Being willing to have honest conversations with our friends, family, and colleagues is vital to the development of more resilient, meaningful, and deeper relationships.
These kinds of conversations are also notoriously unpleasant — at least at first.
In fact, they’re so unpleasant that we often go to great lengths to avoid them:
Teams avoid addressing their own dysfunction.
Partners, family members, and friends decline to share important issues with each other.
Ironically, in our effort to forego the unpleasantry of honest and difficult conversations, we welcome another unpleasantry that comes from having a dysfunctional team, a challenging relationship, or some other persistent problem.
If you play it out, you’ll find that the only way to address this conundrum is to be willing to engage in honest conversations.
When it comes to cultivating meaningful relationships, honesty is the best and only viable policy.