In the different aspects of life, pragmatic self-honesty is a key ingredient to high achievement.

The most successful people have a uncanny ability to recognize and understand the reality of any given situation. Without such self-honesty, they cannot strive to make the improvements necessary to better the situation. This ability to objectively self-evaluate provides the basis for the drive that makes these people successful.

How can people become more in tune with the reality around them? First, realize that we all live with filters about how we view ourselves and our situations. Some of these are overly skewed to the positive and some to the negative. To improve self-honesty, we need to be observant and self-reflective in the way we live our lives. We need to be able to  perceive the reactions around us. We need to be open to criticism but also understand the difference between constructive feedback and non-constructive feedback. We have to be diligent enough to test the different types of information for validation. We also need to be humble enough to consider other points of view and confident enough to change our point of view when shown compelling evidence.

I believe that people can become better at self-honesty with practice and awareness. It isn’t about a check box of things at each situation. After some practice, self-honesty becomes natural and instinctive. It takes a strong person to really look for truth in different situations. However, the reward is the ability to make dramatic enough changes to whatever situation you want to change.