A few months ago, I spent days drafting scholarship policies for the LifeApp 3 Day—consulting accountants, navigating US and Canadian tax rules, and trying to balance compliance with accessibility. When I brought the work to our finance team, the response was, “Honestly, Jonathan, this is simple. You’re overcomplicating it.”
On the Zoom call, I nodded calmly. Inside, bombs were going off. But I said nothing.
Instead, I saved my comments for Teresa, offline. (By “saved,” I mean I let the F-bombs out for fresh air.) She listened, then cut through with a single sentence: “Jonathan, you need to be sharing this with the team. Not me.”
So we scheduled another call. I started with my usual self-protective softening—“Yeah, I felt a little frustrated,” “a little dismissed”—the verbal equivalent of decaf. Teresa stopped me mid-sentence. “You’re not being honest. You’re sugarcoating it.”
She was right.
I tried again—no softening, no self-protection—just the truth: the hours I’d put in, why the policy wasn’t as simple as it sounded, and how I felt like my efforts had been dismissed.
What happened next surprised me. I didn’t lose connection. I gained trust with my team.
That moment taught me something I still have to remember: self-protection without transparency isn’t loving. It’s just self-protection. And it quietly sabotages the very trust and support we’re longing for.
We tend to think of bold, outright lies as the great enemy of love. And yes, they can do enormous damage. But we often overlook the quieter culprit—the filtered truths: the polished words, the swallowed frustrations, the “no worries” smile when your insides are twisting. These half-truths erode connection just as efficiently, only more subtly.
This isn’t an argument for bluntness or cruelty. Honesty that harms for sport isn’t honesty—it’s aggression. The strange gift of loving honesty is that when truth is spoken with care, what feels like risk is often the very thing that makes love possible.
The Science Beneath the Struggle
There’s a simple reason honesty can feel so hard: our bodies treat it like a risk.
When we sense the possibility of disapproval, conflict, or rejection, the brain moves into protection mode. We don’t usually fight or flee. More often, we soften the truth, delay the conversation, or go quiet. Not because we’re dishonest—but because we’re trying to stay safe.
Over time, that self-protection gets mislabeled as kindness. We tell ourselves we’re being considerate or mature when what we’re really doing is avoiding discomfort. What begins as care can quietly turn into avoidance.
But trust doesn’t grow through protection. It grows through safety—the felt sense that we can name what’s real and still belong. Harvard researcher Amy Edmondson defines psychological safety as “the belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up.” When that safety is missing, we keep editing ourselves. We stay polite, but not deeply connected. Instead of being discerning about what we share, we avoid sharing.
Discernment is choosing when and how to share the truth with care. Avoidance is not sharing it at all because it feels too risky.
Discernment strengthens connection. Avoidance slowly erodes it.
What Healthy Truth-Telling Actually Is
Truth-telling is not the same as “brutal honesty.” It’s not about unloading opinions or turning our feelings or judgments of others into grenades. Healthy truth-telling is far more stable and braver than that. It’s real about facts, tender with feelings, and mindful of timing and boundaries.
When we practice it, a few things begin to happen.
Truth restores a shared reality. Lies distort the map; filtered truths blur it. Honesty puts us back on the same terrain, facing the same direction, so we can actually walk forward together.
Truth lightens the load. Avoidance is exhausting. Keeping track of what we’ve softened, skipped, or swallowed costs more energy than we realize. When we name what’s real, the nervous system can finally stand down, and connection stops feeling like a performance.
And truth changes the shape of conflict. When we stop managing impressions and start naming needs, limits, and impacts, disagreement becomes less about winning and more about designing a way forward that honors both people.
What honesty doesn’t promise is comfort or agreement. It won’t spare us pain. But it does offer a better kind of pain—the clean soreness of alignment—rather than the slow ache of living divided against ourselves.
If love is the decision to care for another’s well-being as much as our own, then truth-telling isn’t optional. It’s the ground love stands on.
One Simple Practice for This Week
Notice one place where you’re being polite to avoid discomfort instead of being honest, and practice calibrated truth-telling.
Choose a low-stakes moment. When you feel the urge to smooth things over or say “it’s fine,” pause and ask:
Am I practicing discernment… or avoidance?
Then try one clear, human sentence:
“When ___ happened, I noticed I felt ___. What I’m hoping for is ___.”
No speeches. No fixing. Just shared reality.
That’s often all it takes to turn fear into connection—and self-protective avoidance into something far more loving.
Until next week,
Jonathan Penner | Co-Founder & Executive Director of LifeApp
Resources To Dig Deeper
Book
The Dance of Deception
The Dance of Deception explores the quiet ways we avoid the truth in relationships—not just through lies, but through silence, people-pleasing, and softening what’s real to keep the peace. Lerner shows how these habits, often meant to protect connection, slowly erode intimacy. Her central insight is that real closeness requires truth-telling that is both honest and skillful—clear about what’s true, attentive to timing and impact, and never used as a weapon. Though written for women, the book’s wisdom applies equally to men and women who want relationships built on authenticity rather than performance.
-Harriet Lerner
Video/ Podcast
How to Fail the Right Way
This episode with Amy Edmondson offers the research behind why people often soften or withhold the truth. Drawing from decades of work on psychological safety, Edmondson shows how fear of blame or embarrassment leads to silence—and how environments that welcome candor actually strengthen trust and performance. It’s a compelling scientific companion to this newsletter’s core insight: honesty feels risky, but safety makes it possible.
-unSILOed Podcast with Greg LaBlanc feat. Amy Edmondson (1:03:52)
Music
People Pleaser
These lyrics capture the internal experience behind withholding the truth, not a call to confrontation or chronic people-pleasing. The song names what happens in the body when vulnerability feels risky: the haze, the delay, the instinct to fix or smooth instead of simply naming what’s real. It shows how honesty often isn’t avoided out of manipulation or fear of conflict—but out of an early-learned belief that staying quiet is safer than speaking plainly. The cost isn’t drama; it’s distance.
-Cat Burns (2:28)