Hi! This is Wayne Brown from Life Back On Track.

 Welcome to the latest episode. In this one, I want to talk to you about a subject that I came across in a series of books by Neale Donald Walsch. If you haven't heard of Neale Donald Walsch, he was struggling with his life, just to give you a little bit of back story for this. He, one night in a fit of rage, wrote on a pad, "Why is my life like this?" and he basically vented.

Then he had this voice that spoke to him. He gave it the title of God. Some people would call it your inner wisdom, your inner voice, your inner knowledge. Basically, it's the smarter part of you that spoke to him. In his series of books. As he unloaded all this information that was in him. He mentioned one that for me, resonated strongly, and it affected me pretty intensely. The big challenge, was though, was finally admitting it all to myself.

So what he spoke about was the five levels of truth telling. Real change in your life cannot happen until you start telling yourself the truth. He gave it five levels, and I've been working on that for a long time, and it takes courage to be able to look at those parts of yourself and the parts of others that could be challenging. The thing that I have found though is, the more you can admit to it, it's harder to love someone and love yourself when you see all of the unpleasant parts.

However, what I realised is, you love someone deeper when you can accept all of them and all of yourself. So the first five levels I'll go through them and then I'll talk a little bit about my journey a bit more.

The first level that he speaks about is telling yourself the truth about you. This one is challenging because admitting that we're scared, that we're struggling, all of these sorts of things have fear, guilt, shame tied into them. That's sad, because that tends to hold us back. This is where denial gets thrown out the window. You stop lying to yourself about how you're really feeling.

The second level is telling yourself the truth about someone else. That means admit to yourself that sometimes they're not behaving in the nicest of ways, and this is where it becomes challenging is because you have to admit that there are these things about other people that you then have to learn to love and accept those parts? We are taught growing up that there's certain parts that are wrong, and so we have to learn to disown them or suppress them, and that's sad because it just is a part of who we are.

The third one is to tell someone else the truth about you. So admit to someone when you're struggling, admit to someone when you're scared, admit to someone when you're angry about something. That can also be challenging because we're taught, don't put yourself on other people. Don't impose on them. Don't bring them down. Don't speak to them about negative things because you'll upset them. So we're taught all of these things.

The next one is number four, is tell someone else the truth about themselves. If they're behaving in a way, that might go against a moral compass, for example, you call them on it. If they make a statement that could be inflammatory. You educate them and you do that first of all, by pointing it out to them.

The final one is number five. Tell everyone the truth about everything. I've been working on all of these for pretty much the last sort of 10 years, and it's been challenging, it's has been intimidating.

I've had a lot of fear around upsetting other people, offending other people, and what I've realised is a lot of the stuff we're taught isn't actually correct. People don't tend to get offended. People don't tend to get upset, and if they do, you can just get curious about it. There are so many different avenues and paths that are not pointed out to us when we tell the truth.

If you're with someone and you don't feel secure enough, comfortable enough, to be able to speak your truth, and hear theirs, your relationship will never develop any great depth. This can be applied to friendships, work relationships, family relationships. All of them are predicated upon by this ability, this opportunity to be able to tell the truth about how we feel, how we see the world, how we interact, how we react, and we should be allowed to bring all of us to the table, bring all of us to our reality, and we should be able to also accept other peoples.

So they're the five levels of truth telling, and I know I have struggled with them. Occasionally. I'll still have a little bit of struggle because that little voice that I was raised with, at the back of my head goes "Ooooh, you can't say that" or it says "Don't do that, you'll upset people" or "You'll cause offence" or "You can't do that. It's not the right thing to do".

Being able to monitor and silence that little voice that speaks a load of rubbish is a very empowering thing, and being able to say exactly how you feel with no fear of recrimination or negation or minimalisation, or having to argue or justify or explain, is a wonderful place to be in.

Does that mean you'll never have arguments? It doesn't. You're going to have arguments, you're going to run into people. The thing that I found though is, the more comfortable you get with the truth, the easier it is to hear, the easier it is to speak. It's like any skill, you have to practise it. You have to work at it. Truth can be challenging, in fact, one of the best signs I've ever heard, which I love saying, and for those of you that don't like a little bit of slang, a little bit of mild profanity, you may want to skip this next little bit. However, I love the impact of it, and that saying is "The truth shall set you free, but not before it pisses you off".

The reason is, the truth is uncomfortable. I've noticed in the world now more and more, the truth of past history is coming out, and this is where we get this dichotomy between where we want to learn from history, we want to get it out there, we want to have the truth out there. However, we want to also want to erase it, and that's the wrong attitude. History, and that's not just our collective history, it's our individual history, it's there for us to learn from.

We tend to go gloss over our mistakes, where we made errors in judgement. Sadly, though, these are our best learning experiences, we're taught that we should have fear and guilt and shame about them. We should try and hide them and then we forget the lessons and we tend to repeat them. Telling yourself the truth about things, and one thing that I've found, this just popped into my head, is listening to my gut. I was just talking to someone yesterday about this where I mentioned to them in the past, there are many times where I haven't listened to my gut, and afterwards I've realised my gut was right. My gut was telling me something that I needed to become aware of, a behaviour of someone who may have been going against my moral compass or a decision that I know on some level will take me down a path I don't really want to be down, and I don't need to go down.

The wonderful thing about lessons is you don't need to repeat them, if you got them the first time, you've got them. As long as you tell yourself the truth about them. If someone tries to use, say, a guilt trip on you to get you to do something, just admit to yourself "They're trying to manipulate me. That's not a very nice thing. I'm not going to buy into that. I still love them. I'm just not going to buy into that particular habit, that particular behaviour, therefore, I'm going to stop that here now, before it causes damage, causes damage to me and to my relationship with them."

So all you're doing is calling them on their rubbish so that it doesn't impact you in a negative way. Can you still love them? Yes, of course you can still love them. You don't have to stop loving someone just because they want to behave in a way that's negative. Remember, everyone's doing the best they can with the tools they have, So if that's the only tool they have, that's the only tool they're going to use.

So I've rambled a little bit, however, on hoping the examples I've given will give you enough insight that you can understand where I'm coming from. You can't make real progress in your life until you start telling yourself the truth. So work on those five levels of telling the truth. Tell yourself the truth about you. Tell yourself the truth about someone else. Tell someone else the truth about you. Tell someone else the truth about themselves and then tell everyone the truth about everything, all the time.

If you can work on those five, the further along you get, the better off you'll be. It could be a challenge. It could be scary. It can be confronting, however, ultimately, it's well worth it. So aim for the truth and keep working at it, keep working at it because you're worth it. And remember, we're all trying to get the best life that we can. So I'll end as I always do, here's to a good life.

You can listen to the Life Back On Track podcast on your favourite platform by visiting our podcast website. Click HERE to check it out. 

You can also listen to my radio show “All About Relationships” which has its own podcast on your favourite platform by clicking HERE 

Thanks for listening.