The Bravest Sentence You Can Say in a Relationship
Life is best lived when people you trust have your back, and you have theirs. To have people in your corner, though, you need to feel like they really know you—that they know your gifts, foibles, desires, and propensities. This takes equal measure of transparency and vulnerability, with a solid dose of candor and honesty.
The word authentic is thrown around a lot these days. Many clients come to me striving to be more authentic. They want to be known for who they really are. They want to show up truly as themselves. No hiding, no circumnavigating, no posturing or pretending. So how does one cultivate this?
One of the best tools for developing authenticity in our relationships is sharing impact. What is sharing impact specifically? Sharing impact is telling somebody what’s going on with you in the moment, in relation to whatever it is they did or didn’t do. This is it in a nutshell.
You can share positive and not-so-positive impacts. Both are important. For example, let’s say I had a plan to meet with a friend for a long-overdue hike, but the morning of, they call me and ask if we can reschedule, and this was not their first time calling with a last-minute change. Instead of just saying, yeah, that’s fine, I can challenge myself to be more real, and say something like, “Well I confess that feel a little bit frustrated; but it’s ok,” or “I understand things change, but I want to share that the impact your last minute changes make on me is that I don’t feel confident about scheduling time together.”
So what then is one of the bravest sentence you can say to cultivate deep, meaningful authentic relationships? Whatever it is, it will start with, “I need to share how that impacted me…” or “The impact what you said had on me was….”.
When I share impact, I offer more of my true self. I move the focus away from what someone did or meant to do—fertile ground for defensiveness and debate—and place it on how their actions landed in me. In that honest territory of experience, argument dissolves.
It can be to share something critical, or something positive. Let’s say that a colleague takes on a lot of responsibility in a project we are working on together. I could say nothing at all. Or I could say something like, “I want to acknowledge how much you are doing, and the impact on me is that it makes me trust you. Thank you.”
Impact is tangential to intention within interpersonal dynamics, but it is also a distinct experience. Someone may not intend to hurt your feelings or cause you duress or inconvenience. That’s fine, but it doesn't change the impact it has on you. Intention does not render irrelevant the impact one has on another.
You may say to someone, “Hey, when you said that, it hurt my feelings.” What often happens when someone shares impact in this way, is that the other person will rush in with, “Oh, I’m sorry, but I didn’t intend to hurt you,” as if their intention somehow reconciles the impact. It doesn’t. That’s why those sorts of glib apologies feel so unpleasant.
If that happens, you can advocate for your attempt for authenticity and say something like, “I realize you didn’t mean to hurt me, but that does not change the impact you had. I want you to hear how I was impacted; it’s important to me.”
Ideally, the exchange would sound more like this:
Me: “Hey, when you said you didn’t have time to read my essay, it hurt my feelings.”
Other: “Oh wow, yeah, I can see how that could have sounded. Yikes. I love that you trust me to read your draft essays. I want to give them the time they deserve. But I don’t want to over-promise time right now with my other commitments.”
If you think about it, we are all being impacted all the time. If a dog barks outside, I’m impacted by that. If a car crashes in the lane across from me, I’m impacted by that. And while it’s not always appropriate to speak everything out loud, some things do need to be spoken. Most of us tend to silence ourselves, tell ourselves it doesn’t really matter.
Normally, however, instead of sharing impact, we often do the following (present company included):
Hide – we don’t want conflict, or are afraid of not being heard, so we cloak our feelings.
Go numb – since we don’t feel safe sharing who we are, we dull ourselves, even to the point of not feeling anything at all.
Diminish – we may be aware of impact, but doubt it is anything important.
Run up our ladder of inference – in other words, we start with the facts, but let our mind run amok with assumptions and stories, rather than just being present with our feelings.
Withhold – we feel it, but we’d rather be passive aggressive and hold it against the other.
Blame – we take a victim stance and blame the other for the impact we feel.
Triangulate – we stand at the proverbial water cooler and talk about them to someone else.
Procrastinate – we say to ourselves we’re going to share our feelings, but we want to wait until the ‘right moment’ and that ‘right moment’ never comes.
Sounds fun doesn’t it? Over time we end up feeling unseen and unheard. Tiny paper cuts tend to culminate, and we might eventually explode, shut down, or make up stories about the person or situation.
The more we can share impact, the more we’ll be known. It has the power to regularly and reliably create connection and trust between you and others. It keeps relationships alive, clear, and current.
So how do you start to create an ‘impact-sharing culture’ in your relationships?
Here is what I recommend:
Get open - decide you are willing and open to being impacted. Allow yourself to feel how things positively and negatively impact you.
Get present - start a deliberate practice of being self-aware. Notice how things impact you.
Get responsible - establish a deep understanding that your experience is yours, and that you own it. No one can ‘make’ you feel a certain way. The impact others have on you is a direct result of your unique conditioning and held beliefs. However, it still matters. Sharing impact then becomes a genuine and vulnerable exposure of who you are.
Slow down - slow down so you can pay attention, and slow down with others so you make time to have this kind of communication with them.
Inform others - Let significant others in your life know that you want to start being more transparent and real by sharing impact, and express why this is important to you.
Start with positives first - spend some weeks practicing sharing impact about, and just exercise that muscle. This helps others to learn that sharing impact is not always going to be just bad news.
Get out of limbic - Whenever you share impact in more difficult and stressful situations, wait until you’ve both calmed down, and you can feel some compassion and care for both you. If either one of you have ‘gone limbic’ (meaning you are in fight or flight response) then what you are saying won’t be heard.
Check your agenda - are you sharing to be known, vulnerable, and increase connection? Or are you sharing to change someone, prove a point, push someone away, or make someone wrong?
Set context – tell your person what you are doing, and why you want to do it, i.e., “I’d like to clear something with you because it’s affecting me and my work and I want to move forward together in a good and connected way.”
Get buy-in - after setting context, you can ask, “Would this be ok for you if I shared some things with you?" In this way you are finding the right timing and asking if the other is available.
Own your experience – be non-blaming, for instance, don’t say, ‘You made me feel…’ or ‘You always do…’ But instead try, “When you used that tone of voice towards me, the impact it had on me was that I felt embarrassed."
Stay with the facts – ie, say, “When you used a loud voice”, or “When you were not there” instead of “When you screamed at me” or “When you blew me off.”
Stay with your experience – advocate for your efforts to be real when met with, “Oh, but I didn’t intend to…”.
Sharing impact is all about supporting expansion and evolution, and alleviating contraction — in both parties —thereby cultivating a field of shared authenticity. From there, all kinds of great things can happen. You can check out your assumptions, fears, and concerns by practicing curiosity. For instance, you could say, “When you said you didn’t have time, I felt that the project wasn’t important. So before I start making up a bunch of stories in my mind, I want to check it out with you…Is it really true that the project doesn’t matter to you?”
If all goes well, you can then use the situation to create new agreements and get buy-in, i.e., “I’d like to propose that we have an agreement that we never yell at one another when we are in conflict. How does that sound to you?” instead of “Don’t ever yell at me again”. You can engender collaboration and reciprocity by asking them what things they need, or what agreements they might want.
With luck, you’ll also be on the receiving end of hearing how you affect others. I say ‘with luck’ because it means people trust you enough to share impact with you. When done right, it is a generous way of giving feedback. It is a gift when someone tells you how you or your actions impact them. Our intentions may be great, but we may be unwittingly undermining ourselves by not understanding how we impact others. There is never a need to be defensive, particularly if impact is shared with you in a skillful caring manner.
For example, I was never very good at setting boundaries. When I first learned to use them, I was quite anxious. So, in my stress, my boundaries came across as abrupt and scolding. It created a negative perpetual loop whereby people gave me a lot of pushback, and so in response, I increasingly feared setting them. Then one day, my daughter gently pointed out to me that the tone of voice I used, not the boundary itself, sounded scary to her. What a gift that she shared the impact I had on her! Instead of saying, “Oh, sweetheart, I didn’t mean to scare you,” I used the feedback to work with my issues around boundary setting, so that I could set them without shutting people down. Now my boundaries are better at creating closeness, not separation.
It takes courage to show up transparently. It takes patience and self-awareness to do it in a way that others can hear you. But you will probably find over time that you create scenarios where you feel fully and truly met. Maybe for the first time ever.
Kelly Wendorf is an ICF Master Certified executive and personal coach, published author, spiritual mentor, disruptor, and socially responsible entrepreneur. As founder of EQUUS® she specializes in the liberation of robust leadership capacities in those who are most qualified — the empathetic, the conscientious, the accountable, the generous, and the kind. Did you like this essay? Kelly is available for a wide range of services including Coaching, Workshops, The EQUUS Experience®, Retreats, Keynote Speaking and more. Kelly is the Author of Flying Lead Change: 56 Million Years of Wisdom for Living and Leading.