On Fear and Love: Transparency and Truth

Awareness Reveals Character 

When we talked about transparency in our master class, one of our senior leaders said she thought she was transparent for years until she went through the core values exercise and realized that earlier in life, she chose values that were not really hers. She admitted that she was not being honest before, which was probably because of a lack of awareness. She likely feared that her true core values wouldn’t serve her in the relationships she had at that time.  She chose them to be comfortable because she thought that they should be her values.  She's going through the fear right now of reviewing her core values, and humbly going back to the people whose relationships are important to her. She will be honest with them about her fear, and revisit decisions and boundaries that existed before, and may need to renegotiate some of those. 

Love shows up when you’re developing more transparency in your relationships; fear shows up when you are not. The fear of what might happen prevents you from being self-aware and honest, and it creates an internal struggle. That leader was afraid of what would become of her relationships if she accepted and communicated what was in her core. Once she accepted it, the rest flowed and she said, “Now I have to go back and do this.”  

This is how it works when you step into a new energy source, in her case coming out of fear energy and coming into self-loving energy. Once that love door opened and she was willing to boldly embrace it internally, all the fear-based decisions she made could no longer rest in her core. She had a choice to go back to fearing herself or to extend loving herself into her relationships. You can't live a dissonance and so your spirit wants to reconcile it.   

Fear Chokes Truth 

Fear restricts your ability to be transparent and form strong, loving relationships with others. Someone in fear energy won’t share and will even defend their “right” to not share. This is a false badge of honor. Lynn used the right not to be transparent – it’s none of your business – because she was afraid of revealing her true self. She thought she was being smart by not sharing her feelings and that people would accept that. Lynn recalled her experience at The Stand (we wrote about that before). One of the very first exercises was to stand up in front of everybody and tell them something about yourself. Lynn stood up in front of everyone and said nothing, spending a full two minutes in silence.  

Fear restricts your ability to be transparent and form strong, loving relationships with others.

Another time, she was in a performance review where the supervisor was giving her negative feedback. She shut down her feelings and told herself she didn’t have to talk about it. She knows now that her fear of being unable to articulate her feelings along with the possibility of creating a confrontation made her cling to her “right” of silence. 

Fear Wants Fair 

When Ben was managing other people's businesses and having hard conversations with employees who had grievances or issues he realized the concept of, “Fear Wants Fair”.  He was the general manager at Mad Science and hired an administrative assistant. Things went great for the first couple of months, they had lunch together, he even invited her to his birthday party. They seemed to have a good rapport, but then something flipped, and she became hostile, acting curt toward him and making snippy comments. Ben thought that maybe something was happening in her personal life, causing her emotional pressure that she was letting out at work. 

She became aggressive about perceived disparity between “management” and “staff” and started to talk about her issues. The biggest thing was lunch breaks because she would see that Ben would take an hour lunch break every day sometimes an hour and a half occasionally hours. She usually took half an hour for lunch, and saw this as an unfair disparity. 

She became very upset and wanted to build it into a huge human resources problem (they didn’t even have an HR department; it was only Ben!).  She really needed to be right and to be vindicated and to see this injustice corrected. The crux of the argument was, she said, “I only take a half hour lunch at a specific time, and you take an hour or two and go whenever you want. You show up whenever you want to and you are in violation of our workplace policy!” When Ben asked her, “What do you mean,” she said that the employee handbook says that we get a half hour for lunch. Ben advised her that it didn’t say that and since he wrote the book he was pretty sure he was right. He explained that the handbook said that employees are entitled to take half an hour for lunch. “Yeah,” she said, “and you take an hour and a half.”  

Fear wants everybody to be the same.

Ben continued to communicate calmly that there was nothing in the policy that said employees can’t take more time, it conveys that you’re guaranteed a minimum half hour. She said, well I only get a half hour and Ben told her that she could take an hour. She said, “No, I couldn’t because if I did I wouldn’t get my eight hours in. I have very specific, set work hours.” This was established (transparency) in our initial interview that the administrative assistant was to start work at eight o’clock and could leave at 4:30 because we needed someone to answer the phones during those hours. She had agreed tacitly by accepting the job offer. Ben advised that she could take an hour for lunch, just stay until five o’clock to meet the requirement of an eight-hour workday.   

Her retort was, “No, I can’t stay later because I have college classes right after work.” 

The Root of the Conflict 

Ben revealed the truth to her, that a difference in their lifestyles was the root of the problem. He came in around 10 a.m. and may take an hour or two for lunch, then frequently worked until 9 p.m. At times, he had to substitute for an instructor who did not show up for work that day, and would spend three hours driving to a school and teaching the class. Upon his return to the office, he still had to finish his own work, and get schedules set up for the next day. He asked if she would like to change schedules with him? She realized that her job required her to be at the desk to answer phones during office hours. Ben explained that looking for fairness in this situation was a fool’s errand, because of competing needs. There were different rhythms to their schedules but all she felt was the fear obstructing her ability to see it. Fear wants everybody to be the same, follow the rules, and go to the lowest common denominator. 

If you’d like to hear more about how fear and love influence our behavior, reach out to us.