Honesty as a value – benefits of honesty – caution not to overdue – situations when it is honest to lie and wrong to tell the truth.

Long Term Benefits Of Being Honest

Most of us will have heard that honesty is the best policy.

Being honest brings, indeed, a lot of benefits in a longer run. You are trusted as a colleague, partner, supplier. You have, most likely, sincere and reliable people as friends. Honesty based relationships are stable and lasting. It is much easier to run a business when you have earned trust of other people by being honest.

But do we often consider the immediate reward that we always get for being honest? Yes, from being honest, we benefit immediately, and those immediate gains may often be even more important than the long term gains.

What We Receive Right Away When We Are Honest

Being Whole

We can be a whole person, an integral person, an undivided person – only if we are honest. And being whole is a huge benefit in itself.

Being whole gives you a comfortable feel even in challenging situations. Being whole is a solid ground to stand on in a crazy World. If you feel one and united on the inside, then you leave no chance for the evil to ruin you.

But what if the ultimate purpose for our life is learning how to be happy, even if the conditions are not favorable, even if the World around us is unfriendly? The regularities all around me tell me that it is just that. We have everything and surplus for being happy, but we forget to be like that. We give too much attention to ugly things, assaults, criticism, injustice and others, so that we actually – forget to be happy! That is my impression. And for being happy, we need integrity, we need to be whole, to be honest.

People with split soul can’t be happy. They are at war with themselves. They can’t see Joy because they are too busy fighting the constantly sounding voice of conscience. They feel guilty and are prepared to do everything to deafen that sense of guilt within themselves. If I were to use a single word for that, I would call that Hell.

Honesty is often considered a synonym for integrity. I would see it as the most important component of integrity. I believe there are more things that can damage our integrity, like e.g. allowing fear to stop us from fulfilling our dreams, allowing others to manipulate us into doing what we feel wrong, etc.

But integrity is a value in itself. When we lose integrity, we open ourselves for negative stress, health problems, depression. On the other hand, most often than not, such problems get solved by themselves when we recover our integrity. On this site, you will find many stories about integrity.

Being whole is a value. In fact, a first step towards happy life and good health.

Sense Of Pride

When we are honest, we feel proud of being ourselves. We can feel that all the more when staying honest has required taking a firm stand, when we have stood in an ultimate temptation. In other words, if staying honest has cost us something and we have paid the price. Few things can compare with this sweetness.

When I feel proud of myself, I feel stronger. I feel my health improving. I observe more and more happiness come into my life and more and more viruses staying out of it.

Sense of pride for an honest act is a value that we receive right away the very moment when we decide to stay honest in spite of threats and temptations.

And what a good medicine that sense of pride is! It can take you to good health much faster than any medicine that money can buy.

Good Sleep

Honesty is a sleep pill, too, and a matchless such! Honesty gives me peace of mind even if my being honest has upset the rest of the World.

It is not upsetting others by doing the right thing that takes away our sleep. It is sooner pleasing others by doing a wrong thing that renders us sleepless.

I have challenges and stress, I do. But I do not know what insomnia is. In the end of the day, I fall asleep the very moment when I touch my pillow. Because in the deepest deep, I have my peace of mind. I try to never sin against my integrity.

Caution Not To Overdo Honesty

Honesty must always go together with Love. Never use it without Love! Honesty, if it gets formal, can be worse than the worst lie.

Never use honesty to hurt somebody. Don’t throw your honesty like dirty rags on people!

There are thousands and thousands of small things that can be allowed to belong to the past without ever mentioning. There can be secrets that you’ve been entitled to, or secrets that you have found out by accident.

Be wise. Never lift up things that can do people harm, even if you would sound noble and honest.

Help people to save face whenever you can, and not the other way round.

When Lie Is Honest And Truth Is Not

Again and again I want to repeat that, for the honesty to bear fruit, we need to be wise. The life is very complex, and there can be situations when it is honest to lie and dishonest to tell the truth.

Imagine if you lived in a Nazi occupied territory where the witch hunt for Jewish people is on, where they are placed in ghettos, death camps and exterminated. And now you see a Jewish person run from the police. Will you tell the police which direction they ran?

If you do, that is not honesty. That is cowardice. Honesty is always supposed to work towards saving lives, not betraying, not killing.

Honesty would be showing them a wrong direction, even if, by doing so, you put at risk your own self, even your own life.

Life can be very complex at times, and we need to be wise.