Honesty Above All Else – Cultivating Honesty Part 2

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In this penultimate post in the honesty above all else series we will explore how to cultivate greater honesty and then put these skills in to action in our external communication…

Building the Practice – Cultivating

So now we have some signposts indicating where to focus your attention internally to practice building your skills of transparency and honesty. The next thing to do it simply get on with it and practice!

Daily reflection, weekly reflection, grabbing your journal or an electronic device to make some notes around your thoughts… approach this how best works for you.

What matters is being consistent in your practice which means that you must also be realistic about what you can take on. You need to be honest with yourself about how much time you have to practice being honest with yourself!

I personally find a set weekly reflection time on a Sunday often works as an achievable minimum effort for me. I use this once-a-week practice to then establish a repeatable approach for the practice, which then means if I occasionally feel the need or desire to up the frequency, I can simply get on with it as I have cultivated the skill of cultivating my skills.

There are however some complimentary skills you could also look to build to aid you in the practice of honesty:

Being Curious

Having the drive to keep asking questions is key to the practice of honesty. This can stem both from the push to not be dishonest as well as the pull to unlock the benefits of being more honest. It can also be simply as a result of being a curious human being – it is just who you are: 7 Tips to Cultivate curiosity

Learning to Accept

Sound simple, but it is key.

When you discover something about yourself, you need to accept it to then be able to build appropriate action plans to cultivate change if you think that is needed.

No matter how honest and transparent you are being, if you then attempt to rationalise or explain away what you discover you are being dishonest with yourself in how you process the information.

You might as well have not bothered in doing the hard work to uncover the information.

Acceptance is the first tool in the mindset toolkit, here is a link for you to review: Acceptance

Lightening the Load – Practicing

Once you have started to cultivate the skill of being honest and transparent with yourself, it is then time to put these skills in action with other people.

The key here is first gaining a few wins with yourself so that you have the evidence that you are being successful at choosing to be honest and transparent. This evidence boosts your self-esteem while the practice also gives you experience of handling the discomfort that being honest can sometimes bring.

Being honest and transparent with other people lightens the cognitive load of communication because we are not adding layers to what we are saying. It also means that when we next need to communicate with the same person, we don’t need to remember the specific positioning we used with them on a given topic, we simply need to remember the truth that we universally shared and then build from there. This simplification of communication is not to be overlooked as it is the single greatest compound benefit of the honesty and transparency practice.

It is like lifting the fog from our mental processes and immersing yourself in the splendid view of reality that is unveiled. You can then become present and live moment to moment.

No more anxiety, no more stress

Just transparent honest and acceptance.

When it comes to being honest with other people there are two angles to explore:

Simply learning to be bold and attempt to communicate what you truly think and feel
Stripping away the micro buffering and padding to be more direct and as such transparent with your communication

Being Bold

When it comes to being honest, sometimes you just need to be bold and get on with it. Prioritise being honest over worrying about what people think and just lay out the facts.

Key to this is being kind to yourself and accepting that you will get it wrong sometimes by using language which may trigger other people to become upset or take offence. So long as this is not the intention behind your communication, you are doing the right thing.

It is better to start with being honest and then refine your skills than it is to hide behind the fear of what other people think and never learn to speak your truth.

The way to start with this is to premeditate your communication where possible. If you know you need to have a conversation with someone and communicate specific information, then spend time thinking in advance so you can be clear with yourself about what you want to communicate and what words you will use.

Remember though, that you are only in control of your part of the conversation so your plans may need to change on the fly dependent upon how the other person chooses to react to your communication.

This is where you again need to be kind to yourself as the ability to think on the fly and adjust your communication style is a skill that is learned over time through experience. Just focus on being honest and communicate with positive intent.

If you get things wrong, take note and during your reflection time identify strategies to improve your communication – The use of language tool will be a great help for this.

Dancing Around and Gilding the Lily

Dancing around in your communication is attempting to communicate your truth within the subtext of your communication.

Gilding the lily is adding extra (not always truthful) colour and detail to your communication in a bid to make it more enticing to the other party.

Both of these phenomenon act to water down your communication and soften the message for the other person. While we can do this with positive intent, what it does is increase the probability that the other person will not understand the key messages in our communication.

So, while these methods can sometimes be used effectively to communicate hard to accept information, left unchecked they can they can ruin your ability to effectively communicate all together.

As a general rule the driver behind using these strategies needs to that the other person has shown a tendency to be quite volatile when receiving new or challenging information. The driver should not be that you are afraid of how the person will react. It is important for your to be able to tell the difference between the two.

If you have used either of these strategies, then once the information has initially been shared, circle back through the information again, this time more directly without the gilding. If appropriate, check with the other person that they have understood the key information that you are trying to share.

So, while you can sometimes use these strategies effectively just be aware of potential misunderstanding when you are doing this and avoid using these as your default communication style for everyone.

What’s Next?

In the next and final post of this series I will share some final reflections around how this tool can be valuable in life…

Enjoy, for now.

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