Once you go to a government office or a public sector bank and see employees working hard whenever they get time from having endless tea, cigarette, lunch and snack breaks, you realise why so many of our brethren are dying to be labelled backward. If Amroha Nagar Palika received 19,000 applications and that too mostly from BA, BSc, MA, BTech and MBA candidates for 114 posts of safai karamchari [sweepers], you can imagine how scary it is out there.

Conquering the final frontier

It is a huge achievement when you finally get an interview call. So what if it’s after 5,874 rejections, heartbreaks, and ‘how-dare-they-think-I-am not good-enough’ rants! Now that you have reached the final frontier, you transform into a marketeer about to sell a ghastly tasting tea as a weight reducing miracle beverage. Not everyone is your Mom who thinks you are the best thing to have happened to mankind after Darjeeling tea.

I’m not suggesting everyone lies to get a job. But then even Yudhishthira ‘misspoke’ the truth to put an end to a bloody war that lasted 18 days. Thankfully, a typical interview lasts anything between 20 and 30 minutes within which you have to convince a bunch of grim looking strangers that you are the harbinger of their achhe din! This is the time when you get to unleash the power-hungry politician in you and make promises you have no intention of keeping. It does help if you package yourself well and try to look and sound intelligent. After all, not many take Rahul Gandhi seriously despite his impressive lineage.

What you really mean

Remember the time you wooed that hottie online? You told her you were a six feet something who loved surfing and stays up all night reading Plato and Plath with the book placed on his six pack abs. How quickly she fell for you! It helped that she lived
in Nicaragua and would never find that you’d never been near the ocean or the gym and you spend all night watching porn.

Likewise, an interview is an opportunity to be as creative as possible with the truth. If you’ve ever doubted your talents, here’s a concise list of your misspoken truths and what they actually mean.

When you say – I pride myself as a team player and have never had disagreements with my colleagues. I’m patient, understanding and kind to every single person at the office. Even those I don’t get along with.

What you really mean – I work well only with those who agree with me. The ones who have problems with my style of working are either jealous of me or too stupid to recognise my genius.

When you say – I just love what you’re wearing!

What you’re thinking – I hope my desperation to get this job is not showing!

When you say – I have always wanted to work for an organisation with mission, vision and values. It would be a dream-come-true to work here.

What you really mean – I don’t even know what these words mean! But they sound pompous and idealistic; besides, they make me sound good.

When you say – I resigned from my previous job because it did not help me reach my true potential. Of course, the management refused to accept my resignation but I was adamant. Everyone cried at my farewell party.

What you really mean – I just need a new job to hate. When I finally put in my papers, everyone at my office cried with relief. I just hope they all die and to make sure they do, I shall fast for 56 consecutive Mondays.

When you say – I always give my 100 per cent to the organisation.

What you really mean – The decimal that comes right after 1 is only visible to me. Hehehehe!

When you say – If there’s anything I do not like about me is my quest for perfectionism. I don’t mind the extra hours I have to put in to deliver the perfect package.

What you really mean – I have never met a deadline in my entire lifetime and my last boss had a nervous breakdown waiting for me to complete the job assigned to me. Last heard he had relocated to an ashram in Rishikesh where he scours utensils in the kitchen.

When you say – I have never shied from taking a tough call. If you don’t drive accountability, you’d have happy employees but a bankrupt company.

What you really mean – I once caught one of the team members spitting in my tea. Last Diwali someone put a live ‘phataka’ [firecracker] under my seat. It’s a miracle I did not die of heart failure.

When you say – I am an avid reader, traveller, wildlife photographer

What you really mean – Lol, are you kidding me? The only wildlife I have photographed is my wife! I am an avid reader of Facebook posts. And commuting two hours each way to reach my workplace is travel, right?

When you say – Five years from now I see myself as a valuable employee of your esteemed organisation mentoring juniors and helping them realise their true potential.

What you really mean – Five years from now I’ll have your job. When I sit on your side of the table, I’ll make sure nobody gets the job the way I did. By faking it.

Such glib talking will ensure that these fools will fall for you hook, line and sinker. You can now look forward to a match made in heaven. Of course, most relationships are made in China [they rarely last forever], especially the ones based on lies. But while you’re still a couple, you can keep pretending your boss dearest is the best thing to have happened to you in public, and bitch about her in private. Thankfully you won’t have to wait seven years to get the ‘seven year itch’.  At the first signs of restlessness, you can start sailing the ocean in search of a juicier new catch and prepare a new set of lies to net that big fish.

The post The lies we speak in a job interview [and what we actually mean] appeared first on Complete Wellbeing.

And then there are the people who lie to your face. Right there, in person at the grocery store. You haven’t seen each other in awhile and she’s [let’s call her Dabny] missed every one of your book club meetings for the last two months. She tells you she’s been so busy but she thinks about you every day and oh, have you lost weight? After she rushes off for a ‘work event’ you find out that she left your book club for a much cooler one than yours. So, why is she lying? I’ll tell you why.

An easy way out

Dabny believes you can’t handle the truth. Also, she’s a spineless weasel. Frankly, I don’t understand why you’re friends with her.

Why couldn’t Dabny tell you the truth, instead of letting you waste all kinds of energy and time worrying about your friendship and following her around town and bugging her apartment? And sending her emails and texting her in case she didn’t get those emails, and calling her in case she didn’t get those texts, and messaging her on Facebook in case she didn’t get those voice mails?

Recent surveys show that 95 per cent of people lie at least once a day… and the other five per cent lied on the questionnaires. If one lie was a dollar, we’d all be millionaires. Of course, inflation would skyrocket and you wouldn’t be able to afford housing, food and your cell phone bill but you’d have loads of money.

Lying is all about controlling the behaviour of others. But mostly, people lie because they’re afraid. Like your spineless weasel friend, Dabny, who screens her calls.

Most liars are insecure and starved for attention. The truth is boring, but if you have a ‘filthy-rich’ love interest, or a celebrity who is a ‘good friend’ or worse, a ‘very good friend’, then everyone at the party wants to gather around you and hear about it. Your lies have instantly made you everyone’s ‘best friend’.

Lies that irk me

Like the fictional Dr Gregory House says, “Everybody lies”. I mean cheating Jack isn’t about to tell the doctor how he really hit his head [because he and the babysitter were goofing around], especially with his wife sitting right there in the doctor’s office with him.

Or if you’re standing for elections, tell the people what they want to hear because they will vote for you based on your unrealistic promises. They will scream at you later for not fulfilling your promise. But hey, you got elected and that’s what matters, right?

And don’t get me started on the scam artists who sell pills that will either shrink your whole body or enlarge a specific part of it.

The downside to lying

Here’s the thing—I’m a literal person who expects honesty. If I take Joe blow-things-out-of-proportion literally, I ride his emotional roller coaster with him, reacting to his near-death experiences of wrestling alligators and almost plane crashes as if what he’s telling me happened exactly the way he says it did. After he’s delivered his steaming pile of hyperboles, I’m emotionally exhausted. Later, I will feel like a duped fool for believing any of it. Eventually, I don’t trust him anymore and simply nod along instead of boarding that tiresome train.

If you have a secret, you can tell me or not, I don’t care. I’m not that kind of nosy and I’m not insulted if you keep it from me. I’d rather you say nothing about your closet skeletons than claim you’ve never “had any work done” on your face. Besides, I can tell that you’ve had work done on your face. Nobody’s cheekbones look like that naturally.

As a famous, cherry tree-chopping young lad once said, “I cannot tell a lie”. Though I am fully capable of distorting the truth, it’s too energy consuming for me. I speak from experience when I say that when one lies, one has to store that lie for later reference and I simply can’t be bothered.

I lied to my mother once when I was a teenager. I came home late one day and gave her some lame excuse about breaking my watch and brought in two watch-less witnesses to back me up. But her words indicated that she knew I was lying. In one moment, I’d been caught and punished without being humiliated in front of my friends. I felt horrible. My mother was indeed a clever woman.

When lying makes sense

On the other hand, there are times when lying is a fabulous idea. For example, it’s perfectly acceptable to lie to rude or judgmental people. So what if you have a penchant for squirrel-themed salt and pepper shakers or a late-night doughnut problem? That’s none of their dang business. They don’t deserve the truth for being meddlesome. These so-called friends of yours are emotional terrorists and you can’t let the terrorists win.

Don’t enable their behaviour by answering invasive questions. If you’re a materialistic Judgy McJudgerstein and you ask me where I got this puffy, lime green prom dress and how much it was, I’m not about to tell you I bought it at an 80 per cent discount from a roadside vendor. I’ll say I paid full price for it and had it custom tailored. However, if you’re my trusted friend, not only will I tell you where I bought it from, I will also show you the other cool stuff I bought from him—like an awesome pink chessboard-topped table.

You know, it’s frustrating for those of us who believe in a meritocracy, which doesn’t exist. We watch liars pass us by on their way to the bank because of all this silly integrity with which we are burdened. If only we could tell ourselves, “Well, at least I can sleep at night because I’m not an emotional terrorist,” but then, we’d be the liars.

Nevertheless, we have to keep fighting the good fight because someday, we will win. Someday, technology will advance to the point of reading our brains and everyone will have an app called Polly Graff installed on their smartphones, which flashes holographic emotional terrorist icons above people’s heads when they lie.

Look, I can understand if you don’t want to tell me that you’ve murdered someone or just paid an outrageous sum of money for an awkwardly located tattoo, or you crashed on the couch and binged-watched Spongebob Squarepants all weekend instead of going out with me. Don’t be Dabny, the spineless weasel. You can tell me what you really did, even if it was without me. Or tell me nothing. I won’t take it personally or judge you. If you tell me the truth, I will love you and respect you no matter what everyone else says about you.

And that’s no lie.

The post Truth be told appeared first on Complete Wellbeing.

Why do we avoid telling the unpleasant truth?

We’ve all done it. We don’t really want to do it, but it comes almost naturally. That’s probably because we would prefer not to hurt the ones we love.

If you have a husband or wife who wants to sing but is a terrible singer, you might be inclined to encourage them to sing; despite their apparent lack of talent. That situation can be applied to countless other scenarios where one person in a relationship lies to the other in order to maintain the happiness level. After all, most people don’t really enjoy conflict, especially if the conflict begins with something that one party could take as particularly insulting, like telling them their voice is terrible.

When we lie to those we care about, are we really doing the right thing? It may seem that we’re saving them from pain. For any person, being in a relationship means that we don’t want our partner to be hurt.

The problem is that by pretending that everything is okay, we are merely postponing the hurt. And when the person finally learns the truth about what you’ve been telling them, they may never trust you again.

“Why do my boyfriends always leave me?”

I knew a girl who was extremely beautiful. She had an exotic look to her that any magazine would have loved and she had the smile to match. Her personality was equally as attractive, so I really enjoyed hanging out with her whenever I could.

One night, she and I were talking about the various guys she’d been dating over the course of the last few years. She couldn’t understand why none of her relationships had worked out. The guys seemed to like her, and everything always appeared to be going fine. But inevitably, the guy would break things off with her almost out of the blue. Each and every time, she was blind-sided by the breakup.

When she asked me what I thought the problem was, I honestly couldn’t say at first, because I didn’t know. So, I asked her a series of questions to get to the root of the issue. The line of inquiry went through every possible avenue I could think of: How were their conversations? Was the chemistry good? Were there any indicators that something was wrong?

Then she mentioned one thing. She said that initially the guys were really into her and always wanted to kiss her. But as the relationship progressed, they seemed to kiss her less and less.

An idea hit me. Maybe she had bad breath… But I couldn’t say that. And I actually didn’t know. Plus, I didn’t want to be the one to test it out. That was something I would rather let one of her girlfriends tell her.

I went about carefully laying the groundwork for building up to the possible solution to her problem. I told her it could be one of many things. I listed several items that might have been a turn off to guys, bad breath being one of them.

She asked me point blank if that was an issue, to which I responded that I didn’t know, but maybe she could ask some of her other friends about it.

Telling the truth: There’s spinach in your teeth

When it comes to telling the unpleasant truth, none of us wants to offend someone else’s personal air space and none of us wants to look like an idiot.

I have become a much more upfront person in the last few years, and am usually willing to be brutally honest with friends who ask me questions with potentially hurtful answers. I never found out whether my friend actually had bad breath or not. But if I were her, I would have wanted to know.

Have you ever gotten something stuck in your teeth? I have. This happens to most people, especially if they’ve eaten spinach because you can’t always feel if there’s spinach wedged between your pearly whites. And if someone doesn’t let you know about it, you will walk around for the next few hours with something green sticking out to everyone you smile at.

Not telling the unpleasant truth does more harm than good

When it comes down to whether or not you should be telling an unpleasant truth in a relationship, you have to ask yourself a very simple question. Would you want to know the truth? Inevitably, you are doing far more harm than good by lying and delaying the foreseeable. How would you feel if someone you cared about told you that you were good at something, only to find out everyone else thought you were terrible? It would be way worse than finding out you had some spinach in your teeth.

Are you afraid to know the truth about something in your life? What are the consequences if you don’t know the truth? Or are you afraid to be honest with someone you care about because you don’t want to hurt them? Ask yourself the simple question. Would you want to know?

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The truth about lies

A well-known truth about lying is that everyone, including children, knows it’s bad. But we still indulge in it because the trade-off for lying is some kind of short-term payoff. And frequently, this payoff is higher than the perceived loss that comes with speaking the truth. Whether in business or in daily life, we have been conditioned to choose profitable opportunities over defeating ones. This same short-sightedness, when transferred to  children compels them to focus on the immediate benefits of lying even at the cost of overlooking the long-term harm it does to their character.

Consider these:

• No I didn’t get any homework today [evading responsibility]
• I was not misbehaving at the party [avoiding punishment]
• I did not break that jar, it just fell [escaping consequences]
• I did not hit him. He hit me first [keeping own self-regard]

From the child’s past experiences, she has learnt that telling truth often results in bad/unwanted consequences while lying helps her avoid them.

The past makes way for the future

Your child’s bad behaviour in the past may have led you to punish her. That’s how parents’ discipline their children when their actions call for it. But though punishment is necessary, it is never sufficient. That’s because the child does not understand why she is being reprimanded. All she knows is that if her mother doesn’t know the truth, the negative outcome vanishes and so does the punishment. That is why every child getting punished needs to understand exactly why she is being punished. She has to be told that it’s not the ‘naughty act or event’ but the ‘outcome of the naughty act or event’ that is responsible for her punishment. Not doing so means that we are indirectly encouraging our kids to lie.

Watch for these signs

When kids get caught in a lie they often:

• Look away and make little eye contact with you
• Cross their arms or switch gestures if they get nervous
• Get fidgety because of guilt and fear about their punishment.
• Repeat themselves several times so you’ll believe that they didn’t do it

When you’ve identified the lie, be cautious as well as compassionate. Even the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court shows compassion and offers punishment that is corrective. As parents we can certainly to do better than that. After all, our objective is not to simply punish our children and make them feel bad, but to make sure that we’re raising them to be responsible and honest individuals.

Be considerate

If you suspect that your child is lying, don’t immediately accuse her. Remember that your child may actually be very afraid at that moment and just like adults, kids too are more comfortable speaking the truth when they are not afraid. So you first have to earn the trust of your child. To support your child in telling the truth, make him feel safe, loved and respected. Listen without judgment.

Magnify the truth

One would often assume that if you want your child not to do something, you have to make her feel bad about doing it. All children know that it is not good to lie, but they do it out of fear. By focussing on what you ‘don’t’ want them to do, you’re drawing more attention to that behaviour. Now they will not only be fearful but also guilty.

A better way to manage this situation is to praise your child each time she speaks the truth. That will motivate her to speak the truth more often—in fact she will enjoy it too. Use phrases such as:

• “It’s very good to know that you are speaking the truth”
• “You’re a brave child for having spoken the truth”
• “I like knowing the truth. Thank you.”

Take your own advice

If you don’t want your children to lie to you, you also must be completely honest with them in everything that you say to them, even when you’re refusing to give or do something they want. When they ask you why they can’t go play outside, instead of making up some arbitrary reason that isn’t true, share the real reason with them. Involve them in your process of wanting to be honest with them. And if the honest answer is that “you don’t know”, go ahead and tell them that you don’t know. Because it’s alright to not know! Your children need to learn that too—that it’s ok to not know. They need your honesty more than you realise it. By living what you want your children to do, you’ll set an example and show them what’s possible. They will learn to be brave, today as well as when they grow into adults.

The post Why Children Lie and What You Can Do About It appeared first on Complete Wellbeing.