Transparency is a personal trait of character that allows others to see inside us. A transparent person shares his/her intimate thoughts with a broad group of persons. Transparency has risks and rewards. Also transparency needs work: you don’t become transparent so easily .
Many people prefer opacity to transparency, because they fear that they have more to lose in it than to gain. They don’t want to give up too much of their intimacy. They like to remain private by shyness, or shame of revealing the truth about themselves. They fear rejections by those who don’t share their values or ideas. They fear that people could use the secrets they reveal against them. They like to keep some mystery around them, to maintain a myth that differentiates them or make them superior. They may also believe that don’t have anything interesting to share. In all cases, opacity acts as a shield, creates a wall protecting us from the world at large. Opacity hides.
I prefer transparency because I believe it makes me gain more than lose. Removing walls helps communication. Transparency exposes us to more scrutiny by others and that is a good thing. It is good to be challenged by others, even better to be proven wrong, so that we can correct our point of view and better ourselves. Transparency brings transparency, i.e. if you allow yourself to be seen by others, others will in turn will allow you to see inside them. Transparency brings trust: i don’t have to worry about you, because I know all that you have in mind: nothing hidden, nothing to guess, to fear. Transparency facilitates switching the conversation from small talk to real stuff as we discuss the essence of who we are, what we want to do, the emotions that are inside us. Lastly, transparency equalizes all of us. By sharing the basics of who we are, we realize that, regardless of any apparent difference, we are all fundamentally equal, that our emotions are common and normal, that we are all united in humanity. That is a good thing to keep in mind as our world keeps spinning crazy!
Transparently yours!
When do you think you decided to become transparent? When did you think or realized it was better to be transparent? I have a tough time trusting people. It takes me a lot to share what I go through or what’s going on in my mind and my life. I don’t know if it’s a bad things though because I wouldn’t be comfortable knowing a large group of people knows my deepest secrets.
When did I think I decided to become transparent? Excellent and encouraging question, truly.
As in many things in my life it happened in a moment: the moment before without it and the moment after with it. (I will soon write something about moments in life that change your life: I have had at least three of them. They did not have to happen, actually they were unlikely to happen but they did happen somehow and my life was changed forever after that.)
I know that I had been reflecting on the subject of fear for a long time. My father worked hard on me to be fearless. He had his War experiences and managed to eradicate fear from his life at that time just to survive on the front ( Or at least that’s what he pretended to me). So I believe the concept of transparency came to me when I was fearful of something and tried not to fear that. I do remember that I was very troubled once of being two different people: the one outside and the one inside. I let a relationship develop that I became uncomfortable with and yet, I did not have the courage to say so to the other. As a result, I became alienated, i.e. I was not entirely myself in that relationship. It made me so unhappy, that I decided one day to never let that happen again. It had happened because I had not had the guts to say I am not like what you think I am. Fear of disappointing the other was leading me to deep personal unhappiness, to a false position. Whatever I was fearing led me to a situation worse than the consequences of being truthful . It did not make sense. I really rejected the concept of not being sincere. I considered it to be a major flaw, in addition to causing more harm to all parties. So I started thinking about being truthful at all times, and thought: gee that would be great, I would like that certainly better than being unhappy by lack of sincerity.
That is the best of my recollection.
As I reflect on it now, it is obvious that being more than one person (to please someone else) is unbearable, leads to lies to oneself, to alienation, which ends up being worse than losing the “like” of the other person. Bruce Wasserstein, a famed businessman who died too soon, told me once as my boss: Bernard, you care too much about what others think of you. He could see I was trying too much to please, and he thought that I was not myself. That remark had a profound effect on me: I realized it was a mistake to be like that, yet It seemed against my morality of being nice no matter what. I knew he was right, but I did not know how to do it. It came gradually, by caring more about being myself and giving the truth to others. The best gift you can offer others is to be your true self, sincere, human, often wrong, but always true, no matter what. The big reward is that they will know who you are, where you are. they will not have to second guess yourself, which is wasted energy. They are dealing with the one and only you, and not some metaverse avatar, invented for the fictional reason to please the audience.
You will see (if you are not already there) that it greatly simplifies life, you don’t need to learn one or more roles. It may feel awkward at the beginning to change the structure of the dialogue with others, but it becomes quite natural very quickly, based on the feedback, as well as your own satisfaction to be truly yourself, which I believe to be fundamentally important.
Lastly, when I decided to be transparent , I liked the challenge of resolving potential communication issues right away: no backlog, no debt, all just-in-time, current and refreshed by whatever the day brings: like a great question by you!
To address your last points about fear of unveiling intimacy and trusting others, this is a huge subject requiring separate treatment. It can be linked to holding ourselves to too high a standard and beating ourselves for not being good enough, for disappointing others. The fear of imperfection is probably the worst because it cannot be resolved easily: the fact is nobody is perfect: everybody knows that, except oneself unfortunately. I believe it is bad not to accept our own failings. Life is not simple, sure, but it is the most beautiful thing we have. Not to like oneself is to be blind, not to see our own beauty is excess pride. Who can love us if we don’t like ourselves. Anyway, others generally have better things to do than to judge us. They rarely do, and if we do, we should be concerned.
One last thing: to build on one transparent and truthful base is much more practical: like a mason, you can add bricks of strength everyday, based on what you have learned and enjoyed. The Lego of Life!!!
Life is a miracle, we are a miracle, truly and it is our imperfections that make us human and true. So why fear affirming that we are human?
For a long time, I focused on my physical beauty: yes, I was happy about it and did not want to lose it. And then, it started going away, slowly but surely. I still have not quite accepted it, but it is my reality now, and I accept myself in the mirror. I gained 30+ pounds over the past few years. There were lots of reasons for it, including great pizza, ice cream, sugar etc.. But part of it was an experiment to force me to accept to become fat, to see that I could tolerate lowering my standards and being like all the other obese people in the world. I have now lost 20 of these pounds and am happy about the round trip.
Accepting who we are is tough no doubt, but it is a beautiful quest, to like us as the human, failing things that we are. I am not religious, believe me, yet I really like the Christian concept of forgiveness, particularly to ourselves. Your deepest secrets, your deepest failings are beautiful, because they are you, the true you that your family (and me) love very much. No harm in accepting them and displaying them. Only then, will you receive all the help people give back, will you see how open they truly are when you open up a bit.
Reading your article has greatly helped me, and I agree with you. But I still have some questions. Can you help me? I will pay attention to your answer. thank you.