The Power of Truth Telling: Christine Carter (Full Transcript)

Full text of sociologist Christine Carter’s talk: The Power of Truth Telling at TEDxThacherSchool conference. In this talk, she shares the surprising secret to feeling fulfilled. Especially a talk to share with teens and anyone addicted to social media.

Best quote from this talk:

We can only really be happy, truly happy when we live in total integrity with ourselves, when we’re really open and honest and transparent. And this is because we human beings need the truth like we need food.

Listen to the MP3 audio here:

TRANSCRIPT:

Christine Carter – Sociologist

Thank you so much. It’s fun to be here.

So I was what we would now call a highly sensitive child. I was so shy and so emotional. I cried every single day at school. I would cry if I was a little bit frustrated. I would cry if I was frightened. I would definitely have cried if you looked at me funny. I cried all the time. I didn’t think about it at all; I just kind of wore my emotions on my sleeve.

Until one day in second grade, a girl named Katherine who was my friend and my neighbor informed me that I was no longer allowed to play at her house after school anymore. Because her mom didn’t want to deal with it if I started to cry.

So for the first time in my life, I started to care what other people thought of me. I was so embarrassed and so ashamed that I had been banned from a neighborhood house because I was crying all the time. That I made a commitment to myself to start hiding what I was feeling.

And that one little instant, I began what would become a long career in people-pleasing.

Now people-pleasing in my extensive personal experience is a process by which we assess what will make people think more highly of us and then we mold our behavior accordingly.

It’s very subtle; it’s usually very unconscious… thing that we do to influence others or even to manipulate what they think of us.

And the problem with people-pleasing is that it means that we’re putting out all this energy towards influencing what other people think of us rather than authentically expressing ourselves. And when we make that trade-off, we end up really out of alignment, really out of integrity with ourselves.

And that integrity thing is where we often end up in trouble in my experience.

So I’m a sociologist. I’ve studied the sociology of happiness for well over a decade now. And so as you might imagine, people are always asking me what the secret to happiness is. And it’s fun question, right? I love to answer this question. My answer has evolved quite a lot over the last ten or fifteen years.

I think 10 years ago, I would have definitely told you that the key to happiness was gratitude. Having a regular gratitude practice.

And five years ago, I probably would have added something about a spirit of generosity and kindness being key to a really happy life.

But a few years ago, I came to see that the only path to true joy is one where we don’t lie at all. Only when we don’t ever pretend to think or feel or be something that we’re not can we truly be happy.

We can only really be happy, truly happy when we live in total integrity with ourselves, when we’re really open and honest and transparent. And this is because we human beings need the truth like we need food. And we are starving for the truth.

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In this age of Facebook and Snapchat and Instagram and personal brands, we are starving to tell the truth… our truth… to show the world who we really are and know that they still love us.

And yet so many of us are so concerned about what other people think of us, that we pretend all the time. We say we’re happy to be somewhere that we actually would rather not be. We fake a smile so people don’t know that we’re so anxious or so angry.

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We post something on Instagram that makes it look like we’re having a fantastic time, when actually we’re feeling kind of lonely or miserable.

We pretend all the time to bridge this gap between who we are and how we want and who we want other people to see us as.

Now the thing about this… I’m just going to give it to you straight: all of this pretending is a form of lying, right? It doesn’t… we could be pretending over something really stiny or to protect somebody else’s feelings. But it’s still a form of lying.

And lying is the most stressful thing that human beings can do to their brains or their bodies. Lie-detector test completely depends on this. A polygraph test does not detect lies; it detects the unconscious stress and fear that lying causes.

So hook me up to a polygraph test or a lie detector and it will be able to detect all kinds of changes in the electricity coming off my skin, moisture, my body temperature, my respiration, my heart rate, even the pitch of my voice will change when I am pretending. It’s as though our bodies howl when we’re pretending for us to please just stop.

Now there’s some really really good news in all of this. Research has been done where researchers instruct people not to lie so much, and the good news is that people are able to stop lying. And when they do, their physical health improves.

It’s pretty remarkable. When people stop lying and stop pretending, they report that tension goes down, they start sleeping better, they have fewer headaches, they have fewer sore throats. This is pretty remarkable. Their relationships improve and they feel less anxiety overall.

Now I learned the consequences of lying and pretending all the time, all this increased stress and impaired relationships, the hard way.

Really early in my life, I tuned my attention to what other people expected of me, what other people wanted me to be. And I met their expectations with flying colors. I got straight A’s; I went to an Ivy League college. I got a prestigious job in marketing where I worked 12-hour days at a job that I actually did – I could do pretty well in just six hours, right?

So why did I work so long? Well, because other people expected me to, and I was really good at meeting other people’s expectations. But I was pretty stressed out all the time. I was diagnosed with the generalized anxiety disorder and prescribed anti-anxiety medication.

So even though I was very successful by many measures and also very happy by many measures, I was really struggling to know who I was and what I wanted and how to live my life from that place. I was really suffering from the stress and anxiety that people-pleasing causes.

Now I’m going to stop myself for a second, because I have reverted to a former people-pleasing behavior for this presentation. Maybe you can guess slide’s going to give you a little clue. And it is these really cute blue shoes that I’m wearing.

High heels are a full-on people-pleasing kind of behavior. Now I really actually do like these shoes; they are my favorite color. You could kind of make an argument that there’s some authentic self-expression there in that.

But also… I mean I would not be… I wouldn’t even own these shoes if I didn’t think that they were going to make me look better to you in some way, right? So they make my legs look longer. This is an idealistic kind of beauty thing I know. I’ve seen all research on height; they make me taller… four inches taller and that… the research shows that you will think that I am more competent if I’m taller than if I’m my regular shorty self.

But also these shoes are killing me. I’ve been wearing them all evening. My entire body weight is on the ball of my foot and on my toes… my toes are squished together in a really unnatural way. My center of gravity is all off. I’m sort of teetering around up here hoping that I don’t trip on one of these wires and launch myself into the audience.

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So here’s the thing. Okay I’ll take them off. That’s what I’m going to do. And you know, high heels train us at a really early age to ignore physical pain in order to look good to other people.

Now this is… I probably don’t need to tell you that it’s not a good idea to ignore pain or anything that you might be feeling in order to look good to other people. This is a seemingly blazingly obvious truth that really didn’t hit home for me until the last year or so.

So the truth is that we are happier and far less stressed when we decide not to endure physical pain or emotional pain in order to look good to other people. And this is something that really hit home to me a year or so ago when I started doing Martha Beck’s integrity cleanses.

So like an alcoholic might decide not to drink anymore, I decided not to do any people-pleasing at all anymore. And I hired a coach to coach me in becoming a truth-teller. And I got to tell you I started to feel better right away. I was happier; I was more relaxed; my feet didn’t hurt anymore.

And my relationships grew more intimate, warmer. I just sort of felt more loved by the world.

The interesting thing happened that sensitive kid who used to cry all the time reappeared in my life. Ask my children; it’s kind of embarrassing for them but I cry every day, right?

I might cry, because I’m moved by the astonishing beauty of this world, or because I’m so deeply inspired by someone else or another person’s act of kindness. The only real difference is that I am no longer embarrassed about it.

Now does this… all these integrity cleanses mean that I’m able to live every day all day my full truth in integrity? No. Unfortunately I still catch myself every day thinking about what other people might be thinking of me. And then that’s okay, right? It’s actually not bad to be thinking of other people, as a point of clarification, right?

Thinking about other people is a real happiness habit too, a key to a joyful life. But there’s a huge difference between thinking about other people thinking about you, and thinking about other people, right. Just like pleasing people is not the same as helping people.

Okay, another point of clarification with this… people always ask me with all this truth-telling business, does it mean that you always speak your truth, you always say whatever is on your mind, you always express what you’re feeling? Actually no.

It is not necessary to always say what you’re thinking. And a lot of times it’s not all that safe or it’s just not all that kind.

But even if it’s not all that kind, for example, for you to say something, that does not give you permission to lie. So there’s a really big difference between living your truth and always speaking your truth.

So you may be in a situation in which a friend asks you if you look… if they look fat. And so instead of saying what’s on your mind, you can turn to them and ask them what they are thinking, what they are feeling, invite them to share with you some of their truth and then listen very carefully and with great compassion.

Now at other times you absolutely will need to speak your truth. And unfortunately, many people may not like it. People often get pretty angry and frustrated or just disappointed when we don’t meet their expectations or when we aren’t the people that they want us to be. Other times they just become very uncomfortable or confused or frightened by our truth, especially if our truth is one where that goes up against an established social norm.

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So sometimes we have to face that discomfort. But usually what happens is something different, it’s something much better than making other people angry.

Usually when we show people who we really are when we speak our truth, we let them see the real us. And what that means is that we start to feel known, understood, possibly even loved. And when people love us, we know that they love the real us, not the facade that we put up for them, that we worked so hard to create just hoping that they would like it, right?

But they love the real messy, imperfect version of us. And then that gap between who we are and who we want other people to see us as is completely irrelevant.

Now I know some of you may be a little bit frightened or unsure about all this transparency and honesty that I’m advocating. And that is because we human beings are very clannish and our nervous systems evolved to try and keep us with our tribe. And so acceptance can feel like everything, right?

For some people, acceptance is everything; it is a matter of survival. But if for you, even if it isn’t a matter of life or death, if you’re not feeling ready to step out from behind your façade, if you can feel just very uncomfortable to do so. And so if you’re not ready to do that, that’s totally okay, right? You will do it when you’re ready.

So long as you see how your false selves are holding you back, that facade that you put up, in the long run will rob you of joy and possibly also love. So it’s much better in the long run for most of us to learn to be ourselves, to figure out who we are and what we want and how to live our lives completely from that place.

This is my big hope for you that you will be able to figure out who you are and what you want. But this truth-telling business takes a lot of courage. It is not for the faint of heart. It is downright daring to show your truth to other people. It is crazy brave to become a truth teller.

And yet that is what you will need to do to live your best life. To paraphrase Liz Gilbert, without your truth you will never know the vaulting scope of your own capacity.

And so my wish for you is that you will be able to live as the great Sufi poet Rumi instructed: Sing as the birds sing, without worry who hears or what they think.

My wish for you is that you will have the courage you need to live your life without people-pleasing, without pretending, without lies that you’ll be brave enough to give yourself the gift of true authenticity, that you’ll be able to experience for yourself your own power as a truth teller.

Thank you.