Oftentimes, miscommunication and confusion begins because we are not honest with ourselves: about how we feel, what our motivations are, what we are capable of, etc. Before you can be honest with others, you first have to learn to be honest with yourself. Living your life with honesty will help you be a person of integrity who is guided by the truth.
The Servant Leadership tools are not only for using in a work context. Remember, our definition of an organization is two or more people working together for a common purpose. But you can also use these tools for self reflection to then be able to enter the organizations you’re a part of with clarity and purpose. Use the Moment of Truth tool on yourself first to learn how to ask yourself hard questions and wrestle with the truth.
Moment of Truth
The Moment of Truth (MOT) is a mental model to help you understand the facts of a situation and get to the root of a problem. It is a Here tool, concerned with diagnosing the present reality. It can be used to help others uncover truth, to share the truth with others, or to help you be honest with yourself. Today we will examine it in the last context.
There are four parts to the Moment of Truth: acknowledge reality, get the story, make a plan, give feedback.
Acknowledge Reality
We are often tempted to jump ahead to the story stage and want to start to excuse why something happened before getting all the facts straight as to what happened.
Let’s say for example that you snapped rudely at a family member at breakfast. You might want to begin by saying “I was tired and hadn’t slept well” or “the kids were being too loud” or “I have a lot going on at work at the moment.” But first you need to acknowledge and own up to what happened. You spoke rashly in the heat of the moment. No matter how you’d like to excuse it, that’s what happened.
Get the Story
Once the facts are gathered, then you can start to think about the contributing factors that led to this occurrence. In this order, the story helps provide the larger context instead of excusing what happened. We want to know the story in order to get to the root cause of the moment. Tiredness, overstimulation, compounding stress, and other factors may have all contributed to the outbreak at the kitchen table. They do not excuse the behavior or make it okay, but understanding their contribution can help you understand why it might have happened.
Make a Plan
With both the facts and the story understood now, you can look at all this information and make a plan for how to move forward. In this case, maybe think about some calming strategies for the next time you feel your emotions heating up or start to get overstimulated. Taking a deep breath, exiting the room and counting to ten, or redirecting the family’s attention to fun and play may help avoid a tense moment. With a plan in place, now you have techniques to employ for next time.
Give Feedback
Feedback is not only important when having a MOT with someone else. We can also give ourselves feedback, or let someone else in on the Plan stage and ask them to check in about how it’s going. Without feedback, we’re liable to repeat our past mistakes without much reflection. But we need to see that the structures we put in place are driving desired behavior if we want to learn and grow.
Being honest with ourselves is a skill worth cultivating if we want to walk with integrity and self-awareness. We must be honest with ourselves first in order to then be honest with others.
Gracie McBride is the Content and Systems Development Coordinator at The Crossroad.
