Swearing Makes it Real — @*$# yes!

There’s no delicate way to ask. So I just blurt out the question.

“By the way, do you swear?”

“Swear?” My new client as been calling me “ma’am” up until this moment, so the confusion is big.

“Yes,” I say. “Swear.”

He still can’t quite believe that my question really is this simple. After all, we’ve been talking about deep things, like “How do you want to be help accountable?” And, “How are you with emotions?”

He might be half-expecting me to pull out a bible so he can swear on it, to uphold an agreement that we’re making about how we want to the coaching relationship to work.

“Curse,” I try to clarify. “Do you curse?”

Now, I can really see the mind working. Is there a right answer to this?

“Yes,” the new client said, hesitantly. “I mean, when I’m with friends, I sometimes let an f-bomb fly —”

“Is it okay with you if I swear?” I ask.

“You?”

“Yes, me. Does it bother you if I swear?” I ask.

Huge exhale. “I didn’t know where you were going with this. Yes,” he said enthusiastically.

His full smile softened his face. The ice was broken. Melted. The false wall between us was broken. No longer healer and wounded, the trust that comes with authenticity, was now the air we breathed. Now, we were off to the races.

Swearing does not guarantee that you’ll get the most out of coaching. After all, not everyone swears — though I find that hard to believe. And that disbelief may say more about me and my leanings than anything. But this permission to show up with all of your words, all of your emotions, is permission to be yourself, 100 percent. Without this, coaching is like exploring the whole house — except that one room where the old stuff, the painful stuff, the stuff that you really really care about stays closed and locked.

Swearing lives in a different part of the brain, a neurologist explained, "It’s a center for emotional language. Even in strokes that affect the language center of the brain, swearing often stays in tact and is used appropriately to express frustration or other emotion. Swearing lives in the emotional language center.” Without stroke, swearing gives full access to one’s expression.

To add to the value I place on swearing, it turns out that several studies link honesty and intelligence to cursing. I #@*#ing new it!

Authenticity doesn’t have to include swearing, of course. A doctor friend told me that the only people who really want to know how he’s doing are older motherly women. “I call them at 7 at night and they say, ‘why are you working so late. You should be at home eating dinner,’” he says. “But she loves that I’m calling her at 7 at night.” Indeed, patients want it both ways and the culture of medicine reinforces this idea that you should give your all. Is there a professional work around for this conundrum?

I recently asked my doctor how she was. “Fine,” she said.

“Really,” I pressed. “How are you?”

I could see a wall go down. She remained professional, but she visibly relaxed as we were now two humans in the room. Most patients don’t really want to know what’s going on with their doctor. If they ask how you are, they might recoil to know that you are actually tired, having marital struggles, or worried about your child. They want a compassionate doctor. But they don’t want to know about the hard stuff that actually makes us compassionate.

After establishing that swearing was allowed, my new client stopped calling me “ma’am”. For the rest of our coaching time, calls me “Miss Susan,” which I love, by the way.

This brings me to you. Does patient-doctor decorum limit you in your authenticity? Maybe swearing is unacceptable in the exam room, but are there other ways you can be real and allow your patient to do the same? How much of healing is about authenticity?

I want to hear about your moments of realness at work — whether swearing or simply answering the question, “How are you?” with honesty.