Honesty – no matter how humiliating – is still the best policy.

A quote I read today said, “Warning: 100% honesty can make you feel 100% dysfunctional.”  Isn’t’ that the truth? And isn’t that why we find honesty so difficult.  It is humbling or should I say humiliating when we mess up and people find out we are not perfect.

A lot has been said in the past months about Tiger Woods and the way his people have handled his domestic melt down. I’m sure that in some cases saying nothing has been an effective strategy for handling the media.  And dealing with a crisis that is going to play out on the global stage is certainly full of nuances that most of us don’t encounter in our personal and professional lives.  Still, we all have those situations where the truth about the situation is rather nasty and we feel vulnerable about being found out. How do we handle it?

I believe honesty no matter what is still the best policy. A focused conversation where you  admit you made a mistake, explain how you are trying to handle it and as I’ve said before, apologize if necessary.  Don’t try and candy coat it.  Keep away from spin if possible.  In this world of twitter and facebook status updates someone is always ready to tell it for you.  The safest thing is to tell the truth.

But Your Truth Does.