Read 👉Radical Transparency for context
Get a group of friends to be fully radically transparent with you. Train this principle together as a group, a community, a company by continuously sharing feedback and being open to it. Establish it as the culture to live by.
Times and times again this principle has proven to be life-changing. Life-changing. This is not an exaggeration.
I live in a house in which three of my five friends: Nora, Jeremiah, and Alek are being radically transparent with me. It's not an easy time. Sometimes I am just wondering why I am having it "the harder way". It seems to be "the harder way" because I am having all these "flaws" being revealed to myself.
Hearing to Alek's feedback on my writing by having him read out my sentences in a way that reveals how awkward some of them sound is hard.
Even harder, though, is to have all of my readers think the exact same thing and me not knowing.
So feelings aside, all of us are benefitting 10000000x from this culture.
Firstly, it recently helped me save myself from the loss of a precious person in my life. That happened because that person was brave enough and cared enough about our mutual progress to step out of the comfort zone to be radically transparent. She took the time to edge her way up to that hard conversation, the time to compile her thoughts, and the extreme mental energy to tell it to me. What we discovered in that conversation is that unless Nora really cared, she would have never taken the step.
Also, a lot of stuff would be misinterpreted and misunderstood by both of us.
We wouldn't hear what we needed to hear from each other.
I had another "hard" conversation in which I was told, "I have never been that honest with anyone". Because of how honest it was, we are able to surpass maybe months of guesswork for each other and save mental energy.
The bottom line is:
If you address questions, feeling, emotions, etc. in a radically transparent, radically honest way, it is way easier to deal with and manage "hard realities".
Don't protect your feelings by shielding yourself from the truth. Take the necessary steps to construct an environment in which those around you feel comfortable telling you things that are in their heads anyway.
Jeremiah says, "Feedback is a gift. It is to be earned.". If you look at it as something extremely valuable, a gift of insight about what a lot of other people are thinking but only a few will tell you, you can align your emotions towards the radical transparency way.
For example, at the end of my conversation with Nora, she explicitly asked me "Do you have any feedback to me?"
Because I was asked, because I was made comfortable and welcomed to share what I had in my head, I did provide my radically transparent feedback which will help Nora grow.
The way we receive feedback and how much we explicitly ask for it is will determine how much we will be gifted with it.
Here is an example from my texts with Jeremiah after he told me something:
Wow, just take a sec, please, to realize how valuable this is. Not only one, but a whole three people like that. I am also asking all of my other friends for the same culture.
The results of this are amazing!
Feelings themselves are not even nearly as important with regards to the truth as the need to improve and bring to the light our flaws.
The only way to address those flaws is by knowing what they are.