Day 10 - 10th Jan
Waiting on Microsoft Teams for a call I don’t want to be on anyway.
“You are a very patient man!”
(C.E.O. for, ‘sorry to keep you waiting’.)
“Well, it’s given me a chance to read your CV…”
…and so it begins.
Corporate prostitution.
I say things that are not true,
and she calculates,
far behind her veneers.
Only in a world that repudiates connection
would such spectacles exist.
The emissarian coup is upon us.
Good luck.
Niall Campbell
I advise my clients to be totally honest in their dealings with employees, employers, colleagues, partners, friends, family—basically everyone. This is not the same as suggesting you have no filter, no off button, or no capacity to withhold or keep from oversharing with others. That approach is obviously a terrible and unsustainable strategy.
If you accept that you won’t tell lies—and this variable is held constant—you must find other ways to navigate speaking in different registers and contexts. This is where I see real opportunities for living more efficiently and removing unnecessary noise from your life, allowing you to capitalise on creative clarity.
You don’t need to tell everyone everything. But if you tell half-truths, omit critical information, or let people labour under assumptions you could easily correct (but strategically choose not to), this often backfires in the long term. It’s not just suboptimal for success—it’s also exhausting.
The key is not to control whether you speak the truth when asked, but to manage your rings of disclosure.
When clients try this, they often report uncomfortable moments. For example, a partner might ask, “What’s wrong?” Instead of brushing it off with “Oh, nothing,” they might tell the truth—exactly what’s wrong, how it impacts them, and sometimes, bluntly, why the partner is at the root of the issue. It’s not always a “happily ever after” outcome.
The conversation may spiral into an argument, or it might feel like bad advice or poor communication. But I stand by the principle. These situations are opportunities for growth. If someone isn’t ready to hear the truth, or if you lack the skill to communicate it effectively, these are lessons to learn and improve upon.
Over time, clients become more aware of what people need to hear, how, and when—not in a clandestine, manipulative way, but with an awareness of how to conserve energy. They stop wasting effort by “leaking energy” all over the place.
It’s like trying to air-condition a house with open windows—running the system at full blast will cool it somewhat, but it’s wildly inefficient. The solution isn’t a bigger air conditioner; it’s closing the windows and sealing the space.
This is a learnable skill.
Where this honesty pays the biggest dividends is in the conversations clients have with the different parts of themselves.
This might sound spooky, but it’s well-grounded in the empirical literature around psychological interventions. Internal Family Systems (IFS), developed by Dick Schwartz, is gaining popularity. IFS posits that we’re not monolithic beings with a single, unified personality but instead a collection of fairly autonomous sub-personalities.
If this sounds close to dissociative identity disorder, it’s a related concept on a spectrum. Traditional psychiatric diagnoses often seem black-and-white: you either have depression or you don’t; you qualify for anxiety or you don’t. But the reality is much more dimensional.
We all have different “parts” or selves. Consider a best man at a wedding. At 4 p.m. during the bucks party, he’s wild and seeking indulgence; a week later at the wedding, after delivering his speech, he’s sentimental, reflecting on love and friendship. These two “selves” share the same flesh, but their values, motivations, and desires can be entirely different.
The same applies to you. As Richard Ashcroft sang in Bittersweet Symphony:
"I’m a million different people from one day to the next."
When you’re not honest with yourself—when you let parts of you lie to each other—it creates internal conflict. One part might commit you to something that another part resents, leading to frustration and exhaustion.
For instance, this poem reflects on a time when my people-pleasing tendencies led me to secure an interview with a CEO for a role I didn’t even want. The version of me that showed up to the interview wasn’t genuinely invested, and, unsurprisingly, it didn’t go well. It left me reflecting on the energy I had wasted lying to myself.
The beauty of art is how it can expedite this internal reconciliation. What might take a decade in traditional therapy can happen in years when you engage with creativity. Art externalises the conversation between your parts, allowing for quicker understanding and healing.
In short, lying to yourself leads to cul-de-sac after cul-de-sac. No more lies. I’m more unified now. I love artists and creatives. I want to help them succeed, leveraging my life experience and skillset as both an artist and a creative. On my terms, and theirs.
Corporate fluff is for someone else. I simply don’t have the patience for it.