The old phrase “Honesty is the best policy” is well-known and often used. We all heard it growing up from parents, grandparents, teachers, etc. and in general terms it is something that I always agree with. Unfortunately, the ability to be honest and hold our hands up to a mistake isn’t something that resides in all of us and in footballing terms, I don’t always encourage it completely in my players. Let me explain.

There are numerous mistakes made by different players all over the park, each minute of the game, whether they be positional, tactical or technical. Some of these players will accept blame however there others that will happily attempt to duck the responsibility. This starts to touch on the reason why I don’t always preach honesty as a rule.

When an honest player makes a mistake, he will mostly likely do one of a few different things. He will openly curse himself out loud for the mistake, he will take the blame and apologise openly for all to hear and/or he will hold his hands up in the dressing and take the blame in front of the management and team-mates.

This is something that I would always advocate if we could easily put things behind us and forget about them however unfortunately this is very rarely the case. Two negative things can spawn from our ability to be honest in such circumstances.

First of all, it affects our confidence. We play the mistake over in our mind numerous times whilst we beat ourselves up about it. This does nothing but pull us in a negative direction. Ideally, all our minds would be able to function with a Vulcan-like logicality which would help us evaluate the mistake rationally however as we all know too well, a lot of us allow emotion to triumph in such cases which tends to drag us down into the negative.

The other issue which I’ve experienced that can negatively affect you comes not from yourself but from others around you. When we beat ourselves up and/or accept blame for a mistake, there will be people around you who will hear and see this and use it against you, regardless of whether they do it consciously to spite or belittle you, or subconsciously as a defence mechanism to deflect their own shortcomings.

I’m sure that we’ve all been in situations when someone has used your honest mistake against you. Whether it was in order to put you down and make themselves feel above you or just so that they could deflect some of the heat away from themselves or their deficiencies. Suffering from an honesty streak as I do, I know that I can definitely point to different times in life and football when it has happened to me. This I why I’m a firm believer that we shouldn’t be too quick to condemn ourselves because all around us there will be others making mistakes but who will stay silent when the time comes to pay the piper.

In a perfect world, everyone would take full responsibility for their actions and there would be no need for a concept such as honesty because it would be an automatic and inherent value of people’s nature. Having some life experience behind me though and seeing how society’s focus is now very much about “how can I move forward?” as opposed to “how can we move forward?”, I understand that any chances of a fair way of life is hurtling away from us exponentially. Saying that, I’m not throwing in the towel and suggesting that we all become self-centred but rather that we must have an acute awareness only of how our honesty can work against us in certain situations and how we should use it wisely.

As I wage the internal battle of my scepticism in the present and my optimism for the future, I will continue to preach to the playing squad at Largs the importance of taking responsibility for ourselves moving forward, both on and off the pitch. Having that honesty will undoubtedly make us a far more developed squad and, as Arnie and I can control the dressing room to a large degree, the aim is that we can create a mini-utopian ideology of honesty and responsibility within our closed environment.

“Honesty is the fastest way to prevent a mistake from turning into a failure” James Altucher