Timeless wisdom & sharper thinking for leaders. Alpha Insights is a weekly newsletter helping you navigate critical decisions and think clearly under pressure. Built on hard earned experience and deep reading, from ancient thinkers to modern day trailblazers. Each weeks read pairs a clear read on human behavior with practical leadership insights. [Personal views, written independently of my role at Databricks.]
Why "Let Me Be Honest With You" makes me cringe
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"Let me be honest with you." "I want to be transparent here." "I'll give it to you straight." What does it actually say about the person saying this? That the rest of the time, they aren't? Marcus Aurelius already flagged this, two thousand years ago In his private journal — never intended for anyone but himself — Marcus Aurelius wrote something that reads as if it were aimed directly at a modern meeting room: "How unsound and insincere is he who says, 'I have determined to deal with you in a fair way.' What are you doing, man? There is no occasion to give this notice. It will soon show itself by acts." He then reaches for an image that's stuck with readers for centuries: "A straightforward, honest person should be like someone who stinks: when you're in the same room with him, you know it." Not a pleasant image on purpose. Honesty, in his account, isn't something you announce. It's something that's simply there, obvious to anyone nearby, whether they were looking for it or not. The announcement is the tell If honesty needed a preamble, it wouldn't be your default. The people who actually operate straight don't reach for the phrase, because there's no gap between how they normally talk and how they're talking right now — nothing to bridge with a warning. The announcement usually means one of two things. Either what follows is going to sting, and the phrase is doing emotional labour to soften the landing before the hit arrives. Or — more common, and more worth noticing — it's simply verbal habit, worn smooth from overuse, signalling nothing at all except that the speaker has picked up a corporate reflex. "With all due respect." "No offense, but." "To be fair." Different words, same tell: a flag going up that something is being managed, not just said. I used to say it. I don't anymore I used to open sentences with exactly this — "let me be honest with you" — until I read Meditations. Dead stop, right there. It landed uncomfortably close to home the moment I actually read Marcus Aurelius calling it out directly. Since then I've also started doing the other half of it, gently: when someone says it to me now, I'll sometimes just pause and give them a small nudge — not to embarrass them, just enough of a beat to make them notice what they said. Most people have never actually thought about the phrase before. Once they do, they usually stop using it too. What actually replaces it Not silence, and not the opposite performance of blunt-for-its-own-sake bluntness either. Just say the thing. Skip the preamble. If the honesty is real, it doesn't need a trailer before the film starts — it's simply present in what you say next, the same way it was in what you said five minutes ago. Have you ever caught yourself using one of these phrases — and noticed what it was actually doing? Thanks for reading! If you liked it, please share and tell your friends to subscribe. And if you want to browse the archive go here. /Jonas Everything here is built from my own ideas, drawn from my reading, and life experience. For structure, validating research, proofreading, and edits, I use AI tooling to help make it a better experience for you, the reader. |
Alpha Insights
Timeless wisdom & sharper thinking for leaders. Alpha Insights is a weekly newsletter helping you navigate critical decisions and think clearly under pressure. Built on hard earned experience and deep reading, from ancient thinkers to modern day trailblazers. Each weeks read pairs a clear read on human behavior with practical leadership insights. [Personal views, written independently of my role at Databricks.]
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