Children and Adults, Learning, Lying and Spin

Val — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 17:09:52 +0000

One of the many things I’ve learned from young children is that lying is instinctive. Maybe it’s part of fight or flight… For example, one day I a saw a young girl pick flowers out of a landscaped area at our condo’s pool. The girl ran to her mom who hadn’t been paying attention to give her the small bouquet. She clearly thought she had done a nice thing and was excited about the gift. When her mother saw the flowers, she harshly inquired “Did you pick those flowers?” The child now instinctively knew from her mother’s tone that picking the flowers had not been “good” and responded, “No, they were just sitting over there.”

You can imagine how the scenario may have played out – either the mother recovers and makes it a positive teaching moment or the situation escalates because of the newly added lie. Either way, over time, the little girl will hopefully learn that when you make an honest mistake, you own it and take any consequences that go with it and most importantly, you learn from it. Ideally, we should learn that the long-term outcome of telling the truth outweighs any short-term benefits of lying. But as we know, that’s not always the way it works out.

In my view, it seems that as a culture, we’re evolving back to the place of not knowing that the truth is better than a lie. Just take a look at sports, politics and cable news. In most sports, it’s not only acceptable to pretend something did or didn’t happen, it’s expected. For instance, in football, if the official calls it a catch when you know the ball hit the ground just before it landed in your hands, your team and fans would find it unacceptable for you to report the truth. In politics and cable news, at best, the facts are taken out of context and manipulated to support a point of view and at worst, lies are stated as facts. The twisted facts and lies are lapped up by those whose views agree.

With the age of Internet, there is almost nothing we can’t read about, but when truth, facts, lies and spin are all given credence, how can we sort it out? I really don’t know and it worries me.

What would happen if before every conversation we had, every game we played and every speech or talk show discussion, all of the participants took the oath… I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. As a culture, do we even remember what that means…?

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Distracted Driving

Val — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 20:52:46 +0000

I’m starting to feel pretty strongly about the need to significantly reduce “distracted” driving. We’ve all known for a long time about the dangers of driving under the influence, but we haven’t paid that much attention to our increased use of cell phones for talking, GPS units and now there is texting. We’re learning that it may be the worst of all. In recent weeks, even before Oprah mentioned it, I’ve been thinking about the need for a national movement against distracted driving. I’m so glad that she has taken on this cause with regards to talking and texting on cell phones.

I’ve become much more aware of my own driving as I’ve been thinking about this issue and notice how easy it is to be distracted even by things as simple as choosing a radio station. I’m making a commitment to myself to pay more attention to my driving and less attention to anything that can distract me. I have never texted while driving, but I have decided to pull over when I need to make or take a phone call. That will be a change and a challenge, but I believe that if I’m going to get behind a movement for change, then I must start with me.

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Children and Adults, Learning, Lying and Spin

Distracted Driving