It’s Easy to Be Honest

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This newsletter serves a simple purpose → To help you build optimism, resilience and a solution-focused perspective.

Each week, I’ll share actionable insights that not only brighten your day but position you to be a leader within your own life and seize life’s opportunities.

Read time: 20-30 minutes.

Hello, Brighter Side readers! ☀️

As always, thank you for being here.

This week, we're getting honest about honesty.

Telling the truth should be the simplest thing in the world, but it can be expensive. We unpack why, backed by some research that genuinely surprised me.

We share the story of Alphonso Davies, born in a refugee camp and now captaining Canada at the World Cup after overcoming challenge after challenge.

Also, a beautiful film recommendation and a short piece on gratitude, touching on why it might be the one habit that pulls all others along for the ride.

Grab a cuppa, settle in, and I hope you learn something new about yourself today ☕

See you on the Brighter Side,

Chris

P.S. Please feel free to send me feedback on how I can improve. I respond to every email.

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When you look in the mirror, do you trust the person looking back at you?

We almost always know the truth.

It’s the saying it out loud part that tends to be difficult.

Why?

Because telling the truth means accepting the consequences of reality.

And it's a little wild that this even needs saying.

We keep telling ourselves the opposite though.

It's easy to be honest.

Just tell the truth.

It sounds wise and saying so always collects nods of agreement.

Simple, sure.

But easy?

I’m not so sure of that.

The hardest part arrives after the words leave your mouth because the truth tends to surface with a bill attached.

You tell your boss the project is behind schedule.

You admit to someone you forgot to do something.

You say the thing you had to share but your partner didn't want to hear.

These words cost nothing, but the consequences can cost plenty.

Because of this, lying sometimes feels easier in the moment.

And that, right there, is the trap.

A lie is nothing more than a deferred payment.

And the interest on these payments is brutal.

For twenty years, I worked in the travel industry.

If you want a fast education in the cost of the truth, try telling someone their trip of a lifetime has been cancelled.

I’ve done and overseen a lot of that.

During the Icelandic ash cloud that grounded flights across Europe.

Or arriving to a queue of concerned customers on the Boxing Day after the tsunami tore through Southeast Asia.

Or more recently during COVID, when the entire travel industry stopped on a dime.

Every crisis came down to the same job.

Communicate effectively and tell people the truth, early, even when it’s awful.

Working in this environment you learn to deliver and lead with bad news while ensuring you keep everyone who needs to know, informed.

The customer.

My team.

Other teams.

And most importantly, the one who is often the toughest to be straight with.

Yourself.

You have to read each situation honestly, without any of the additional spin we all tend to apply.

As with anything, with enough practice you become quite good at it.

Get it right on a regular basis, and you walk into every conversation with nothing to carry and better yet: nothing to hide.

Master it, and people will believe you when it counts.

Which is a reputation worth having.

The biggest problem with a lie?

Is that a lie doesn't end when you tell it.

It simply opens a loop.

You’ve now created a version of events you have to remember, protect, and keep consistent with every piece of information that follows.

Who did you tell?

What did you say?

Which version of the story is the current one?

The truth requires none of this.

It just sits there, asking for nothing.

Why?

Because it actually happened.

I've written about this in a previous edition which focused on open loops and how they create tired minds, you can read it here if you’re interested.

Open loops are the unfinished tasks that sneakily drain your battery behind the scenes.

Things that weigh on your mind unnecessarily until you address it.

A lie creates the same type of loop, only far more demanding.

It’s more than just a metaphor, it also shows up in your brain.

A meta-analysis that pooled more than a hundred experiments revealed that we're consistently slower to lie than to tell the truth.

Brain imaging indicates deception lighting up the regions of the brain linked to both effort and self-control.

And the reason, well, that’s a bit of a mind-bender.

In order to lie, you first have to summon the truth.

Then actively choose to override it.

So, lying is actually internal truth-telling, followed by a second, much more costly, step.

The truth, as the researchers put it, comes naturally to us.

Deception, though, requires some deliberate effort on our part.

Each lie we tell creates a small open loop.

Tell enough of them and you're suddenly running an internal operating system just to make sure keep your story straight.

That cost?

Will negatively impact you, the liar, long before anyone ever catches you.

Now here’s the part that surprised me.

We love to say that everyone lies, likely to make us feel better after a fib leaves our lips.

But the truth?

The research findings disagree.

A classic 1996 diary study by psychologist Bella DePaulo did find that the average person tells one or two lies a day.

Which sounds a bit damning, but that average is hiding something.

When Kim Serota and Timothy Levine looked at how those lies were actually spread out, the picture flipped completely.

In their national sample, approximately six in ten people reported telling no lies at all on the previous day.

And almost half of all lies told, came from just five percent of people.

Most of us, on most days, tell none.

But there’s a small minority doing the heavy lifting.

These findings flip the “everybody lies” script on its head.

The truth is that a few prolific liars distort trust for everyone, while the honest majority ends up paying the tax.

You pay it in second-guessing.

In double-checking.

In the mental hum needed to determine "is this person telling me the truth?"

That hum is the cost you pay for someone else's open loops.

Carried by you.

And it gets worse.

Lying becomes cheaper the more you do it.

Research has also determined that the mental effort required to decieve drops with practice.

While a truth-teller's brain fights against the lie, a seasoned liar's brain has stopped fighting at all.

That’s how someone becomes one of the prolific few.

By wearing the same groove smooth, one lie at a time.

Until the truth becomes the only thing that feels expensive.

Too expensive to turn back.

Ok, now we’ve met the prolific few.

Then there are the unintentional liars, and they might be the most important group of all.

Biologist Robert Trivers built his entire theory around the uncomfortable idea that we deceive ourselves first, so we can deceive others more convincingly.

If you genuinely believe your own spin on things?

Then there aren’t any nervous tells to give you away.

The most convincing liars have already conned themselves, meaning no poker face is required.

Which makes them an open loop you can't see.

The worst kind for sure.

These are the people who rewrite arguments in their memory.

By inflating the role they played in a win.

Or narrating their life a few degrees away from what is true.

The reality is they aren't getting away with anything because they've completely lost contact with their own reality.

And reality, well, it will eventually send the bill anyway.

It always does.

If lying costs us this much, you'd expect the opposite from the truth.

You’d expect honesty to pay.

It does.

And luckily, we can measure it.

In 2012, Notre Dame researchers Anita Kelly and Lijuan Wang ran a study they called the Science of Honesty.

They asked one group to stop lying, the big lies and white lies alike, for ten straight weeks.

They then tracked them against a second group who were given no such instruction.

The results were striking.

During the weeks that people lied less, they reported better mental and physical health.

Fewer headaches, fewer sore throats combined with less tension and general sadness.

The effect was amplified for those who were consciously holding the line and the explanation given was the obvious one.

That lying less, improved their relationships.

And as we’ve mentioned here many times previously, better relationships makes for a healthier life.

Reverse the situation, though, and it's sobering.

The constant mental loops, the ongoing maintenance and the eternal hum of managing your own story.

None of this stays parked only in your head.

It shows up in your body.

The headaches, the illness, the tension - none of it is random or unlucky.

It’s the bill you have to pay for keeping your fabrictated story straight.

Tell the truth?

And there's no bill to pay.

Because honesty leads to trust, which leads to integrity, which leads to respect.

And a lie can destroy all of it in seconds.

Honesty lives in the smallest moments: the quick excuse or the little exaggeration or the easier answer.

Those moments when a quick lie feels like the easier path.

Here’s a few ways to make sure you stay on the right side of it:

Notice any small dodges: Nobody becomes a prolific liar in one dramatic lie. It's the convenient omission or little white lies that kickstart the habit. Each one makes the next lie easier. Catch ‘em early and the habit never forms.

Lead with the hard truth, early: Bad news rarely improves with age. Say the difficult thing while it's still small, before a delay begins to add interest.

Get honest with yourself first: The lies that cost the most are the ones you've already believed. Before you decide what to tell everyone else, make sure you're not the one being fooled. If you can’t be honest with yourself, you’ll struggle to be honest with others

Pick the lighter load: We carry a small lie for weeks just to avoid one uncomfortable minute of honesty. When you catch yourself doing it, weigh the two against each other. The honest version will almost always weigh less.

All of this brings me to the question I keep coming back to.

For what purpose?

As I type, we're living through a moment in time with more visible examples than ever of lying, cheating and performing within a self that isn't real.

And the worst part?

Many are getting rewarded for it, at least for a while.

It makes it start to look like a winning strategy.

But strip away the visibility and nothing changes underneath the surface.

Every one of them is running the same noisy background processes.

Paying the same internal tax and gaining the same brutal interest.

The reason so few people name the real motive is because it's small.

Lying is how we attempt to avoid the consequences of reality.

That's it.

It’s like taking a shortcut through a minefield.

It might seem like a clever way to get ahead, but every step is fraught with danger.

The illusion of progress is just that, an illusion.

Eventually, the truth catches up, and the cost of deception becomes painfully clear.

Any temporary gains are overshadowed by the long-term damage, leaving a trail of broken trust, damaged relationships and missed opportunities.

Your boss won't be disappointed, your partner won't be hurt and the failure won't be fatal.

That’s the attraction of avoiding the true thing.

But reality will never take that deal.

It will only lets you defer payment.

Last year, I wrote that sometimes it's okay to lie, and I still believe that.

But that’s the small, loving kind, told to delight someone rather than dodge them.

Today we’re focused on the other side of that same coin.

The lies we tell in order to skip the bill.

Rather than to give a gift.

The lies we tell to advance our cause.

At the expense of others.

The truth wins eventually, every time.

Honesty can be simple and costly at the same time, and the cost is the entire point.

To tell the truth is to agree, up front and in cash, to live in the world as it actually is.

To lie is to put it on credit and pretend the bill will never come.

It always comes.

The only question is how much interest you now have to pay.

If you'd like to go a bit deeper on this topic, this video is worth your time. Dan Ariely is funny and refreshingly honest about our dishonesty:

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Picture this: It’s the year 2000 at a refugee camp in Ghana.

A baby boy is born inside a clapboard hut, not much bigger than a minivan, to parents who’d fled a civil war in Liberia.

They have no clean water on tap and there is no promise of where their next meal will come from.

And little reason, at the time, to expect this child's life will be anything other than hard.

Twenty-five years later?

That same boy is wearing the captain's armband for Canada at a home World Cup, with an entire nation roaring his name.

His name is Alphonso Davies.

For the first five years of his life, that camp was the only world Alphonso knew.

In 2005, Canada took the family in.

A nation halfway across the globe gave them an opportunity.

His family called Windsor home first, then across to Edmonton, where the winters were a brutal shock and the welcome was far warmer than the weather.

Somewhere within those early years, a kid with no money and a thick new accent found a football at his feet.

And most importantly, a local football team that didn't care where he was born.

That was the spark.

A chance to feel like he belonged and a pathway to a future he could never have imagined.

Football became more than just a game offering a lifeline, a community and a source of identity.

Through the sport, he learned discipline, teamwork, and built upon his resilience.

Qualities that would both shape his character and guide him through life's challenges.

Alphonso joined the Vancouver Whitecaps' academy when he was fifteen.

By sixteen, he was one of the youngest players to play in the MLS (Major League Soccer).

He made a name quickly with his frightening turn of pace and soon enough, the world's biggest clubs began to take notice.

In 2019, Bayern Munich, one of the most storied football clubs, paid to bring him to Germany.

Within just a year, he'd won the Champions League, and turned himself into one of the finest left-backs on the planet.

An incredible rise for any player, especially so for a boy who faced countless challenges early in life.

And, more than any single player, he's the reason Canada competes at this World Cup believing they belong.

In 2018, before any of the Bayern fame, a teenage Davies stood up at a FIFA Congress and spoke in support of North America's bid to host the 2026 World Cup.

He helped talk this very tournament into existence.

And now he's playing in it.

At home.

Many players who reach the highest level leave the old world behind them.

Davies, though, he never stops reaching back into his.

So much so, that in 2021 he became a Goodwill Ambassador for the UN's refugee agency.

The first footballer ever to be entrusted with the position.

He regularly uses the platform to fight for kids who find themselves right where he once was.

Stuck in a camp, through no fault of their own, waiting for a opportunity or a country, somewhere, to say yes.

He’s never once pretended he did this on his own.

As with most stories like these, if you only saw the highlight reel?

You'd think it had all gone perfectly.

It hasn't.

In March 2025, with his home World Cup finally in sight, Davies tore the ACL in his knee.

That's 221 days on the sidelines, watching, while the moment he'd dreamed of his whole life crept closer without him.

He fought his way back, only for his hamstring to give out, ruling him out of Canada's opening game of the tournament.

Think about how that must have felt.

The proud kid who literally campaigned for this World Cup, finally home for it, and his own body keeps locking the door.

There's no villain in this part of the story. Just rotten timing, and a man who refuses to let it write his ending.

Where you start doesn't decide where you finish: Davies began life with next to nothing. A hard start is just a hard start, it doesn't get to choose where you finish.

Gratitude is a form of fuel: He gives back to refugees because people once gave to him. The help we receive can become the help we pass on, if we let it.

A setback is never the final whistle: Two serious injuries with the cruellest possible timing could have ended his tournament but he kept getting up. Most comebacks are simply people who refused to believe it was over.

I'll level with you on something here, I’ve followed this sport my whole life.

I've watched Alphonso Davies rise through the ranks, and seeing him thrive and win at the highest level with Bayern Munich has been a real joy.

For Canada, he's been the heartbeat of a team that's climbed out of nowhere.

So when injury kept him out of this World Cup, it stung.

For him, and for the those of us watching.

Then came the knockout game against South Africa.

When he came on, you could feel the energy on the pitch tilt.

His pace immediately dragged defenders out of shape and opened gaps that weren’t there before.

The team kept pushing, and, in the 92nd minute Stephen Eustáquio lashed in a late winner that sent Canada to the last 16 for the very first time.

One number sums up this whole story.

Before this tournament, Canada had never won a single point at a men's World Cup.

Not one.

Now?

A first-ever point against Bosnia in the opening match.

Their first-ever win, a 6-0 demolition of Qatar.

And now, a second win, along with a place in the last 16.

Territory that no Canadian men's team has ever reached, but with success, come even greater challenges.

Next, they face their biggest test yet against Morocco who are ranked 6th in the world.

With Davies fit and flying, though, I wouldn't want to face this Canadian side.

They've already made the country proud.

They’re passionate, united, and have absolutely nothing to lose.

In the end, Morocco proved a step too far for Canada.

After putting up an incredible fight in the first half, Morocco’s class shone through and they converted their chances to move on in the tournament.

Sadly, Alphonso was unable to take part in the game and had to watch his team from the sidelines once again.

So Canada’s run stops here, but what a run it's been.

And no matter the result of this game, it barely touches the surface of the real story.

That a boy born in a refugee camp was standing in the middle of it all.

In front of the country that embraced him when he needed it most.

That was always the bigger win and it happened the moment Alphonso Davies walked back onto the pitch.

If you haven’t seen Canadian coach Jessie Marsch’s post game address, it’s worth 40 seconds of your time:

Last year I read the book “The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind” and loved it.

Then, just a few weeks back, my son flagged it as something he'd like to watch.

Some of you may remember, I featured William Kankwamba and his book in a previous edition.

This film is the 2019 Netflix adaptation of William's memoir.

And it's every bit as good as I'd hoped.

It's directed by Chiwetel Ejiofor.

His first time behind the camera, and he chose William's story specifically for his debut.

He also plays William's father, Trywell, which gives the film a grounded centre.

Maxwell Simba plays William.

His first ever role, and he carries the entire film with a calm & watchful intensity.

It was filmed in Malawi, mostly in Chichewa (Malawi’s national language) with English subtitles.

That detail matters more than you'd think.

There's something very real about hearing the village speak in its own language, even when the conversations are simple.

It’s a story I'd recommend to anyone.

Given it’s a story about engineering, very little of the film is about the windmill itself.

Most is about what came before.

The drought.

Crops failing.

The school William couldn't afford to attend.

A father trying to hold his family together.

You feel life slowly tightening it’s grip around the Kamkwamba family.

By the time William reaches the library?

You’re already invested in every page he turns.

As the story unfolds, Ejiofor's direction lets the Malawi landscape do much of the talking.

The big moments remain small too.

There are no big speeches and no grandiose music as the windmill finally turns.

Just a light bulb flickering on in a corner of the house.

And a family in tears.

It's one of the most understated cinematic moments I've seen.

There are great lessons everywhere within this story, here's why I think it’s a great one to watch with kids:

It rewards patience: The pace is deliberate, and the payoffs are gentle. A helpful counter to the fast-moving stuff kids are used to.

It opens conversations: Films like this give you a natural way to talk with your kids about the wider world. Places they haven't seen, lives different to their own, why some opportunities come easily and others don't.

It shows resourcefulness: William doesn't have any of the tools or money he needs. The whole story is about figuring out what's possible with what you already have. A brilliant lesson at any age.

It celebrates curiosity: William just wants to know how things work. That curiosity changes his whole community and provides a great reminder that the questions kids ask matter.

These are the stories that stay with you for days afterward.

Reading the book had planted a lot of pictures in my head.

The dust of the drought and the weight of a father's decisions.

The face of a boy who refused to stop asking questions.

The moment a light bulb flickered on for the first time.

This film gave those pictures life.

You witness the landscape William grew up in and you can feel the wind he was trying to catch.

You watch a father that couldn't afford to send his son to school but raised a boy who ended up teaching entire communities.

There really is no need to embellish William's story.

It reminds us all what a single, determined life can do.

A boy.

A book.

A pile of scraps.

A flicker of hope in his father's eyes.

That's the shape of every meaningful life, if you choose to look closely enough.

None of us have everything we want, but most of us have more than we think.

And the difference between those two things is what William figured out at fourteen.

If you've read the book, watch the film.

If you haven't, do both.

You'll come away moved.

I did and still am.

You can watch the offical trailer for the film here:

Please share; I'm always keen for great suggestions.

We often treat gratitude as a nice bonus.

Something you’ll pay attention to once all of the important things are handled.

Cicero though, he saw it the opposite way, and I couldn’t agree with him more.

He referred to gratitude as more than just a virtue and the parent of all the others.

The one that gives rise to the rest.

That's a big claim.

Be grateful, and patience and kindness follow along behind it?

But take a moment to think about your own experience.

Notice how you treat people on a day when you feel genuinely thankful, versus a day when you feel hard done by.

The difference is night and day.

Gratitude doesn't stay in its own lane, it impacts everything downstream of it.

Centuries later, modern research has caught up with Cicero’s thoughts.

David DeSteno, a psychologist at Northeastern University, has spent years studying gratitude as more than just a warm feeling.

In one experiment, he had people recall something they were grateful for, then gave them a choice: a smaller sum of money now, or a larger sum later.

The grateful group were far more willing to wait.

Gratitude had made them more patient.

Some of his other work points to the same results.

People nudged toward gratitude become more generous with strangers, more willing to help, and more honest when no one is checking.

The feeling it provides reliably produces the behaviour we'd all recognise as good character.

Gratitude sits a little upstream of other virtues, feeding them all.

That's Cicero's 2000 year old claim, confirmed in a modern lab.

Name it specifically: Vague gratitude does little. Instead of "I'm lucky," pin down the specific thing: the friend who called or the meal someone cooked for you. The detail is what makes it land fully.

Tell the person: Gratitude you keep to yourself helps a little. Gratitude you say out loud helps a lot, lifting both you and them at once. Don’t hesitate, say the thing or send the message.

Aim it at the ordinary: The big wins are easy to be thankful for. The real impact is felt through the small, reliable things you've stopped paying attention to. Hot water, home cooked meals or that friend who always picks up the phone. That's where most of life actually happens.

On the days I'm stretched too thin, I'm not my best self.

Not many of us are.

Tired and behind, I get short with the people I love most, and become quicker to snap than they deserve.

What pulls me out of it is a deliberate moment of gratitude.

The moment I stop and acknowledge what's good, even as simple as a healthy family and doing work I enjoy, something loosens.

The patience returns.

I find it much easier to be generous and also to let the small stuff go.

Cicero had it right.

Gratitude doesn't just make me feel better, it makes me act better.

Almost everything good I manage on those days generates from that one shift in attention.

So next time, before you reach for patience or generosity straight away?

Start one step back.

Get specific about what you're grateful for, and then let the rest follow.

Transform your daily routine with my specially crafted gratitude journal.

Start (or end) each day with a moment of reflection and positivity.

As you develop daily your gratitude, you're also helping grant wishes to children facing critical illnesses.

It's a powerful cycle of hope and optimism.

🌟 What's Inside:

Ready to embrace the power of gratitude?

Click here to order a copy now!

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