Honesty Perhaps, but Certainly not Openness
I have come to the conclusion over the past few weeks that while most people want honesty in their lives, they don’t want openness… and couldn’t handle it if they had it.
It started a couple of weeks ago when I was having one of those random conversations you have with your friends where you end up on some topic, but not have no idea how you got there. You know the type. Somehow we ended up discussing what life would be like if people we really honest with each other. I mean really honest, pull no punches, no sugarcoating comments like we all do every day of our lives. We quickly decided that people would have a meltdown, at least at first until they got it through their heads that what people think is just opinion. People are sensitive and can’t often seem to cope with the reality that we all disagree on something with everyone we know… but those people are all still right here in our lives, so they must not think it’s bad enough to leave us over. Perhaps one day people will be ok with knowing what topics make other people wish they would just shut up. I don’t personally see it happening anytime soon, but that’s just me.
There is a lot more to that than what I feel like getting into here, with exceptions and practicality issues everywhere, but we quickly came to the conclusion that honesty is not what people are after, no matter their protests to the contrary. This idea has never sat with me well, even as I have determined it true over various periods of my life… usually because there was some truth I didn’t want to know myself.
It was not until a couple of days later that I suddenly realized that of course we want honesty. There are just a million things we don’t want people to say. What people say to us, we want it to be true. Of course we do. We break relationship over lying, even over trivial matters, too quickly for it not to be true. But while we want the words to be true, we want the subject matter to be safe. There are some topics we don’t want to hear about, sometimes even if the person talking really is the best one to speak it.
Much of our desire to be closed off to people is one of simple practicality. How much more difficult would your job be if your co-workers actually pointed out to you how they disagree with everything you stand for and with the methods you employ to get your tasks accomplished? It would reasonably (or not) quickly degrade into a hostile work environment as you came to realize that people don’t agree with how you do things. Contrast that with what is probably reality. Except that one person in the office who must disagree vocally with everyone over everything, as long as your results are solid, most people are perfectly content to ignore that they think your methodology is beyond goofy and inefficient. Nothing changed. Our methods still disagree with theirs. They are still aware of what they perceive as our inadequacies. They are still happy with our results, whether they think they could be slightly better or not. All that is different is that we are not consciously aware of their opinion. Of course when we ask a question about our methods, we want them to be honest about their opinion of things…. but we probably won’t ask. Even if we do, we are most likely after a superficial answer… a true one, but perhaps not a complete one. Honesty, yes. Openness? Not so much.
And what is so wrong with that? For the workplace, probably not a thing in the world. The trouble is only when you don’t extend past simple honesty with someone, preferably a couple of someones assuming you are lucky enough to have multiple people you can trust with yourself completely. The trouble with honesty by itself is simply that if we have no reason to change, we won’t. We all need someone or something to push and nudge us in the direction of constructive change. Honesty will only get us there if we are asking people we trust the right questions. And honestly, I’m not even sure I know what the right questions are. This is where we need openness. That person (or people) who can say whatever needs to be said because we know they are there for us. We know they aren’t there to judge. We know they aren’t going to walk away if we screw it all up and don’t change. Not pressure, not condemnation, just “Look, this is how things are. I love you completely whether it changes or not, but you need to be aware”.
I would hope many of us have this somewhere in our lives, most likely as a spouse or best friend. It seems lately that so many people confuse the honesty with openness, claiming that if you don’t let them in on everything, you aren’t being open with them. No, it’s just that while we can be honest with everyone, all people don’t deserve our complete openness. Too many times people want to manipulate us under the guise of being helpful and then wonder why we keep them out.
At our core, many people are highly sensitive to the opinions of others. It is why we don’t let them in. As I said in the outset, we can’t always handle openness on a grand scale. But you know, as long as we have at least that someone who can speak into our lives, that’s probably just fine. The trick is just to remember that the person we allow ourselves to be open with? We allow them in for a reason. When they say something difficult to hear, and they will, we have to recall that we let them in because they love us and are only after our best interests. They aren’t trying to hurt us or be cruel, they just want us to be happy as much as we do.
One last thing…. it could be that person we should be/could be open with doesn’t realize the difference. Or maybe in the past we reacted negatively to their attempts to speak into our lives. If that applies, even if you think it might in the slightest, maybe you just need to reaffirm them in their right to say difficult things to you. Communication is most people’s greatest weakness. Let’s see what we can do about that, at least with those closest to us.
