Standing in integrity with yourself and speaking your truth, even when it isn’t easy, especially when it isn’t easy, is something I strive to do and which I admire greatly in others. Whether you’re expressing your values, beliefs, needs or desires, it’s important to speak your truth. To do anything less does a great disservice to yourself and to those with whom you have relationships.

You cannot live fully, joyfully, while hiding those parts of yourself that make you who you are, while hiding the beliefs, philosophies, values, needs and desires that are meaningful and important to you. You cannot build deep, long-lasting, meaningful connections with others while being less than honest.

When a relationship is important to you, it can feel very scary to speak your truth if you suspect it may put the relationship itself at risk, but it’s in those very moments that it’s most critical to do so. If the truth you need to speak holds the potential to make or break the relationship the truth will inevitably make itself known eventually anyway. Better to speak your truth in the early stages of building a relationship than to wait until the relationship is well established and the dissolution, if that is indeed the result, is likely to be much more difficult and painful.

I’ve been on both sides of this equation at various points in my life. I’ve been the one needing to speak a difficult truth and the one hearing a difficult truth in relationships that I valued deeply, both personal and professional.

In several of those instances, it resulted in the dissolution of the relationship. As excruciatingly painful as that can be, if the revelation of your truth ends in that result, then even if you’d  not spoken the relationship would not have been healthy, would not have worked. No relationship can thrive when one or both of the people in it are pretending to be someone they’re not in order to maintain the status quo. The longer you wait to speak your truth, the more heavily invested you and the other person are in the relationship, the more difficult and painful it becomes.

In those instances when someone was honest enough to speak a difficult truth to me, however painful, I appreciated the guts it took to be honest. I appreciated that they respected themselves, respected me, respected the relationship, enough to be so honest.   When you speak a difficult truth one of two things will result. Either the relationship will dissolve, or the connection you share will deepen and become even stronger.

A relationship based in truth, in the ability for both people to speak their truth, to be fully, openly, who they are is a rare, amazing and beautiful thing. If those are the kinds of relationships you seek you will only ever find them by speaking your truth and allowing others to do the same.