“Don’t give people advice. They just might take it.”
I heard this advice (there’s some irony) and immediately thought of some terrible advice we often give in our era:
“Follow your heart.”
There are variations on this advice. Follow your bliss … you do you … you’ve got to be true to yourself. … The theme seems to be that, if you feel a desire to act a certain way or make a certain choice, you are not being authentic if you don’t act that way.
And if you’re not authentic, you’re just a liar! Right?
I’ve read about some serial killers who followed their hearts. Some cult members, too. But let’s get more practical:
Many workplaces are haunted by the “follow your heart” advice. It’s the employee who just does’t feel like coming in to work or giving a fair day’s work. The team member who lights into others when they perceive injustice. It’s the manager who says, “I just tell you how I see it—I gotta be real with you.”
They are choosing to honor feelings and thoughts inside them over other concerns.
Deceit is deceitful
They think they are doing what’s right by bringing their whole selves to work.
There are two problems.
The first is that you don’t choose to bring your whole self to work. You just do it. Everybody brings their whole selves to work. It’s what you choose to do with that whole self that matters. If we act on every impulse, we’re no better than children. When was the last time you spent time with a child? Even a teen? Often, something they consider incredibly important and worth throwing a fit over is, quite simply, not a big deal.
Which brings us to the second problem: What if that whole self to which you think you are being authentic and true is, well, wrong?
We’ve talked about it here before: The prophet Jeremiah said,
The heart is deceitful above all things,
and desperately sick;
who can understand it?
The question at the end implies that the heart is so deceitful that we can’t even understand our own hearts. We deceive ourselves. (See our recent “Pride and Prejudice” podcast for more on that!)
It turns out that the solution to both problems is to redefine “authentic.” Instead of authentically indulging all our thoughts and feelings, we must authentically acknowledge those things that are causing negative feelings to bubble up inside us.
Name it, tame it
As a client recently told me, “If you name it, you can tame it.”
I have occasionally wanted to storm out of the room after blasting some choice words at others. That would be authentic, in a sense. But better authenticity would be for me to, in my head—to myself, name what was happening:
“This conversation is frustrating me because I feel like they aren’t listening to me. I hate feeling like my opinion doesn’t count.” Just saying those words—naming it—allows me to manage how I react—taming it.
If the Bible is correct that God is Love, notice how Jesus was authentic. He sacrificed his wants for others: “Not my will, but thine,” he told his Father before submitting to torture and execution.
I daresay he did not feel like dying on a cross. But out of love, he chose caring for others.
So, just bottle it up?
There is one caveat worth mentioning here. The point is not to bottle up emotions. It is quite the opposite: Note them mentally, journal them, talk about them privately with a trusted advisor or friend—in other words, somehow “name” them so you can tame them. But when should you express them?
Jesus is the guide here, too. Ask yourself: What is my motivation for saying these words?
Jesus certainly had hard words for others. And he got upset. He cried. But even then, the authentic responses of Christ were rooted in care of others.
“Faithful are the wounds of a friend,” the Proverb says. In Hamlet, Shakespeare has the prince tell his mother some hard truths. Here is his setup:
Leave wringing of your hands. Peace, sit you down,
And let me wrong your heart; for so I shall
If it be made of penetrable stuff,
If damned custom have not braz’d it so,
That it be proof and bulwark against sense.
He follows up with a line the great Nick Lowe harvested and paraphrased for one of his hits: “You’ve got to be cruel to be kind.”
It’s ironic that, in both cases, the speakers (Hamlet and the girlfriend in Lowe’s song) can be seen as justifying bad behavior. So even in expressing what you think is wounding “as a friend,” beware that your heart might still be “deceitful.”
I pray you’re having a great week, and that I didn’t just follow my heart to tell you these things.
You made it this far, so you might as well watch Nick Lowe turn his actual wedding to Johnny Cash’s stepdaughter into an early music video.
I also feel obligated to show you an older, wiser Nick Lowe. His outfit reminds me of my musician Papaw, who also got better with age.