When the Truth Is Your Only Chance « Peter Bregman.

Peter Bregman is a business writer who does a lot of work for the Harvard Business Review (warning: link will take you to one of those annoying “skip this screen” ads before you can read the article). This article says a lot of the things I try to say here, more clearly than I often can.

The best lines in the article, to me, are these:

The biggest problem most of us have isn’t that things are bad, it’s that they’re not changing. The truth changes things.

The hard part is moving through the mystery of what will happen when the truth is on the table. It’s that fear of the unknown — the risk it represents — that leads us to keep the truth hidden.

So how do we get over that fear? It’s simple and hard: courage.

This article is all about telling the hard truth instead of running away from a problem. The truth, Bregman says, is what changes bad situations. And he’s absolutely right. In fact, the truth is about the only thing that changes bad situations: lies or silence just let problems pile up, or introduce new problems, or both.

And telling the truth, particularly to somebody we don’t know will take it well, takes courage.

But if we want something to change, and the truth is the only way to make things change, don’t we owe it to ourselves to share it?

You can find Peter’s book 18 Minutes here.