It’s time to give up sugar (coating)

Avoiding telling the truth by being sweet is a salty thing to do

“A real friend tells you what you need to hear, not what you want to hear.” Fair enough.

If only.

Not only is it uncommon in our personal lives, it’s more of an anomaly in the professional world. Giving someone the cold, hard, truth doesn’t seem to be a common practice.

In the best seller, Radical Candor, author Kim Scott refers to this as Ruinous Empathy; you’re so fixated on not hurting a person’s feelings in the moment that you don’t tell them something they’d be better off knowing in the long run.

When the hard pill isn’t given in the moment, it only becomes harder as time goes on. Before you know it, you begin to resent the person for not measuring up, leading to fewer conversations, which will likely cause the initial issue to escalate.

Eventually, you’ll need to part ways.

When you have that conversation, they’ll be stunned, feeling as though they weren’t given the opportunity to improve. Meaning, “if you would’ve told me exactly what I was doing wrong, I would’ve worked to correct it.”

But you couldn’t because you’ve been conditioned to “be nice”, or even worse, give a “compliment sandwich”. No one falls for that old trick anymore, do they?

Regardless of the reason, sugar coating needs to stop. It’s a hard action at first, but once you do it, you’ll start to love it. Here’s why:

Hurt me with the truth rather than comfort me with a lie.

People will actually begin to seek you out when it’s medicine they need. Why? Because they want to get it from someone they can trust. You begin to become that person. The one that will always tell them the truth.

For every good reason to lie, there’s a better reason to tell the truth -Bo Bennett

In the moment, when you have a hurtful truth or unfavorable feedback to give someone, it may seem like an excellent idea to soften the blow with a little vagueness or ambiguity. Otherwise known as sugar. That’s fine, you convince yourself. You don’t want to hurt them, because you’re not a vicious animal, afterall. Well, guess what? It will get to them eventually, as it always does, and you’ll forever be castigated as the one person “of all people” that should’ve told them the truth.

No good deed goes unpunished, as they say.

Giving honest and well-intended feedback is often confused with being mean. It’s not mean; It’s nice -Robert Kiyosaki

I think most people want to be nice. Well, at least they don’t want to be complete jerks. That’s what giving honest, real feedback can feel like, sometimes. Regardless, if you really put yourself in the shoes of the recipient, I think you’d agree that the truth is always preferred. Even if not in the moment, in the long run for sure.

When you think about it, sugar coating your communication with others is manipulative and misleading. Basically, you are considering the outcome for you, not them. You want to make sure you’re not uncomfortable by modifying the message making it more favorable than it should be, which will lead to misunderstandings.

When thinking about the merits of always telling someone the cold hard truth, without sugar coating it, consider this:

People deserve better than a partial or diluted truth. You would want that, so do the same for others.

In the end, they’ll get over the notion that you were being rude or inconsiderate. They’ll likely never get over you holding back.