Your truth isn’t necessarily THE Truth

When I was a sports reporter all those years ago, I wrote a feature story about a boy on the local high school basketball team and his dream to play college basketball.

I followed him around for an entire weekend as he played in a high-level summer league basketball tournament, and my story focused on how hard he was working to attract the eyes of a college basketball coach or two who might one day offer him a scholarship.

When my story ran in the paper the next week, the high school basketball coach called me.

Not to congratulate me on my story about one of his players.

He called me to chew me out.

He was livid that I wrote the story about this particular boy and not about his own son, who was also on the high school basketball team, and who also played in that weekend tournament I had attended, but on a different team.

I'll never forget him yelling at me over the phone, “He’ll never play a single minute of college basketball! And that will make your story look like the pile of crap that it is!”

He was saying this about one of his own players!

But because it wasn't about his preferred player — his son — he was blinded by the reality of the situation: the player I chose to feature was the better basketball player.

In fact, the player I wrote about did go on play college basketball as a four-year starter at a Division-II university.

What this high school basketball coach couldn’t see was the reality that existed beyond his own personal truth, to the point that he would disparage one of his own players to deal with the cognitive dissonance within his mind.

This situation isn’t just reserved for high school basketball coaches who favor their own children.

This plays out daily in all aspects of life.

We see it in all of the hot button issues of the day: politics, the economy, overseas wars, social justice, the environment, faith and religion.

We take our opinion, we find others who agree with our opinion, we become supremely self-assured, and we proclaim our individual truth as the Truth. Capital T. Full stop. End of story.

And when “my truth” becomes THE Truth, it becomes easy to see those who hold different views than you not just as enemies, but as threats to your very life.

In the episode 74 of The Follow-Up Question, Justine Lee told me there is a simple question we can ask of ourselves to help snap us out of this mentality.

”I think it’s just taking that moment to take a step back when you read something or you hear about something that makes you upset, exploring a little why that might be. I would ask myself, ‘Do I feel like I have the whole story here, or, am I just getting a one-dimensional caricature of a person — a point of view?’”

Though it might be a simple question, it is certainly not an easy one to explore.

Just like a high school basketball coach can’t fathom that his son is not the best player and therefore most worthy of a newspaper feature story and a college scholarship, so too are we tied to our individuals truths.

But as Justine told me in our conversation, we can either lean into or lean away from the discomfort of the ugliness of our own thoughts.

Why do I advocate that you lean into the discomfort?

Because if there was a chance that you didn't have the whole story and that you might be wrong, wouldn’t you want to know it?