In 2007, I wrote about corporate transparency, whether honesty really matters or if it’s just PR. I was asking the wrong question.
Now I understand why transparency changes everything.
What Happens When You Tell the Truth
When you tell the truth, you’re able to effectively see and feel the trapped energy and emotion in your system. And then you can process through it fully.
This makes you an incredibly effective node in the consciousness network.
When you lie, even small white lies, even lies you’ve deluded yourself into thinking aren’t lies, it’s an incredible computational waste. All that energy goes into maintaining the deception instead of processing reality.
Every lie requires memory. You have to remember what you said, to whom, and maintain consistency across contexts. That mental overhead compounds. It fragments your attention and drains your capacity for the things that actually matter.
What I Didn’t Understand
I didn’t understand that we’re all nodes in a network. I didn’t understand that people can tell when you’re lying, maybe not consciously, but their nervous system knows.
I didn’t understand that it’s always better to just come clean, make amends, lighten the load.
People don’t want perfection. They want authentic expression and progression. They want to see people fail out loud and grow in the process.
The relationships I’ve damaged through lies far outnumber the ones I’ve protected. The protection was always an illusion anyway. The truth comes out eventually. It just comes out later, when there’s also the added betrayal of having been deceived.
The Nervous System Connection
Your body knows when you’re lying. It tenses. It braces. It prepares for the possibility of being caught.
This might seem minor, but it’s not. That chronic tension shapes how you move through the world. You become defended. You hold back. You can’t fully relax because some part of you is always managing the deception.
When you get radically honest, that tension releases. You have nothing to hide, which means you have nothing to protect. The energy you were spending on maintenance becomes available for creation.
Real Change Requires Radical Honesty
If we think about reality as a mirror, then what we own as our identity, what we become, shows up in the reflection. Reality is showing us the trapped energy or trauma we’ve bypassed, the emotions we need to feel through and process in order to evolve.
So real change isn’t about better messaging. Real change is about getting radically honest with who we are and how we’re showing up.
The things you’re hiding from others, you’re usually hiding from yourself first. Radical honesty with the world starts with radical honesty internally. What are you pretending isn’t true? What are you avoiding feeling?
The Freedom on the Other Side
I’ve had conversations I dreaded for months that turned out to be the best thing I ever did. The relief of finally telling the truth outweighed all the discomfort of the conversation itself.
People are more forgiving than we expect. What they can’t forgive is being lied to. The truth, even when it’s hard, builds trust. Lies, even when they’re discovered much later, destroy it.
This is shadow work in action.
If you’re ready to get honest about what you’ve been avoiding, explore the Shadow Work practices.
The question isn’t whether people care about transparency. The question is whether you can afford the computational cost of maintaining lies.