Sensitive Creative Person: just blurt out your truth and resist the urge to run away!

What you should know is that I spent the bulk of my early career stewing, internalizing, and being very shy. Raising my hand before offering the blandest observation in group conversations used to be a total nightmare, never mind actually bringing up an unpopular opinion. Because I was so timid and meek, it was hard for people to know what I was thinking or what I needed to do well in the workplace.

I used to communicate passive aggressively when something went in a direction I didn’t agree with. (“Well, I guess we do wear white after Labor Day.”) I used to hint at my opinions instead of just outright saying them. (“Blue feels, you know, blue.”) I used to mutter excuses when I made mistakes — and the mistakes happened because I didn’t ask for clarification. (“But your email was hard to understand and so I had to guess.”) And I used to just ghost people when I couldn’t meet deadlines because I had a hard time just telling them I needed an extension.

The problem with so much internal tension and conflict avoidance is that the emotional energy still needs to go somewhere, right? So I used to be unfair and take out my work frustrations on the people in my personal life, where it felt safe to have meltdowns and express my intense and outsized dissatisfaction over infantile stuff, like “The mayo jar is hard to open!”

I told my boss I didn’t agree with something, and noted that she didn’t respond by punching me right in the face. I noted that the world didn’t come crashing down as a result of my honesty.

This cycle became untenable at a certain point. My personal relationships became strained. I was not performing exceptionally at work, either. My therapist kept advocating for me to just say the truth out loud to people and assured me it would be okay. I used to say, “John, what you are saying sounds completely batshit.” I just wasn’t socialized — as a woman, as an Asian woman — to be going around telling randos what I thought about things and how I felt about things.

I tried it though, starting with itty little baby steps.

I told my boss I didn’t agree with something, and noted that she didn’t respond by punching me right in the face. I noted that the world didn’t come crashing down as a result of my honesty.

And, encouraged by those early modest gains, I started doing it more and more — being honest with people. Not only did I notice the incredible efficiency that is a byproduct of honesty (OMG, you save so much time when you don’t have to spend five minutes vamping up to a point!), I also noticed that my relationships with people — in and out of the workplace — actually became stronger and richer. I became more likable the more honest I was. I figured out that people are drawn to authenticity.

As creatives, the origins of our opinions are often in the body — our intuition — instead of our brains. Like, there are so many moments where we see something and we just don’t like it, right? And then we have to reverse engineer a bunch of reasons to back up our initial visceral reaction of “OH, NO!”

Direct communication and the ability to navigate difficult conversations is huge in creative work. Direct communication is a safeguard against website edits that go on for fifty million years. Direct communication is a great time saver because when you engage in it, you never have to waste your evening wondering, “What did she even mean when she said the logo looked too handsome?” Direct communication is a balm that can soothe inter-team conflict, because you can shed a lot of office politics and just say how you feel about something without self-censorship, dammit.

As someone who is not naturally gifted at direct communication, here are some tips and tricks I’ve picked up over the years, in the course of faking it until I made it.

Tip 1: Direct communication actually doesn’t have to be definitive. You can express that your thoughts are evolving and subject to change as you continue to process.

A huge mental block for me used to be uncertainty. It used to be hard for me to give quick hot takes on stuff because I was scared of being wrong in the moment or accidentally being a liar later. I used to conflate direct communication with like, decrees. And they are not the same at all.

What freed me up to speak with honesty in the moment? I started prefacing my honesty with an admission that my thoughts weren’t yet fully baked — which, actually, is a form of direct communication in and of itself! I started to say, “Okay, so here’s my hot take right now. It might not be my hot take tomorrow…” and that lessened a lot of the pressure of needing to be ultra thoughtful and accurate all the time.

Tip 2: If you are slow on the uptake, buy yourself time by saying something bold and blunt!

As creatives, the origins of our opinions are often in the body — our intuition — instead of our brains. Like, there are so many moments where we see something and we just don’t like it, right? And then we have to reverse engineer a bunch of reasons to back up our initial visceral reaction of “OH, NO!”

There’s so much pressure to come up with cogent reasons for stuff on the spot. Turn the valve and let some air out! One way I do this is just to blurt out something bold and clunky. Seriously, I say, “I don’t like it — but I don’t know why yet.”

Tip 3: Remember that being direct doesn’t have to be rude. Being direct is actually a kindness.

This one is a hard one for us Pacific Northwesterners. We love to dwell in tepid politeness and niceness, so our cultural communication style is often passive or indirect because we think that that’s being nice.

Indirect communication requires a lot of work though — a lot of mind reading, tracking facial cues, and also body language. And it’s like, do we want to give the people we like and want to be nice to all of this extra work?

The more I started to buy into direct communication, the more disconnected my face was from the way I talked. So I made efforts at closing the distance. I allow myself to smile a whole lot more — and I let myself frown super hard sometimes.

Nah!

I tell myself I’m doing the people I like a favor when I am direct in my communication with them. I’m giving them the cheatsheet into my innermost thoughts because I trust them.

Tip 4: Don’t worry about eloquence. The content and message are the important parts, not the delivery.

In the past, I used to feel silly and embarrassed for not being able to sound smart and deep at a moment’s notice. I’d feel self-conscious tripping over words or stuttering in the course of saying something that I find awkwardly difficult. But a desire for perfectionism often impedes honesty.

So I allow myself to say what I feel inside as ‘unsmart’ as possible. I use small words. I sometimes make sounds, like grunts when something doesn’t feel great and a girly “ooh!” when something does. As long as the info gets transmitted, who cares how ‘smart’ it sounds, right?

Tip 5: Direct communication doesn’t just have to be verbal. It can be non-verbal!

I used to practice having a poker face so people wouldn’t know how excited (or not) I was about something. I thought that being mysterious was cool and was the thing to get me to the top of corporate America’s marketing department!

Direct communication can be a commitment to being braver, to giving more of ourselves to the people around us — like our colleagues, our clients, our communities. Most of the time, me directly communicating with someone is not at all me laying down the law on something. It is actually me telling them I felt hurt or unheard or unseen in a process or in work or something.

But the more I started to buy into direct communication, the more disconnected my face was from the way I talked. So I made efforts at closing the distance. I allow myself to smile a whole lot more — and I let myself frown super hard sometimes. On the rare occasion I get the opportunity to, I even let myself laugh inappropriately in a room full of Boomers because someone clearly accidentally made a dick joke and no one got it but me. Like, I just let my gestures, my expression, and my body language be real and truthful, too — and most people will pick up on it and understand it.

Tip 6: Commit to being real and authentic with people. Commit to building healthy relationships with others.

I know direct communication can feel aggressive and bold, and some of us are like, “But I’m not aggressive or bold! I’m just me! I like to knit blankets in the evenings!”

Hey, that’s real. And I mean, this is a pretty loose concept that can look like a lot of things. Oftentimes we are scared of communicating directly because we are scared of the outright rejection of our thoughts, our beliefs, and who we are, right? So we end up hiding ourselves in convoluted or opaque language.

Direct communication can be a commitment to being braver, to giving more of ourselves to the people around us — like our colleagues, our clients, our communities. Most of the time, me directly communicating with someone is not at all me laying down the law on something. It is actually me telling them I felt hurt or unheard or unseen in a process or in work or something. And it’s like, terrible-as-hell stuff to say out loud. But I’ve made commitments to the people I work with to do the dopest shit with them — and we gotta trust each other and believe in each other in order to do the dopest shit. So here we are, in the practice of having difficult, honest, and beautiful conversations with each other all the freaking time.

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