Let’s face it. We’ve all got our faults.

Shane Snow - formerly co-founder of Contently, current CEO of Showrunner, and my former boss - wrote a great piece several years ago about how the world’s most admired people have often committed some pretty shocking transgressions.

In her younger years, for example, Oprah smoked crack (true story). In her teen years, Laura Bush accidentally killed someone in a car accident. And Bill Clinton, Robert Downey Jr. and Mike Tyson have taught us that nobody’s perfect, everybody makes mistakes, and some people (not named Bill Cosby) deserve a second chance.

Even if you are one of the lucky, virtuous few with no glaring flaws in your past or present, some folks simply aren’t going to like you. As legendary burlesque dancer Deeta Von Teese says, “You can be the ripest, juiciest peach in the world, and there's still going to be somebody who hates peaches.'”

This brings me to the subject of the turd.

A few years ago, I was sitting in a meeting at a company I worked with, which had just gone through a merger. In my limited experience, mergers are sort of painful, and they don’t usually turn out very well for most people involved. They also (sooner or later) require that you tell your customers and employees a whole lot of information that they’d really rather not hear.

As I sat with some of the new company executives preparing an email to inform some customers that the company was now actually owned by one of their competitors, someone suggested we start by “putting the turd on the mantel.”

I'd never heard the phrase before, and the Gods of Google can't tell me where the phrase originated, but the gist of that phrase is this:

When you go into a meeting or negotiation and there is something very negative that needs to be addressed, instead of dancing around the subject or acting as if the issue isn’t there, you should go ahead and put the negative (the turd) right out there in the open for everyone to see (on the mantel).

If you pretend like the turd’s not there, stinking up the room, it does not matter what you say or do. Everyone will be thinking “turd” no matter what you do, and the sheer force of that turdy, turdy stench will be infinitely magnified when your audience is forced to act as if that nasty turd does not exist.

Particularly if you’re in sales, where you are often required to sell peaches to peach-haters, you may not even agree that the turd is a turd, and you might even think that your turd doesn’t stink. It really doesn’t matter. A turd is a turd, and it can’t be polished.

Unless you disempower the turd by putting it out there in the open and up on a pedestal, nothing you do will make them forget that wreaking turd.

But if you can acknowledge that yes, there are parts of your product that the customer will not like or that indeed, at the face of the discussion you are actually competitors or that absolutely, you are perhaps the most expensive option on the market, or that yes, you are a juicy peach when they really want a pear - then and only then you can get down to the more productive conversation of why that’s nowhere near as interesting or important as what you really want to talk about.

I’m not going to say that Putting the Turd on the Mantel always works, but taking an honest and transparent approach and being realistic about the negatives is sometimes literally the only way to move on to the positives to have a constructive discussion.

Put the turd on the mantel, get over it, and move on to what matters. It's better than stinking up the room.

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