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Should we be brutally honest or considerate and polite?

There are benefits to both approaches.

Being honest seems more authentic and sincere.

We can impress people with our bold provocations.

Being polite seems kind.

We can show people we care by protecting their feelings.

I will teach you how Howard Stern, the SiriusXM radio celebrity and multimillionaire king of all media, completely transformed his life by letting go of the brutal honesty that characterized him in his early career.

Instead, he embraced a more tactful and diplomatic way of communicating with people.

If you can master these same techniques, you can transform your own relationships to one where you're callous, brutal and alienating to people around you, or you have trouble connecting with people, to one where you can build strong, intimate friendships and relationships.

Howard Stern and Brutal Honesty

Howard Stern – some of you may not know who he is. I was talking to a younger friend of mine and he didn't know who Howard Stern was. People my age know that Howard Stern is what we used to call the king of all media.

He was the first radio shock Jack. He became famous by saying shocking things. His whole strategy for celebrity was brutal honesty all the time, and this worked tremendously well for him. He became very popular and very wealthy, but as we'll see in this video, it wasn't a great long-term strategy.

Those of you who may not know who Howard Stern was, I'm going to show you a clip or two. He just did an interview with David Letterman on Letterman's new show on Netflix. He revealed some really interesting things about his personal life. And that's what we're going to get into today.

In this first clip, I want to illustrate for you the sorts of things he used to do on the radio to give you a sense of his style, if you're not familiar with him. In this case, there was a terrible plane crash back in the 1980s where a plane took off in Washington and crashed into a bridge over the Potomac River and many people died. It was tragic and he made a joke about it.

In this first clip, we'll see him talk about the joke he made.

That joke gets a big laugh. Even I have to say it's kind of funny, but it's brutal. If you've ever known anyone who's died in a plane crash as I have, you realize in some ways how heartless it is. He made this joke right when the plane crash happened.

We're now talking about 40 years later or 35 years later to make a joke it can be funny, but on the day that it happened, you really have to have a lot of nerve to make a joke like that, and he did. That's what he was like. He believed that this honesty was the key to his success.

Let's watch a clip of him talking about honesty. Here it is.

Honestly, then, he thinks is the key to his success. This comes back to one of the main themes we've been talking about on this blog for a long time, and that is the tension between being completely honest or maybe completely authentic, saying exactly what's on our mind versus the competing demand to care about other people's feelings and to be considerate, to be tactful, diplomatic, and kind.

Pure Id

In the beginning, Howard Stern just thought it was really best to have no filter. In this next clip, he talks about the decision that he made to have no filter. Let's watch it.

In that clip Howard Stern says, "He's going to crack open his head and just let pure id out." Id is a Freudian term. It comes from Sigmund Freud's theory of the mind. He said there were three parts of the mind, the id, the ego and the superego.

I'm not going to go into all that in detail, except to say that the id refers to the part of our mind that contains the basic instinctual drives, especially for sex and aggression, without any filter. It is not governed by the ego or the super ego, which would be a conscience or logic or tact.

Pure id means pure unfiltered expression of sex and aggression. And if you knew about Howard Stern's show in the 80s especially, that's what it was about – sex and aggression. He thought that was a great idea.

The Consequences of Brutal Honesty

In this next clip, he talks about how though it made him famous and successful as a radio host, this brutal honesty had lots of other negative consequences. Let's hear him begin to talk about the negative consequences of this unfiltered pure id way of being.

"You don't have a life. You become a madman. It wreaks havoc with your personal life." This is Howard Stern who make no mistake, became rich and famous by having this unfiltered strategy on the radio. But now upon reflection as an older wiser man having paid the price for that unfiltered way of communicating, he now says, "It made me a madman. It was no way to live."

Here we begin to see the costs of communicating in an unfiltered way. Maybe in certain narrow domains of our life, it can make us successful, but it ruins the rest of our life because it prevents us from developing friendships and intimate bonds with other people, because we have no regard for other people. This unfiltered honesty is just a way of having no regard or consideration for other people, for their feelings, their thoughts, and the consequences.

Here in this next clip, he continues along that same line of thought about what the consequences were of communicating in this way. Let's have a look at this next clip.

He says he didn't have the ability to think about others or to function in the real world. These are pretty dramatic consequences. He’s describing the inability to think about others. What is he saying there? He said he had no empathy. This is what I've been trying to get across.

There are two poles; on the one hand, brutal honesty, on the other hand empathy. I've been encouraging people to move towards empathy and into the light. This is what Howard Stern was saying.

When he was operating in this mode of pure id, unfiltered honesty said he had no ability to understand the perspective of other people. He was without empathy, a madman.

Apology

As he goes on, he talks about what this ultimately did to his relationships and about the need to apologize to all the people that he hurt.

Let's watch this next clip where he talks about the need to apologize.

I've never seen Howard Stern be this vulnerable. I really was taken aback when I heard him say, "I could not love anyone. I could not respect anyone. I just thought this is how I was."

That's a really, really sad state of affairs to be in. That's a very empty way of existing as a human being. This is a direct result of failing to take into account the needs, beliefs, preferences, attitudes, and feelings of other people.

If you are like this, you will not be able to connect with other people. It's in those connections with other people that all of the greatest parts of life eventually emerge – friendships and love relationships and family relationships and work relationships that give meaning and purpose to our life. Howard Stern is reflecting now with great regret on having communicated in this other way, which did so much damage.

Psychotherapy & Restoring Empathy

He talks about the benefit of psychotherapy. I think for many of us, psychotherapy can help us get over these obstacles and flaws in our ways of communicating. We can work with people who can help us learn to communicate in new ways. We may have learned from our families or early in life, very destructive ways of communicating.

In this next clip, Howard talks about what he learned from his mother about how to communicate when he was a child. Let's take a look.

“Words have no meaning.” I think this is a common belief for people who can be brutally honest like this. A lot of people really tease a lot and think, "Well, you shouldn't be hurt because I'm only teasing. You should know that I'm teasing. And because I'm teasing, this shouldn't hurt you. Because my intentions aren't to hurt you, you shouldn't be hurt."

This was the way that Howard Stern thought for a long time. He says he learned from his mother that words have no meaning. We learn as children, sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me, but that's just wrong.

Anyone who's ever been called names or mocked or teased knows it actually does hurt us. Now we can develop a thick skin so that they hurt us less, but in fact, language can hurt us very powerfully when people who we care about say terrible things about us. This is a painful lesson.

He talks in the end about how he asked himself, "Why was I doing this to Dave Letterman, in particular?" He says, "I loved you. You were my friend. Why did I do this?"

It's really painful. Those of us who sometimes communicate in this unfiltered way, sadly myself included, live to regret it and have to apologize. I may portray myself as a communication expert on this channel, but I've made all the mistakes that I'm talking about other people correcting.

When we communicate in this brutally honest way without regard to other people's feelings, we hurt the people that we love, and sometimes in irreparable ways. We sometimes damage relationships in ways that we can't repair them.

Other times we just cause tremendous harm and suffering to people that we care about and that we love, and we have to spend an enormous amount of time and effort repairing those relationships if they can be fixed.

Summary

In the end, I thought it was just beautiful to hear Howard Stern tell this story of how he evolved from the pure id and unfiltered brutal honesty that made him famous and very, very wealthy, to after psychotherapy being able to have regard for other people's feelings, apologize for all the people that he hurt, realize that words do have meaning and words have the power to hurt us very badly and then modifying his behavior accordingly.

I think he does a very generous thing by sharing this vulnerable aspect of his life experience with us so that we might learn the same lesson without having to pay as high a price as he paid.

That's all I have about Howard Stern. I hope you enjoy those clips. You could go and find the show on Netflix and watch the entire interview. It's really funny and entertaining and touching. I could only take a few short clips here to talk about these principles of honesty and compassion and empathy.

I'd love to hear from you in the comments. Tell me what you thought of Howard Stern, whether you're a fan of Howard Stern's, and what you think of his transformation.