My Grandma Rose often said, “Always tell the truth and then you won’t have to remember what you said.” In 56 years of living, 38 years of marriage, 159 kid years of parenting (the sum of my six practically perfect children’s ages), and 25 years as a lawyer with a lot of experience getting people divorced from spouses and business partners, I have unfortunately heard a lot of lying and told my share of them as well (I’m only as human as you are).
Almost all of the lies I have heard (and told) have been innocent white lies, some of which are allowable in their circumstances. The really unfortunate ones I have heard, however, (and told) have been lies to avoid confrontation about an inconvenient truth. For example, in my divorce cases, I have often been told by a wayward spouse he or she has never had sex during the soon-to-be-asunder marriage with anyone except that spouse’s spouse.
The wayward spouse will deny it in his answer to the complaint to divorce. She will deny it in the first interrogatories (questions sent from one litigant to another to be answered under oath). They will both deny it in their depositions. And then, as they say, the real fun begins, because nothing is more fun for a lawyer than proving a sanctimonious liar on the stand to be exactly what he or she is, a liar. Philanderers are not usually very smart. They live their lives through their checkbooks, debit cards, and credit cards and the data disproving their lies is easy to obtain and exciting to throw on the ledge separating them at trial from the judge and opposing lawyer.
Almost any public relations consultant worth his or her salt will tell you, however, “When faced with an inconvenient truth, the best way to get past it is by running straight at it as hard and as fast as you can.”
I would much rather tell someone exactly what I have done and why I had done it than to lie about it and be proven to be a liar in the end. All people lie and when they perceive their best interests to be at stake, most can and will lie convincingly. The will support their lies with their years of credibility. They will tie themselves so closely in their lies that, in the end, when their lies are destroyed, they will find they have destroyed themselves as well.
Therefore, now, whenever anyone (legal or personal consulting client or just friend or acquaintance) asks me, “What do I do about the fact I have [fill in the blank with your inconvenient truth), I almost always advise them, “Tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth; tell it as fast and as loudly as you can; and keep repeating it to yourself and the other important people in the situation until the whole ugly mess is out there; and then you can get past it.
Almost never lie. It’s so simple it seems stupid to have to repeat it. Run at the inconvenient truth.
Great! people almost never lie. Go out there today and be Great! All the Time!
How many times have you been caught in a lie to cover an inconvenient truth? How did it turn out?