#16: How Honest Should You Be?

The Pat Kelly Podcast

Honesty is an interesting thing. It’s generally regarded as the best policy in most situations, and I’d usually agree, although I admit that I sometimes use white lies to protect other people’s feelings. Or if someone confidently tells me something I know to be incorrect, sometimes I’d rather just let them be incorrect than face the awkwardness of telling them they’re wrong, especially if it’s something unimportant. But in general, I’d say I’m a very honest person; maybe to a fault. I tend to share every thought or emotion with everyone in my vicinity.

Being totally transparent is freeing. It feels great to get things off your chest instead of holding them in. People who hold things in tend to overthink them and make them worse, which is not a great strategy. Recently though, I started to see how being too open could also have some unintended consequences. Whether I like it or not, part of my identity is based on how I think I’m perceived by other people. Even if the people in my life are totally non judgemental, I’m still subtly affected by their perception of me.

There’s a reason why people who go travelling tend to open up a lot or ‘come out of their shell’. Being in an environment where no one knows anything about you is pure identity freedom. You feel much more comfortable experimenting and letting different parts of you come to the surface, since there’s no one around to say “hey, you weren’t like that 6 months ago, what a phony!”. Humans are hardwired to crave simplicity in the presence of nuance and complexity.

Of course, I’m not suggesting that you never be open about your feelings. If you carefully choose who you share your deeper feeling with, you can have the best of both worlds. Know your inner circle; that group of trustworthy people who genuinely want you to succeed and won’t hold you to your past self. People change and evolve, and some people have a hard time accepting that, especially if they haven’t changed much themself. In fact, growth and change are literally in the definition of life that shows up first on Google: “the condition that distinguishes animals and plants from inorganic matter, including the capacity for growth, reproduction, functional activity, and continual change preceding death.” I think that gives us adequate permission to change; now we just need the people in our lives to be so understanding!

I think a good compromise might be to regularly write down your thoughts and emotions in a notebook. I do this all the time! Even the simple act of putting these thoughts on paper can relieve a lot of tension and let you see things from a different perspective. If you’ve done all that and you still feel like talking to someone about it, then maybe that’s the right time to do so.