A while back, I made the conscious decision to change one of my values. To prioritize honesty over being polite.

Learning a new value is never easy. It is new, unfamiliar and scary. We don’t know the rules of the game yet and we often feel like bumbling amateurs compared to the people we admire for the same value.

My struggle is that I vacillate between overdoing the honesty bit just to prove a point and reverting back to being polite in the fear of hurting others’ feelings. There was one such occasion recently where I kept repeating a statement even after the person said it was hurtful to hear it. I refused to back down from telling the truth. But I came to realise that beating her over the head with the truth was not helping to inspire the behavioral change I wanted. All it had managed to do was heap on hurt. In the pursuit of honesty, I had lost sight of what I wanted to achieve in the first place. So I apologised and promised to not repeat it.

Even though I handled this situation wrong, it didn’t diminish the significance of the reason why I had adopted this value to begin with. There are always going to be moments like this when we are adopting a new value, mistakes through which we learn the new boundaries. What is important is to not give up but be kind to ourselves as we navigate this new land.