Conduct yourself with candor, Queen. 👑
“You gotta want kids if you want to be with me.”
He was 19 years older than me. In his first marriage, they had agreed not to have children. I was falling in love with him. I also knew I wanted kids. And I knew he would make a fantastic father. I wasn’t about to compromise on what I wanted. But, I was willing to walk away if I couldn’t have it all. So, I figured I’d come right out with it. Why beat around the bush, right?
Yet, so often in our communication, we speak implicitly.
We hint.
We imply.
We drop clues.
But, come right out and say what you want and that you want it…
To be totally and brutally honest, well that’s just brutal, right?
Or is it or is it brutal to pretend you want something you don’t want, dance around the topic for years and then get your heart smashed because it didn’t happen. To me, the latter seems far more brutal with time, effort, and energy lost.
It’s much easier to rip a bandaid off than to unstitch a gangrenous wound of implication.
BEING DIRECT, CANDID, EXPLICIT WITH YOUR COMMUNICATION ALLOWS NOT ONLY YOU TO KNOW EXACTLY WHERE YOU STAND AND WHAT YOU WANT, BUT OTHERS AS WELL.
It may feel harsh at the moment, but isn’t it better to know where you stand than to waste months, even years, thinking you stand in one place when really the other person sees you in a totally different spot?
So in that way, I’d say...
BEING CANDID IS KIND.
I’ve seen communication breakdown in every type of relationship - marriages, business partnerships, parent/child relationships, client relationships.
Telling a client what they want to hear in a coaching session instead of what they need to hear, because you don’t want to make them “feel bad.” (I guarantee you, it’ll feel a lot worse for both of you, if they end up not seeing results because of the behavior you’re allowing them to slide on. Then, it looks bad for both of you.)
Being a pushover with your boundaries when a customer wants a refund, and it’s clearly outlined in your policy that you don’t offer refunds after a certain month.
Tolerating a team member clocking in hours building your website, when you can see clearly that they spent most of their time researching how to do the job they said they knew how to do when you hired them.
Allowing your kids to go one more time beyond that one more time that you already said without a time out, when you had clearly stated that if they do that thing one more time that that’s where they would go.
Surrendering your voice to your spouse by not sharing your dreams with him because you’re scared he wouldn’t support you.
It’s a practice, learning to speak up for yourself and what you want.
IT TAKES BEING REALLY FREAKING CLEAR ON THE LIFE YOU WANT TO LEAD, THE BUSINESS YOU WANT TO HAVE, AND THE MISSION YOU WANT TO FULFILL.
And it takes a crap-ton of courage to speak your truth, especially when you think you’re risking losing something else that you love.
One of my clients wanted to build a million-dollar company in three years. She’d never told her husband her dream. When her husband would go to work, she’d work ferociously on her business for hours on end, but when he’d come home, she wouldn’t share anything about what she’d done all day. He knew she had a business, but he didn’t really know what she did. It terrified her the thought of possibly having to give it up, so instead of being brave and sharing it with him, she hid it....like a love affair, only, it was with her business instead of another man.
Here’s the problem with hiding your truth, though, especially from the ones you love. More often, the perceiver starts projecting their fears, their annoyance onto their partner.
This looks like nit-picking, bitching, nagging, complaining...and eventually, resentment toward the other person.
Perception is projection, sweetheart.
YET, WHEN WE’RE NOT HONEST WITH OURSELVES, WE HURT THOSE WE LOVE BY PROJECTING OUR ANNOYANCES ABOUT OURSELVES ONTO THEM.
Meanwhile, her husband had a nasty habit of dipping. Yes, chewing and spitting tobacco. I know...gross. He knew she hated it. So he only did it when he was at work away from her. He’d quit in the past for her, but when things got stressful, he went back to it. Then the nagging started, and the complaining and the more she complained the more he hid his habit because he didn’t like feeling like he was constantly disappointing her.
HIDING ONLY CREATES MORE HIDING. PERCEPTION, PROJECTION.
“It feels like such a breach of trust,” she said.
“Aren’t you also breaching his trust by hiding what you’re doing from him?”
“What do you mean?”
“If you really trusted him, you’d share your truth about what you want - to be a wife AND to be a million-dollar business owner.”
That night she had a courageous conversation. She shared her dreams. She shared her desires. And...it went even better than she expected.
“Kim, I cannot believe I so massively misjudged him! He was curious. He asked questions! He loved the idea and is so excited for me!”
That’s the thing about speaking your truth…
If you speak it to the right person, it will create an even stronger foundation of trust, honesty, and security.
And, if you think someone “can’t handle” your truth, and they really, truly can’t, then they aren’t in alignment with you...and that’s okay.
You’re honoring the other person’s time by not wasting it if they’re not the right fit.
But they won’t know, and you won’t know unless you have the courage to share it, you know?
A QUEEN CONDUCTS HERSELF WITH CANDOR - STATING EXPLICITLY, AND UNAPOLOGETICALLY WHAT SHE IS AND IS NOT AVAILABLE FOR, TRUSTING THAT THE UNIVERSE WILL ALIGN THE REST.
“With you, I could see having kids,” he said to me.
The next day, Spike and I decided on how many - two - a boy and a girl. And we spent the next hour of our morning over coffee, coming up with four names, just in case.
The first name we chose...Declan.