In my world, there is a strong push towards total interpersonal transparency these days. It’s a hard marketing sell by the “authentic living” leadership and coaching community – “Tell it all, be proactive, share everything, spare no detail, be vulnerable”.  As you can imagine, this doesn’t sit well with me, and while I am all for honest, open, clear and direct communication, I am also for keeping parts of my life private, and the lives of my close intimate friends and partners too. 

As I evolve and mature, it’s becoming easier to maintain my personal boundaries, although they are often seen by the uninitiated as rules, and please remember this is my social circle, not necessarily my close or particular friends, and yes, there is a difference. Before moving on to exploring the difference between honesty and transparency, let’s do a quick side bar, and clear up personal boundaries vs rules. 

My Personal Boundaries are empowering and enforceable because they are all about my actions, my choices, and there are consequences for others; whereas Rules are disempowering and often unenforceable, because they are about you and therefore out of my control. Perhaps I need to write a dedicated post of this subject. I will think more!  

As I have said, my privacy is very important to me, as is the privacy of my partners and particular friends, so for me the difference between honesty and transparency is that honesty is what I share with people as my perceived truth, whereas transparency is what others feel they need to know about me.  A good example of this would be how we share our tombstone data.  I like to share the minimum possible such a name, address, email and perhaps phone number (this is honesty), whereas many social media apps want all of the above plus DoB, hair colour, gender and inside leg measurement (for sake of transparency).  For me, the issue is that, if you’re transparent, you may not succeed in educating people as to what they really need to learn about you, whereas my truth is my truth and it informs people about my reality. When I am accused of being secretive, I am often simply exercising my right to privacy. People frequently dress up their invasive demands for information about my life as a need for “full transparency and disclosure”.  

This happened this week, when someone asked me why I wasn’t willing to attend a social event? I had already answered that I wasn’t available, and yet they pushed for full transparency demanding more disclosure, including what exactly I was doing with my time and with whom? My honesty was that I wasn’t available, and that’s a hard “No”, which is all they really needed to understand to access my truth; whereas if I had fully disclosed how I was engaged during that time, this information would have opened up a conversation about social and friendship priorities, which I wasn’t prepared to explore. My choices are my choices!    

There is a concept called a Disclosure Agreement that can be made with partners and particular friends about what we will and will not disclose about our relationships with other people. Perhaps it’s time for this concept to become a more common practice, especially in the days of megacorporation-controlled social media where anything and everything can be disclosed and shared on the InterWeb in an instant?