I was surprised when someone heard that Bridgewater and Levels Health records all their meetings, it sparked huge reactions.

The argument for recording is that it creates searchable information for the entire team, prevents gossip and allows the revisiting of how past decisions are made.

“But what if we say something we don’t mean?”

It’s understandable that it trips us up.

Would our honest sharing be used against us?

Again, it comes back to trust and intention.

”It’s just the way I am. I’m not a consistent person.”

It’s entirely possible that there are things you do consistently that you didn’t do when you’re a child.

And so perhaps a more honest answer is “It’s really hard to change my habits, and it is not important enough right now, to put in the work.”

Do you brush your teeth every day?

Stockholm syndrome is when a kidnap hostage develops trust and affection with their kidnappers.

The opposite of a healthy connection.

So when we say connection or community…

What we don’t want is… to be held captive, obligations or stuck relationships.

And what we DO want is to feel cared for, to feel someone has our back, to be able to be ourselves.

But what are you willing to offer?

It’s simple, but it might be scary.

It’s to go without guarantees.

To have someone’s back, to care for someone and allow others to be themselves.

But if you do it enough, on a long enough timescale, care will come back to you.

Someone is waiting for you to show up.

There is a certain kind of truth that is hard to come by.

The ones we rather not tell our friends. The ones that we don’t often get.

The ones we think about on the therapist’s chair “Why are we so unable to think of ourselves as damaged and crazy? Self-righteousness.”

Of course, there are people who have told us before.

There are our friends. But they don’t want to risk an unpleasant evening triggering us. And then run the risk of getting back an unequal amount of harsh truth.

There are our parents. They are very kind and maybe also blinded by their own affection for us.

So it leaves another category, our exes. You could expect that they have probably told us. But after all, there is a reason why they are our exes.

So we can go through life, with an average person who met us for 20 minutes could end up with deeper insights into many of our flaws.

How about a pact?

A pact for our friend to tell us the truth. Where part of the friendship is actually to go deeper, to hold each other’s secrets, to be honest with each other. A pact where self-disclosures will not be used against us.

“Hey JAKE, I’ve been thinking about a way to increase my self-awareness. How about a pact? You to tell me inconvenient truths. And I trust that it is for my best interest in mind”.