10 Self-Assessment

You can fool yourself, you know. You’d think it’s impossible, but it turns out it’s the easiest thing of all.¹

—Jodi Picoult, author

Self-assessment may be the most consistently useful application of all the skills. Your relationships, health, and career depend on giving yourself nothing but the truth.

Actually, that may or may not be true all the time. Perhaps there are times when deceiving yourself is useful.

This chapter delves into circumstances in which telling yourself the truth is vital to your well-being and how you can nurture that, as well as when a bit of self-deception might be adventageous.

Relationships

While collecting insights from experts and personal stories for this book, I received an e-mail from someone I’ve never met. A close associate of mine asked her to contribute her story as a way of illustrating how a very bright woman (her graduate degree is from Harvard) failed to do the self-examination that could have spared her grief and expense. The name in the e-mail has been changed to protect the contributor’s identity:

My ex left on January 1, 2009. My stepdaughter called a week later to say he was living at a woman’s house. He had told me he was staying with an “investor” to sort out his feelings.

I couldn’t take it in until 6 weeks later, Hilary called again to tell me he really was with her. He did marry her (briefly) after the divorce and of course after spending a ton of her money. I truly could NOT believe he was cheating.

I still have trouble with taking in that he was lying and cheating. In June I got sued by an ex-partner of his because my ex forged my signature on a personal guarantee for $1.3 million. (Delightful to be shelling out a sick amount of money to defend myself.)

I can’t believe I am still shocked!!

From my coauthoring ventures with family and couples’ therapist Trevor Crow, I knew she had heard many stories similar to this one and guided people toward healing with emotionally focused therapy (EFT). Her advice on how to begin being truthful with yourself about someone whose trustworthiness you question doesn’t begin with a cognitive experience. That is, she doesn’t recommend poking your psyche with logical questions, creating checklists of pros and cons related to the person, or writing down all the facts of the matter and analyzing them. Her advice is more compassionate: Try a somatic experience. In a somatic experience, you focus on your body sensations as a way of getting in touch more honestly with your thoughts and emotions about a person, place, thing, or event in time. To understand what it feels like, she advises:

Sit still next to another person. Pay careful attention to the way your body reacts to this person close to you.

Is your physical experience one of calm and softness? A feeling of safety and well-being? Or is it a gut feeling of tenseness, perhaps excitement? Is there a feeling of not knowing? Maybe a little off balance?

Listen carefully to your gut feelings and pay attention to your intuition. Your physical experience won’t lie to you.²

Once you understand the sensations of a somatic experience, try it with the person whose trustworthiness you question. You will respond on a physiological level. Remember all those signs of stress described in earlier parts of the book, such as suddenly noticing adaptors and barriers, or changes in posture? They aren’t just things that other people do. Monitor your own deviations from baseline to see if you are showing signs of stress.

After you’ve determined how you feel, then pull away and take some time to figure out how you think. In other words, lead with your authentic responses to being near the person and follow up with good questions to yourself.

Health

When we feel ill or uncomfortable, the voice inside usually asks: “What is this?” “What’s causing this?” “How did this happen?” The first response that another voice inside our head gives is often the product of rationalizing. Answers might include: “It’s nothing; it will go away,” “It’s probably the weather causing it,” or “I must have bumped into something without realizing it.”

For some people, self-deception about a health issue is not just making up excuses as to why we have symptoms. It is a mental illness called anosognosia, the medical term for not seeing what ails you. Rather than simple psychological denial—and most of us can relate to that—people who suffer from this condition will even deny something as obvious and serious as paralysis.

The rest of us are just engaging in the destructive diversion called rationalizing. But when it comes to our health, we want accurate answers as soon as possible.

To illustrate both the value and mechanism of questioning for self-assessment, let’s begin with a true story. In spring 2013, the discomfort a client of mine had in one hip became pain in both hips, weakness and pain in the hip flexors, and occasional lower back pain. She received multiple diagnoses from different practitioners, none of whom thought that an MRI or x-rays would be necessary. She also went through numerous therapies, but the relief she got was short-lived—anywhere from a few minutes to roughly half an hour. Some of the therapies had no effect at all.

The chronic, debilitating symptoms made it painful and difficult to do anything that involved lifting her legs, from walking, to putting on pants, to going up and down stairs. Everyone around her thought the problems must have something to do with her athletic background. After all, how could she be normal after years of intense competition in sports such as gymnastics, bodybuilding, powerlifting, and adventure races of 400 miles in length? Medical professionals added that her current, largely sedentary, posture during the day while designing had an important role in exacerbating the symptoms.

And then I introduced her to ultra-endurance athlete and World Record holder “Epic” Bill Bradley. He didn’t focus on her symptoms the way other athletes and medical professionals did. He asked her the question that a good questioner asks—and one that she had neglected to ask herself: “What else could be causing this?” She couldn’t even speculate, never even having asked the question. Rather than try to guide her toward other answers, he recommended a book called Healing Back Pain, first published in 1991. The author, Dr. John E. Sarno, is professor of clinical rehabilitation medicine at New York University School of Medicine, and attending physician at the Howard A. Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine, New York University Medical Center. His premise is that a person’s response to tension can cause real, physical disorders such as those she was experiencing. “Epic” Bill credits that book with helping him recover completely from serious back pain that had persisted for 14 months; his recovery was a gateway occurrence to a series of astonishing endurance feats.

Through the book, it seemed to her and to me as though Sarno continued the good questioning that Bill had begun. Over a two-week period, thoughts about what else was causing this started to take shape in her head. She linked the onset of the physical symptoms with the most intense period of deadlines and demands in her professional life.

Then her own good questioning began: What, or who, is making me chronically tense and/or angry? What would happen if I didn’t assume there would be pain? What would happen if I tried harder to work through it? She gave herself honest answers; the pain remained, but it varied in terms of intensity and location. With Sarno’s voice in her head, she kept asking the questions on a daily basis and finally gave herself the truth: She felt huge, unrelenting pressure to perform as a designer. She even felt guilty reading a novel at bedtime because she wasn’t being “productive.”

One day some weeks after that, she got out of her car at the grocery store. As she walked toward the door, she realized she had no pain. Walking through the aisles, she had no pain. When she got home, she went up and down the stairs. She experienced discomfort and weakness, but no pain. The next day was about the same, so she tried a few exercises that were somewhat more vigorous than what she’d done in the past. But then the pain returned.

She began physical therapy with someone who made the connection between her chronic problems and stress. After a few sessions, she was climbing stairs, walking briskly, doing light weight-training, and handling daily tasks with relative ease.

The truth: She was stressed out beyond anything she had experienced before but was unwilling to admit it. Not recognizing that truth had both exacerbated minor physical problems and triggered new ones. These problems constricted her movement, her health, and her enjoyment of life. When she stopped kidding herself, she started healing.

Career

Tom followed in his father’s footsteps and sold life insurance for a living. He had a wife, two young daughters, and a stepson in college, all of whom depended on his impressive income. The self-deception that pervaded his life was that his high performance as an insurance salesman meant that he was a good match for the career. When he was just about to turn 50, he told his wife that what he really wanted to do was make sandwiches.

She attributed the remark to his bizarre sense of humor—the one that she wished he had “left in Boston.” Then Tom told her that he wanted to work out a plan with her to open a small deli at the start of tourist season in their small town and see if he could make a go of actually making sandwiches. He was a naturally gifted cook who had concocted 10 unusual sandwiches and a couple of soups.

He opened the deli and it was a hit—for the five months of the year that tourists were in town. Other than that, his life was a struggle, but he remained happy and optimistic, and he earned enough through catering parties during the off-season to keep his family in their beautiful home.

By the time Tom contracted a life-threatening illness and had to give up his deli, he had spent 10 happy years making sandwiches. The truth was, it was what he was meant to do.

Clarity about what you want to do with your life can be hard to come by—not as obvious as Tom’s passion to make sandwiches. It’s particularly difficult if you’re very good at something that pays well and is at least marginally satisfying. Having spent more than a decade doing marketing communications in the high-tech industry, I knew the story of achievement, financial reward, and complacency very well. But I was lucky: I got a kick in the psyche in the form of a layoff.

Feeling a little dazed and confused, I attended an Anthony Robbins seminar. Somewhere in the middle of it, I heard him ask the question, “Where do you see yourself in five years?” I really heard the question. And the answer came down to an internal battle between certainty and uncertainty. I could either safely splash in the kiddie pool and lie to myself that life was grand, or finally dive off the high board and face a high-risk truth: I wanted to write for a living.

So the answer was this: In five years, I see myself signing copies of my new book.

Just as your emotions serve you well in ascertaining the truth of your relationships, they will serve you well in finding it in your career. It’s important to know what you’re good at doing, but ask yourself which of those things you’re good at energizes you emotionally.

For Psychology Today, author Kat McGowan researched the topic of self-deception and profiled four people who triumphed over it in her article “Living a Lie.” Her conclusion, which should provide some comfort to all of us, is this:

There is no particular personality type that is more vulnerable to self-deception. We are all equally susceptible, especially when anxiety gets the better of us. In general, accepting our flaws alongside our strengths provides a bulwark against excessive self-deception; so does coming to peace with our own internal contradictions and learning to withstand difficult feelings, such as doubt and fear.³

Benefits of Lying to Yourself

It may seem odd to end a book on truth detection with a section on the value of lying to yourself. My rationale is that realizing the truth of what you want to accomplish in life and how you want to feel may benefit from a bit of self-deception. In other words, there’s a bigger truth at stake for you.

Joanna Starek, currently a senior partner with the management consulting firm RHR International, is a PhD psychologist who has worked as a performance enhancement consultant with elite athletes. She defines self-deception as follows: “Self-deception is that you have two contradictory beliefs and you hold them at the same time. You allow one of them into conscious, and you have a motivation for allowing one of them into consciousness.”⁴

People do this all the time with relationships. You allow your truth to be “He loves me and wants to be with me” even though you know that he’s apartment hunting and is moving out imminently. Or you allow “She’s faithful to me,” even though you’ve seen the e-mails documenting her rendezvous with a man from work. Your motivation is that you want the thought to be true so you’ll treat it as though it is.

Unfortunately, that type of self-deception is not useful, and neither is lying to yourself about the possibility of being fired at work or the need to address certain medical symptoms. However, Starek conducted a study that suggests that self-deception can have positive effects—that allowing a thought that isn’t true, or isn’t true yet, to take shape as truth in the conscious mind. The genesis of her study was an interest in finding an answer to “How can you have two people have the same physiological capacity, yet one consistently outperforms the other?”

She administered a test designed in the 1970s by two psychiatrists, Harold Sackheim and Ruben Gur, that features embarrassing questions that provoke two contradictory answers: yes or no. Through the years, some researchers have administered a later version of the questionnaire requesting a 1-7 response to indicate answers ranging from “not at all” to “very much so.” Some of the questions are⁵:

Have you ever felt hatred toward either of your parents?

Have you ever felt like you wanted to kill somebody?

Have you ever doubted your sexual adequacy?

Have you ever enjoyed your bowel movements?

Have you ever thought of committing suicide in order to get back at someone?

The underlying assertion is that people are lying to themselves when they give a negative response to the questions—that everyone has, at some point, thought or felt these things.

In Starek’s study, she and her research partner gave the questionnaire at the beginning of the season to the swim team at Colgate University, which has a long history of highly competitive swimmers. They trained throughout the season to qualify for the Eastern Athletic Conference Championship. “It’s a very objective measure,” notes Starek. “You either swim fast enough during the season to qualify or you don’t.”⁶

At the end of the season, Starek found what she calls “a bizarre relationship.” The athletes who had answered no to the embarrassing questions did much better: “Consistently, they were the winners.”⁷ So, the fastest and most successful swimmers were the ones who had lied to themselves.

In more than sports, denying certain facts about the real world around you—according to any number of new studies—produces people who, it turns out, are better at business and better at working with teams. And here’s the real kicker: They turn out to be happier people.⁸

People who are most realistic, seeing the world exactly as it is, tend to be more depressed than their counterparts, who engage in some self-deception. They are honest about pain they’ve caused others, are realistic about their shortcomings, and face the brutal facts of the harshness and brutality in the world.

Those people who do not deceive themselves are right in the sense they are truthful. But we are all vulnerable, and sometimes, telling ourselves a better story than the one that is true is part of how we cope.

Jean-Paul Sartre would not agree with that latter assertion, of course. The famous 20th-century philosopher and author firmly believed that self-deception is “an immediate, permanent threat to every project of the human being.”⁹ But Sartre was a philosopher, which few of us are. For those of us whose thoughts are less lofty and our emotions more dominant, it might better to allow ourselves an occasional bout of self-deception.