Video Blog Transcription:

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A really useful way to think about honesty is to view it in terms of acting, speaking, and relating congruently and in accord with what you're experiencing inside. And the things we experience inside include our feelings, opinions, thoughts, beliefs, the way we see the world, and our senses of things, including our intuition.

It's today what we call transparency; being honest is being transparent. Honesty is a willingness to expose your inner experience with someone. And when we do this, it allows us to be intimate and close, because we're being real with someone. We're showing someone how we really are inside.

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And of course, when we do this, we feel vulnerable, and it is a little risky on the emotional level. It hurts a little more if we get criticized, judged, or betrayed when we’re laying our heart on the line than it does when we’re just talking shit. So it does have higher stakes but could be very worth it, perhaps.

So it follows that the intention of being honest is to connect and to be close and to share yourself with someone else. You're saying, “This is how I feel.” And by doing that, you're naturally inviting the other person or other people to share what they're feeling and to be real.

When I’m being real, it’s always an invitation for someone else to be real. They may or may not step into it or not, but it naturally opens the door for that.

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In contrast, a different type of intention when relating to people would be to be more strategic. And by strategic, I mean we're not going to share our inner experience. We're going to kind of keep our cards close to our chest. Like when we're playing poker, we're not going to show them our hand.

This strategic intention is more like to gain an advantage. And we've got a plan and we're trying to outsmart them, win a game, or win a race. If we're playing football, we're not going to show our game plan.

And then we also take this strategic intention into our relating to other people sometimes. It’s when we're more goal-oriented. When we want to get the girl, or where we want to have him be our boyfriend, or we want to get accepted by a group of people or get elected for something.

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And then sometimes it’s not natural to show our vulnerability. We want to like put ourselves out there in the best light. And this can be appropriate for some types of relating, but it has a different intention.

So when we're honest and when we choose to expose our inner experience, we give up some things and we gain some things. And the main thing we give up is control over molding this experience to have a specific outcome. It's like I'm going to strategically make it have this result. We're giving that up.

Instead, we're just saying, “This is how I feel. This is what I would like to happen.” It's almost like trusting in the other people, trusting in the universe, that the thing that this magic, closeness, love, synergy, and connection can happen, and it's going to be a good thing.

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And so what we gain is the magic. We gain the connection. And often, at least from my experience, the things we gain far surpass that control that we gave up.

Because we gain things that we couldn't have foreseen. We would've never been able to plan, and this magic happens and these things happen that wouldn't otherwise. And it all happens because we were open and we were honest, which opens the door for all kinds of intimacy, connection, and magic.

So anyway, that is my video blog for this week. Thank you for watching. I hope you have an awesome week and that you allow yourself to be honest and see what happens. I will see you in a week.