mind works, or you can choose to believe that you have no control over these things.
When we take the time to reflect on our lives and the thoughts and actions that led us to where we are today, it can be easy to dismiss what didn’t go well and tell yourself that it was meant to be without being honest with yourself. I remember for the longest time when I was in high school and the early university years; I was convinced that I wanted to be a lawyer. After my first attempt at the LSATs and my dismal score, I decided it wasn’t the career for me.
The interesting thing about this story is that I worked for a lawyer the summer before my last year of high school. I was excited when I got the job. I thought I was going to go to court and learn all kinds of cool things. After that summer, I realized that being a lawyer wasn’t anything like what they show on television, and I started to doubt if that was the career I really wanted.
My parents loved the idea of me being a lawyer, so even though I had lost my passion for law, I went ahead and did the LSATs. When the score wasn’t where I knew it needed to be, I took it as a sign that Law School wasn’t meant for my future.
A few years after I graduated with my undergraduate degree, I decided to go back to school and do my master’s. After getting my degree with a major in International Politics with a minor in Peace Studies, I figured my Master’s degree should be more practical, so I decided to do my MBA. Applying to do my MBA meant writing my GMATs, a test similar to the LSATs in that the questions are logic-based.
Since I really wanted to do my MBA, I took a course to teach me techniques to score higher on the test than I was scoring in the practice runs. I took the GMATs only once, and even though the score wasn’t stellar, it was enough with supporting documents to get me into the only school I applied to.
If I was honest with myself, I took the LSATs for the wrong reasons. I already had doubts about whether I really wanted to go to law school, yet I still wrote the test and then felt bad about the score I received. If I really wanted to go to law school, I would have taken a prep course like I did for the GMATs and retaken the test, but I didn’t. I clearly didn’t want it bad enough.
Doing my MBA was something I wanted, something I believed would help me with my professional career. I was motivated to do whatever I needed to do to get into business school. I was clear on where I wanted to go and didn’t leave room for a plan b.
When we’re honest with ourselves, we can save ourselves a lot of grief. Sometimes we choose to do something because we think it will make someone else happy, even when we’re unsure about how that choice will affect our own happiness. When we choose to do things for the sake of others, even when we know it could negatively impact us, we have to be willing to take responsibility for that choice.
Being honest with yourself and having a willingness to take responsibility for your actions are great ways to grow and positively change your life. Whether that means being honest when you’re not doing okay or taking responsibility for something you did or didn’t do that impacted you differently, you’ll start to see shifts in your life when you make them a priority.