Liar liar

Radical honesty is still de rigueur for self-help gurus and management consultants alike. But is it possible to be honest while not being a dick?

Photo by Taras Chernus on Unsplash

How often do you lie? Be honest now… I promise I won’t judge you. Have you perhaps lied already today? I’m not talking about big whoppers like telling everyone you’re a celebrity lawyer (I finally watched Baby Reindeer this week and my how it haunts me…) or masterminding your very own Ponzi scheme. Although if you have, I admire your confidence - I really do. But maybe you fibbed to get out of a dinner you didn’t fancy. Or didn’t correct your coffee order when it came out wrong, for fear of making a scene. Or you told your friend you loved their new glasses when in fact they make her look like a serial killer (on this I worry my new specs make me look like Jeffrey Dahmer - to be clear this is no reflection on anyone I know).

Truth telling - or lack thereof - has been bouncing around my brain a lot this week for two reasons. Firstly, I listened to a recent episode of The Tim Ferriss Show featuring Martha Beck. Beck, whose most recent book, The Way of Integrity, is all about honesty. So much so that she once spent an entire year - yes… a year - telling no lies whatsoever. Not even a tiny white one to get out of an awkward situation. And this made me painfully aware of just how hard I would find this - and how much I hush up on a daily and sometimes hourly basis.

Secondly, I had a wonderful experience this week with a temporarily estranged friend who got in touch as part of a twelve step programme they are part of. They had reached the step of making amends, and bravely contacted me to talk about the harms they felt they had done me. The incident in question occurred a few years ago - one of those messy situations where we didn’t exactly fall out - but a series of events led to a strained and awkward situation between us from which we both retreated. Fast. In the silence that followed I was too scared to get in touch for fear they harboured ill will towards me. And I felt too fragile to face that.

Over a Zoom call this week we talked it through. They said what they felt they’d done wrong. I said what I felt I’d done wrong - and everything melted away. We realised as we talked that by not being fully honest about things at the time we unwittingly created a gap that has taken time to bridge. And it all seemed so… silly. Surely it can’t be hard to just be honest?!

And yet - having spent some time reflecting on much I bend my own truth - I have concluded it is fucking hard to be totally honest. In her interview, Beck pointed out that most people use lying as a form of social lubricant. White lies created from a place of not wanting to cause offence, and used to oil the machine of our networks and relationships.

This is definitely where I would place my fibbing habits - but I wonder if this has tipped me into a place of not representing myself at all. It’s one thing to say you are busy rather than tell someone you can’t imagine anything worse than coming to a party at their accountancy firm - but if this extends into blindly going along with others’ plans (both at work and at home) that don’t appeal, for fear of my suggestion turning out to be shit… well maybe this is more a for of self abandonment.

Radical Honesty - a term coined in 1996 by Brad Blanton in his book of the same name - is a concept that’s still alive and kicking and bandied around by gurus and management consultants alike. It also birthed the trend of putting the word “radical” in front of anything to create a snappy sounding movement (something that I fully reserve the right to do if I could just think of a good one). The original concept was sold on the benefits - reduced stress, better relationships and reduced reactivity to events - that never fibbing at all could magically generate. These days the concept has splintered off into movements like “speaking my truth” (spiritual) and “speaking truth to power” (corporate). Which seem to me more focused on giving less of a toss about the feelings of others - part of the apparently unstoppable self-help genre juggernaut I see as “Radical C*nty-Selfishness”.

My issue - as I outlined a while back in my piece Are you ‘Speaking your truth’, or being a dick (something that earned me my first troll) - is that I worry we need an element of fibbing, exactly for the social lubrication reasons Beck spoke about. And I’m not convinced it’s possible to be kind and thoughtful to others - and always be unwaveringly honest.

But the conversation with my twelve step friend made me question my thinking. It felt fucking great to speak fully truthfully about what had happened and where we went wrong. And with hindsight I might have been able to avoid a two-year hiatus in our friendship by simply saying “I don’t think this is working - shall we have a chat about it?”. Could it, in fact, be possible to speak your truth… without being a dick?

I suddenly felt an overwhelming urge to get in touch with people I’ve had unspoken fallings out with and clear the air. But I realised with some I am still too bruised to cope if they’re not in a place to be unemotionally honest.

Having reflected on this, I have concluded we need a new sub-genre of honesty - Constructive Radical Honesty. Because let’s face it, overgrown children that we all are, promoting pure radical honesty just gives us carte-blanche to insult everyone around us, stick with our own deluded views totally unchallenged and probably end up alone or living in a cult.

Constructive Radical Honesty, however, could be ‘speaking your truth, plus’ - a notion where you can say what you think but only if you can formulate it in a way that contributes positively to a conversation or leads it towards a solution. Radically honesty when it’s all one way is just a shit show of “you’re wrong and I’m going to be a dick about it”. Constructive Radical Honesty looks more like “you’re wrong, I’m wrong and this is what I think might work better”.

Because the truth is you can only be properly honest when you are able to admit fault. When you can see a situation from a step back and be honest with yourself about the role you played in it. When you can admit that you might have been a bit of a tosser too. When you put down the shield of defensiveness and meet in No Man’s Land.

And the problem with radical honesty in the moment is it’s very hard to do well. We are emotional beings - some of us more than others. And while it’s easy to have this conversation two years late when the dust is settled - in the heat of things feeling shitty, it takes a truly evolved human to be able to be open and vulnerable while feeling hurt.

So how can you practice Constructive Radical Honesty? Listening back to Beck , she was asked exactly this question. She gave an example of not wanting to go to a fancy dress party hosted by a good friend - suggesting a response of “what else could we do together”, thereby shifting the focus on a mutual beneficial arrangement, rather than “I would rather hack off my own foot than wear fancy dress”.

The good news is she also doesn’t really recommend a year of truth speaking. Suggesting instead that most people would benefit from simply spending three days writing down what they really thought every time they spoke a white lie.

So can you be truthful without dickishness? Yes - but only if you’re prepared to put the effort in. Can you be honest with compassion when you’re raging or afraid? Great - go ahead. If not, it might not be the right moment. But focusing on a solution that feels more ‘you’ might be the honesty the world needs a bit more of right now.

What do you think? Be honest… I dare ya….

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Good afternoon team… I can happily report I have not lied today. Have you? Does this chime with you? Should we be more honest or do we need a little light fibbing to make the world go round….? Let me know - honest is applauded. Just don’t be a dick, yeah?!