Some thoughts on honesty in friend- and relationships
2023-01-19
Even though some might not like to admit it, keeping a good and healthy connection to our family, friends and especially our better half is of crucial importance. In this article I want to present some of my thoughts on the role of honesty in this context...
Some of you might argue that talking about honesty is unnecessary and a pure waste of time as we obviously do not lie to the people who are important to us all the time and generally tell them the truth. However, I am also not thinking about honesty as the way we interact with all the people around us such as colleagues and strangers, but as a way to allow persons we fully trust and value to "look into our heads" and understand our thoughts. Let me explain that a bit more:
Most problems and disputes in families, friendships as well as relationsships can be put down to bad communication and missunderstandings, which both ultimately cause frustration and therefore are the ideal foundation for large, sometimes deadly conflicts. By not only being honest, but brutally, shamelessly, deeply honest down to our self-image we can greatly mitigate these risks. Exposing all of our thoughts and not trying to hold something we might consider embarrassing or painful back not only illustrates our trust in someone, but allows them to build and maintain exceptional sympathy with you.
Also play this game the other way around and all of a sudden you are able to get a grip on opinions as well as character traits of someone else you previously believed to be impossible! It certainly is not easy to open up yourself this far for others and requires a lot of time to build the required trust, but it can fundamentally change the way we interact with and see the people we care about the most. Especially, in todays mistrust-driven world, where everyone always thinks the worst about people he is interacting with, such a practice can have huge influence .
Hopefully, I could encourage you to think a bit about the way you deal with others and just maybe lay the foundations to a very valuable skill of yours. As always, getting started is the most important step - so do it now, before the motivation or the circumstances are possibly gone forever...