Leadership Lesson: Truth Always Helps

counseling-session
Photo by BusinessWeek
 
 
One of the principles that I have been trying to teach our members is: “You will only be helped to the extent you tell the truth. In fact, this principle can be applied to many other areas. Whether it is on opposite-sex relationships, addictions or even accountability, unless a person is telling the truth, he or she cannot be fully helped.

Too often people settle for cosmetic fixes and then, we begin to wonder what went wrong when things get out of control. Cosmetic changes will never get to the root problems or issues. We need a complete transformation from the inside out.

Elizabeth Cohen, a CNN senior medical correspondent shares an illustration in her article, “10 ‘Secrets’ You Shouldn’t Keep from Your Doctor.” Cohen writes,

“Do you remember the scene in the movie ‘Something’s Gotta Give’ where Jack Nicholson’s character lies about Viagra to a doctor in the emergency room? Many patients are embarrassed to talk to their doctors about certain subjects, like sex, finances and bad habits. Many patients are embarrassed to talk to their doctors about certain subjects, like sex, finances and bad habits.

He’d just had a heart attack after romancing a (much younger) woman, and the doctor is furiously calling out orders to give him aspirin, blood pressure drugs, and… nitroglycerine. ‘Mr. Sanborn, did you take any Viagra today?’ the doctor asks as the nurses load him up with the medicines. ‘No. No Viagra,’ he says.

‘Okay, good. Just need to be sure. Because I put nitroglycerin into your drip. And if you’d taken Viagra, the combination could be fatal,’ the doctor warns. Cut to Nicholson, who rips the IV out of his arm.”

 
 
I was thinking how hilariously funny this scene is when you thing about all the factors involved. Here is a person who doesn’t want to tell the truth because of his embarrassment or insecure but later realized that it could have (and would have been) fatal.

Why is it that only when things are fatal then people will start telling the truth? The self-preservation spirit is strong. I don’t know many people I have counseled over the years where if the person just told the truth early on then they could have saved themselves a lot of heartaches and headaches.

This brings up another point.

Self-deception is often times so deep and elusive that many people cannot catch it until it is too late. This is the reason why God’s Truth has to be the filter that we constantly run thing through. If we don’t, then we will find ourselves trying to pull out the IV but it will be too late.

Maybe David in the Bible finally understand the importance of this when he wrote, “Surely you desire truth in the inner parts; you teach me wisdom in the inmost place” (Ps 51:6).

Spiritual ENTREPRENEUR, Church EQUIPPER, Leadership EDUCATOR, Ideas EXPERIMENTER & Global EXPLORER who is trying to transform lives and transform the world.
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