When does honesty backfire?

When does honesty backfire?  When we’re not being honest with ourselves first. 

Almost every leader we work with has a sense that “good” leaders are honest - even when it’s hard.  They say the hard thing.  And a lot of our leadership intensives are spent exploring what that feels like.  But there is a problem with focusing FIRST on being honest with others. 

Most of the time, our bigger challenge is around being honest with ourselves. 

I’m 41 years old, and only in the last few years have I been able to be truly honest with myself about some deep anxieties that come up frequently for me:  the fear of being trapped in pain, the fear that others will have control over me, the fear of being disliked, to name a few. For most of my life and career, I would tell you that I didn’t have much fear, but in reality I wasn’t giving myself the space or the tools to be truly honest with myself.

So there were many conversations in which I THOUGHT I was being honest with others.  But few in which I really was.  Because I was actually just giving them the rationalizations that I was feeding to myself.  Not the deeper truth.

I remember a time when - after years of having a reputation for great “adult culture” and survey after survey that showed how happy everyone was – our team started to struggle and the story that “everyone loves it here!” was starting to fall apart.  I gave myself false hope and I tried to control things even more - attempting to manufacture the next initiative or message that would recapture our glory.  That didn’t work.  Then I blamed the decisions from the “network” or some of the “wrong” hires we had made. That just led to more anger and frustration … for everyone.

And neither of those were the truth.  But I wasn’t ready to be honest with myself about the burnout, embarrassment, and hurt that I was actually feeling.  And how could I show care and curiosity for how my team was struggling when I wasn’t even giving that to myself?

We probably all know how painful it can be to work with or for someone that is not being honest with themselves.  Unfortunately, it’s all too easy to perpetuate that cycle by trying to have “difficult conversations” with others before we’ve created space to be truly honest with ourselves first. The good news in my experience is that when we CAN be honest with ourselves first, we don’t need to have “difficult conversations.”  We can have deeply honest and vulnerable conversations where defenses go down, real connections are formed, and true growth can begin.