By Mary Gottschalk
Are
you honest with your friends?
It
is all well and good to say that friends are honest with each other, but what
does that mean in practice? Do we have an obligation to share our opinions just
because we have them?
Where
is the boundary between honesty and cruelty, between honesty and interference,
between honesty and acceptance of friends as they are? How do you find the balance between being
honest and being kind? How do you find
the line at which honesty—or the lack of thereof—makes a charade of the
friendship without actually crossing the line?
Where
does the boundary lie when people you care about make life style decisions you
don’t agree with? It can be painful to watch a friend making the wrong job
choice, or spending money unwisely, or picking an unsuitable romantic partner.
But what do you accomplish when you offer an opinion that a friend does not
want to hear … when you make a recommendation that a friend is emotionally or
psychologically unable or unwilling to act upon? And who’s to say that your
opinion is correct? What seems self-evident from your perspective may be
inappropriate and/or impossible in a friend’s situation.
Where
does the boundary lie when a friend is being betrayed, perhaps by a spouse or a
business partner? Do you have an obligation to pass on that information? Put
differently, do you have a right to pass on that information? What if your
friend already knows and is trying to avoid dealing with the issue or trying to
deal with it in a non-public way?
Confronting a friend with the fact of a betrayal may exacerbate the
situation rather than improve it.
For
myself, I lean towards telling my friends what I think and appreciate having
friends who are forthright in their dealings with me. But I am much more
cautious than I used to be. The fact that I have an opinion doesn’t mean that I
have to share it.
Mary
has made a career out of changing careers. After finishing her MBA, she spent nearly thirty years in
the financial markets, working as an economist, a banker and a financial consultant
to major corporations. She has
worked in New York, New Zealand, Australia, Central America, Europe, and
amazingly, Des Moines, Iowa.
Along
the way, she dropped out several times.
In the mid-1980’s, Mary and her husband Tom embarked on the multi-year
sailing voyage that is the subject of her memoir, Sailing Down the Moonbeam.
Twice, she left finance to provide financial and strategic planning
services to the nonprofit community, first in New York and later in Des Moines.
In
her latest incarnation, she defines herself as a writer. She is working on her first novel (A Fitting Place), freelances, and lectures on the subject of personal risk-taking.
Links to books
and social media sites
http://www.facebook.com/mary.gottschalk.9
http://www.facebook.com/MaryGottschalkWriter
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