People don’t want love. They want the easy way out to be coddled, enabled, and patted on the head.
Tough love is too much work. We avoid it at all costs.
Do they believe they are perfect, proper, always correct? Truthfully, not.
But what if tough love is the truth we’ve been missing?
Tough love doesn’t mean cruelty, and it doesn’t make you a jerk. It simply means you care enough to be forthright, to create temporary friction in service of something bigger.
In her book Radical Candor, Kim Scott highlights the notion of tough love: Radical candor is a simple idea: to be a good boss/parent/coach, you have to care personally at the same time that you challenge directly. When you challenge without caring, it’s obnoxious aggression; when you care without challenging, it’s ruinous empathy.
A coach doesn’t let you smoke after wind sprints because she hates you or holds you to your commitments and goals. She does it because she knows you’re capable of more.
Tough love is leading a passionate life. It’s doing the hard work of digging under the surface. Not settling for comfort and mediocrity.
It’s your wise friend telling you you’re making excuses again. It’s looking at yourself in the mirror and facing the truth.
We can not only handle tough love. We crave it.
In our bones, we know it’s the thing that will finally set us free.
