“You can’t handle the truth!”  Remember when Jack Nicholson shouted that at Tom Cruise in the movie?  How true that is for so many people.

And so sad.  Because you need the truth.  We all do.

Now that we’re on a new season of American Idol, you see the tragic results of this.  Some of the people auditioning sound like a cat being poked in the eye with a fork.  Yet they invariably relate how their mother and all their friends tell them they are the next Janet Joplin, Luther Vandross, or Mariah Carey.  Ahhh, no.

They have no business singing.  And I don’t say that to be judgmental, since  I can’t carry a tune in a bucket.  There’s no shame in that.  But listen kids, delusion is not a particularly attractive personality trait.

If you’re following a path you shouldn’t be on, it’s keeping you from the path you should be on.  So how do you know what’s your highest good?  How do you know when something is just adversity to overcome, and when you need to throw in the towel?

Your sacred circle.

The people who are closest to you.  You have to have a relationship of total honesty both ways.  You have to not only give the people closest to you permission to tell you the truth – you have to demand they tell you the truth.  It has to be a core value of the relationship.

So who are the people in your life?  Do they tell you the truth or foster your denial?

Don’t we want friends that support us and believe in us?  Of course we do.  But there is a BIG difference between believing in you and lying to you.  Because lying to you doesn’t help you, it hurts you.

Here’s the key…

You want people who tell you the truth.  But people who come from love, and want your highest good.  Not people who want to tear you down to cover up their own feelings of insecurity.

So which kind of people do you have around you?

Before we leave the subject, there’s one more issue to explore:  Your role in that.

Because if you have people around you who only tell you what you want to hear – you must recognize that YOU are responsible for that as well.

You have either:
* Only attracted superficial people who tell everyone what they want to hear;
* Had people tell you the truth in the past, but the way you reacted to them made them feel uncomfortable to do it any more; or,
* Both.

So who is around you, and what are they telling you?