Pain Is Inevitable, Misery Is Optional by Hyrum W. Smith & Gerreld L. Pulsipher

Author:Hyrum W. Smith & Gerreld L. Pulsipher [Smith, Hyrum W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Inspiration
Publisher: Deseret Book Company
Published: 2004-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

Avoid the Pain That Comes from Self-Deception

As the happiness or real good of men consists in right action, and right action cannot be produced without right opinion, it behooves, above all things in this world, to take care that our own opinion of things be according to the nature of things.

—Benjamin Franklin

Perhaps no emotional or spiritual pain is more excruciating than that we inflict upon ourselves. Most often we do this when we deceive ourselves about what is truly happening in a situation, denying the reality of what we are doing and its eventual effects and results.

My own experience with allowing myself to be, in Mother Eve’s words, “beguiled” by the adversary taught me some painful but redemptive lessons about how I must seek to identify and live by the correct and true principles the Lord has provided. One of the most important of these lessons is the absolute necessity of making sure that what we believe to be true is aligned as closely with reality as possible, not just in this world but also in the eternal realms. If we are not living in sync with what is really true in the eternal sense, we can deceive ourselves about some very important matters and find ourselves in big trouble.

For most of my adult life I have been intrigued with why we do some of the things we do, and how we can change our behavior for the better. I read a lot about motivation and behavior change, and when I served as a mission president in California in the late 1970s, I tried to motivate and inspire our missionaries to be the best representatives of the Lord they could be. After being released from my service as president in 1981, I felt confident enough about my ability as a motivational speaker to go into business giving motivational seminars.

I later joined forces with others having similar interests, and with several of them eventually formed Franklin Quest, an organization that would later merge with Covey Leadership to form today’s Franklin Covey Company. In 1984, at the beginning of what eventually became a very large venture, our focus was on time management and helping people make more effective and meaningful use of their time. In addition to training people in the use of our Franklin Day Planner, we also taught them about the importance of identifying and living by their inner governing values—the things that really mattered most to them in their lives.

In early 1985, two individuals, Jerry Pulsipher and Kurt Hanks, approached our organization with some ideas they had been developing. One of these was the metaphor of the Belief Window. This invisible window, they said, filters everything we see and experience, and our perceptions—so filtered—affect the decisions we make, the actions we take, and ultimately the results we get. Their basic premise was that since our behavior is significantly influenced by what we believe to be true about ourselves and the world, behavior change could take place only when

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