--:-- Ryan Hanley: Rule number eight from Jordan Peterson's *12 Rules for Life*, the rule that he considers the most important in that book, is "Tell the truth, or at least don't lie." This morning I was doing a little journaling, and I don't journal every day. This isn't like a morning routine life hack video by any regard. I was just writing down some thoughts. What are the core values of the content that I want to share on this channel? What are the standards? What are the bedrock ideas, concepts that I live my life by, that I build companies by, that I advise founders and entrepreneurs and executives on? What are the ideas that drive my daily decisions, my daily actions. And the first one I wrote down is "Tell the truth."
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And it shocked me when that happened, not because I think that somehow I'm virtuous in that way, but why it shocked me is for so long, I was one of those people who told little white lies. I would, in an effort to be a people pleaser, to be nice, to be a, I didn't want to be mean. I didn't want to be aggressive. I didn't want to come off as a disagreeable, even though I probably am a disagreeable person by nature. I've always told little white lies.
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And it wasn't until I came across Jordan's book in 2017 and really made a lot of life changes, got my health and fitness, got my mental health in order, got so much of the discipline that I live by today was generated through a whole bunch of different readings, not just Jordan Peterson's *12 Rules for Life*, although I do think that's one of the most impactful books I've ever read and highly recommend it if you have not.
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Telling the truth is something we don't do. We wanna believe that we tell the truth. We wanna believe that we don't lie about big things, but think in your own life. You probably told a little white lie today. You probably had a situation in which you could have given someone the raw, honest truth. You could have been direct and straightforward. It doesn't mean mean, but you could have been direct and straightforward with someone. Your spouse, your children, a colleague at work, one of your team members. You could have been direct and honest, and you weren't. And these little white lies add up.
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Not only do I believe that they eat at our soul, that's a little ethereal, but what they do is they create a false sense of reality. And I want to give you two examples from my own life that this became a major problem.
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So how this looks is I had an early employee. She was an incredibly high performer, driven, type A, just an absolute monster. She just got things done. And in the early days of our company, when there was only a few team members, her nature to be kind of overbearing and controlling, it actually was an asset because she would take over situations and she would make sure that projects were accomplished. She would make sure that people were held accountable, that they lived up to what they said they were going to do. And she did it in a way that created massive progress and massive results.
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But as our company started to grow, she tended to overstep her bounds. She tended to move into areas that were not her primary concern and acted as if she was the number one. Now, not to me. She was deferential to me, but to everyone else in the company, regardless of their status situation, what vertical of our business they were either working in or in control of, she maintained that overbearing, aggressive, controlling nature.
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And at first I saw it as just youthful exuberance, that she was excited, that she wanted to see the company grow. She was incredibly committed to us. She was loyal and she wanted to be part of our success. And I thought that as we grew as a company, as she saw how I led, which is kind of this of service mentality, that she would start to see through my leadership, through my example, how you have to give people rope. You have to give people space. You have to give people an opportunity to own and make decisions in the areas in which they been given ownership.
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And she did not. And here where the mistake comes in. Early on, I knew this about her. I did not correct it. As we grew, I started to get complaints. And what I would say to people is, you don't understand. She is a high performer. She is driven. She is just kind of aggressive, hard charger. That's the kind of person we need in this company, everything will be okay.
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And then when I would do one-on-ones with her, I would gloss over these interactions. I would soften them. I would give her tangential feedback and never just directly say to her, "You have to stay in your lane. You have to take control of, and you have to be responsible for the things that you are responsible for and let everyone else do their version of how they want to lead their department as long as it fit the standards, obviously, of our company."
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And by not being direct with her, by not being honest with her, by not sharing with her that the way she was going about her business was creating a real problem in our company, the issue metastasized, it spread, and it became a real problem. And ultimately we lost two employees because they didn't want to deal with her anymore. They didn't want to be under her thumb. And that was a problem.
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And at that point, losing two employees that were otherwise good performers in the company, people who we would never have let go that were growing and maturing into their roles and were contributors to the team by not being honest and direct with her, by telling her these little white lies that, oh, you know, how you're going about it is okay. You just have to work through things. Everyone has different styles. I didn't want to have the hard discussion with her and I was not honest.
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And therefore she was living in a false reality. She was living in a reality that what she was doing was okay. That she wasn't the problem, that it was just a remote workforce or different styles of work or different personality types. And that wasn't the truth. The hard, unfortunate truth was that her disposition and the way she was approaching people, the way she spoke to people, the way she wrote Slack and email messages was creating a problem and it was absolutely positively the way she was going about it and I did not address that issue until it was far too late and ultimately through our investors and our board, I was forced to remove this person from her position which created all sorts of other problems.
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And when I look back on it, it's not her fault. It wasn't her fault. I didn't tell the truth. I wasn't honest and direct with her. I didn't sit her down and have a conversation about what was actually going on and setting reality for what it was. That while she was a driven, hard-charging, performance-based employee who I did love having on the team, she had to do real work to change the way that she addressed other employees.
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Because this was the point of Jordan's talk back in Utah, that our reality is set by the words that we use. Words are real, words matter. And if we do not tell the truth, we create a false reality in which people respond to. How would she know that I believed that she was actually the problem if I never actually shared that with her? If I always tried to massage it or whitewash it a little or dampen the feedback or make it seem that what she was doing wasn't actually the problem. How could she live in reality? She couldn't actually react. I never gave her the chance to react to the situation and make real adjustments because I wasn't honest with her.
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And now, three years later, having worked with countless entrepreneurs and executives, being a board member of other organizations, talking to other friends who are CEOs and entrepreneurs themselves, I've realized that this is a very common problem, that we have so many things to deal with in our lives that we do not want to have those really tough conversations. We don't want to tell the truth in the moment because with telling the truth comes all sorts of emotions, complications, frustrations. The meaning that you wanted to be 20 minutes now becomes an hour or longer and you dealing with another problem.
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And as leaders as executives as entrepreneurs founders we don want to add another problem to our plate. So we feel like if we can kick the can if we can just get past this conversation then hopefully things will work themselves out. My friends, nothing gets worked out on its own. That is a cliché that does not translate into reality. We as leaders have to address things head on and we have to tell the truth.
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Telling the truth is not something we just need to focus on in our business lives. We must focus on it as well in our personal relationships. And this can become incredibly difficult because we want to have good relationships with our children. We want to have good relationships with our spouse, with our partner. We want to have good relationships with our friends, with the people that we see at sporting events or community events or religious events. We don't want to have strife and no one wants to be seen as someone who is openly disagreeable.
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But unfortunately, disagreeable people oftentimes live in the purest sense of reality. Here's the good news. You can start telling the truth at any moment. This is not something that is going to break down a relationship. You can sit down with your spouse and say, "I'd like to talk to you about something. This thing that you do, you come in the house and you don't acknowledge me. That makes me feel bad. Could you please, when you come in the house from work, just address me, say hello, ask me how my day went, or just let's have a quick interaction with each other. It makes me feel like you don't care about me when you walk in the house and just walk right past me as if I don't even exist."
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Or in a business context, when someone does something or says something or is confrontational in a way that is negative, address it head on and tell them the truth. This does not mean that we have carte blanche to go ape on them and just yell or chastise them in public. These types of conversations are best had in private if possible, where you pull someone aside, whether it's remote or in person and say, "The interaction that you just had was a negative. And the reason for that is because, and insert the reason."
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Now that person gets to respond to reality. They can respond negatively. They can make excuses. They can blame you. They can blame the other person and that's fine. And then you can address those things or they can take in the advice and they can change and work on it and adapt just like you are and not telling white lies anymore and working through the truth and living in reality.
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Because someone who works for your company, who is creating problems that you do not address, that you whitewash, that you make excuses for, that you do not tell the truth to, they are not living in reality. They oftentimes will tell you on exit interviews that they didn't even know the things they were doing was a problem, which is the case with the woman who we ultimately had to let go.
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In her exit interview, her primary frustration was that she didn't know the things that people had a problem with that she was doing. That's my fault as the leader for not being open and honest with her. I have corrected that. I now try to be a net positive, disagreeable individual. I will question assumptions. I will ask people to dive deeper into opinions. I will tell someone upfront if they're doing something that is a net negative to an organization.
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So here's the rub. Our words create reality. If we're not telling the truth, then that is the reality that everyone in our space is living in. So if you feel frustrated, if you feel like people don't understand you, if you feel like people don't listen to you, if you feel like people consistently do things is not what you want or not what you like, or that people are doing things and they're not understanding who you are, where you come from, or what you want, the case is much more often that that person doesn't understand what you want because you're not telling them the truth than it is they don't care about you or that they don't want to do things that make you happy or that help your company.
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So here's your task out of this video. Start catching yourself telling little white lies. When you find yourself about to whitewash something or just move around the truth or give someone a false sense of reality by not being direct with them, catch yourself, take a deep breath, and find a way to deliver that message in a truthful manner so that they can actually respond to what you want.
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This is how we become great partners, great parents, great friends, great community members and great leaders. And this my friends is the way.
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And if I haven convinced you and are not a Jordan Peterson fan a few other references Socrates as captured by Plato many of his arguments around telling the truth focused on both personal and societal improvement. And ultimately, the Socratic method was developed or at least was used to ultimately dig down to the to the truth of a particular topic. Constantly asking why, why, why, was to get to the ultimate truth of a topic.
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If you're looking for someone a little more contemporary, Brene Brown, who is an author and researcher, incredible. If you haven't read her books, I highly recommend them. She attributes telling the truth to authenticity and authenticity being a primary aspect of personal and professional growth and development.
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And if you wanna go slightly to the political side, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who wrote the Gulag Archipelago, which is a very intense and powerful book about the Gulags of Russia post-World War II. He said that the only way to fight authoritarianism and totalitarianism was to tell the truth. Evil cannot survive in the light of the truth.
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If you enjoy this content, if you love this channel, please hit the subscribe button. Leave comments. I want to know how you deal with telling the truth. How do you catch yourself? How do you make sure that you are telling the truth as often as you possibly can? If you're listening to the audio version of this and you want to leave a comment, come over to the YouTube channel. Otherwise, my friends, I love you for watching this show, creating this content for you, sharing these ideas for you. It brings me great joy. I hope you love it as much as I do. Until next time, my friends, I'm out of here. Peace.
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