I'm a little bent out of shape tonight so you'll have to excuse me. I was planning to deliver this post via YouTube but my Blue Yeti Microphone decided to wreck the audio on every shot I tried. Looks like I won't be delivering it until tomorrow, and only until my new microphone comes, thanks to Steemit’s generous rewards system. I've went and bought a Rode-NT usb. Reviews were cracking and users say they feel it's better than my current one. We'll soon see!

Alas, what I was planning to deliver via video I will be giving all of you in text. The video will come tomorrow, hopefully, if I get any sleep tonight. My son has awoken with a 38-degree temperature so he's not too well right now. I'm sort of fleeting back and forth from him at the moment and my attention is divided. Apologies if this is sub-par!

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Honesty is liberating

Honesty in communication is the stepping stone into a new world. For me, it was essentially the way in which I transformed my life. It's not an easy thing to do, and I'm well aware that attempting this can be quite challenging for some as it was for me. It's not something that happens overnight, you don’t wake up and think, "Yay, I'm honest now," no. It's a very difficult path to take, honesty, especially when the world tells you that sometimes there are occasions when you have to be dishonest with others to protect yourself. I disagree.

Living a completely honest life is close to harmonious. Think about it, there is no need to pretend to yourself that things are fine when they obviously aren't. It gives you the common sense to go out there and tackle problems when they first appear, rather than pretend to yourself it's not an issue for the next decade. If there's always honesty then you're never having to think of what you said to whom and when to keep yourself out of hot water. There will also be no need to grow those lies; sometimes a lie can become a massive lie because we are too scared to admit the truth. Why put yourself through that?

Be honest with yourself

The first step to honesty is starting to better acquaint yourself with telling yourself the truth. You know, stop kidding yourself on. We can never truly lie to ourselves but we can brush our issues under the carpet so we don't have to deal with them. It's never a good idea though because unresolved issues come out in different ways. Chucking large pints of beer down my throat was one of my coping mechanisms for having a large amount of issues I really just wasn't dealing with at the time. Start being honest with yourself a bit more. Admit things that you probably wouldn't normally admit to yourself. Admitting to yourself that you're a numbskull at times is easy, but admitting that you are a devious manipulator is much, much harder. One thing that made it much easier for me through this journey was realising I wasn't the only one with bad qualities. Everyone has them. My best friend that I've known since seven is an awesome guy, but boy does he cling onto that control; at the core, he's a people pleasing manipulator, and that's just him. Many of us have these traits. The first steps are admitting them and then once we know we can do something about it.

Be honest with others!

Once you've started to open up to yourself a bit more and begin to realise that you're not the beacon of high-borne perfection that you once thought, then you'll find that you'll start to be honest with other people, after all, you've nothing to secretly hide away, right? When we're honest with ourselves then we less feel the need to lie to others out of poor self-esteem. We begin to realise that it's fine to not be the best at everything, something that's becoming far too common nowadays. Truth with others will begin to come naturally and you'll find that people will begin to trust you more. Nothing tears up a reputation like a stone-cold liar. I know, I used to be one. When you tell the truth all the time you'll begin to realise that people start to come to you for honest judgement rather than fake niceness. There is a way to give criticism without making it sound too bad. We call it the feedback sandwich in our trade, where you sandwich two positive criticisms in-between a negative to soften the blow. Hearing it may sound something like, "David, that's amazing work, perhaps you could have structured your last two paragraphs better, but that's the best I've seen you do so far! Well done!"

A gateway to other amazing stuff

Once you have a better hold of honesty then it opens up a definite platform of communication. People are willing to listen to you, and equally willing to speak to you, rather than just the normal "tell you how it is." It's a really liberating experience and I recommend everyone at least give it a try. Being constantly honest opens up pathways into trust and safety, and we'll talk about them another day.

Hope you've enjoyed this, thanks for listening.