What honesty really is
Joy Osaka-Lu
Scaling operations and culture sustainably with intentional business owners | Operational fluency | Mindset and Solutions Strategist, Speaker
Whether you take the long or short road, it seems we all end up in the same place.
Me, I like the shortest road possible, even if it means I need a 4-wheel drive vehicle to get through it.
Although most people aren't like that, there is a slow surge to cut through the fakery...
...and finding ways to not annihilate others in the process.
It's called grace, actually, and its unfolding is one of the most beautiful things I've seen.
I've seen glimpses of it throughout my life, even when I was in corporate.
And, I always found that it saved A LOT of time when someone was brave enough to speak in terms about what the real story, the real reason underneath what we were doing.
Honesty opens up choices
During my global financial services career, I worked with only a few executives who were honest.
I don't mean only being ethical but about talking truth in our situation
For instance, while shooting the breeze with one, he asked me, "You know what we market here?"
I thought of two answers, one was, "We ensure financial stability for peace of mind," and the other was the real reason, "We take advantage of people's ignorance about money by subconsciously conveying they're too dumb to understand it."
His answer was simply, "We market fear and scarcity."
Wow.
While shocking, it was true that underneath the veneer of shiny graphs and positive returns, we really were conveying our solutions and services to meet the need of people's fear about their financial illiteracy.
Rather than disillusioning me, I felt a tremendous amount of respect for him for being honest.
We both admitted we made choices to be part of a larger machine so we could make it living...
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...and had to reconcile what we could do (not to make us feel better), within our swim lanes, to not market fear and scarcity.
We still got the big things done daily AND did our best to eliminate that fear and scarcity that was prevalent within the company that seeped into the outside world.
Here's the responsibility with honesty
Now, it doesn't seem like a much to do what you can to eliminate fear and scarcity when the machine you live and work in gets its fuel from exactly those elements.
But, it did make a difference.
It preserved the humanity of the people we worked with and for...our customers.
It took guts for us to reconcile within our own hearts, souls, and minds that we were in a dirty industry and yet, found a way to stay clean.
What happens inside (a company, in yourself) reflects, amplifies or has the power to diminish the same thing that's happening outside.
The first step is to be honest about where you're at, what you're doing and why.
While it's not always pretty, it is vital to know specifically where you're standing so you can choose what you want to do next...and be responsible and accountable for that decision.
So, instead of mouthing off about honesty, the real question is, do you have the guts to be responsible with it.
I get people to reset to their true north. Like a compass, only minor recalibrations are needed to shift from the prescribed magnetic north to your true one. It's all about where you stand in your Perspective | Purpose | Perception