Most of us can name people we see every week who still do not really know us. Kristen Newton, speaking with Lisa Fields, gives a way to see why. She describes letting someone into your life as a sequence of steps: honesty, openness, transparency and vulnerability. Friendships tend to stall on one step without anyone deciding they should. Over four sessions, this guide asks you to climb those steps on purpose, one per session, with people already in your life. By the end you should be able to tell which step a friendship has reached, take one deliberate step higher, and notice whether the other person meets you there.
You can work through it alone over four weeks or with a small group that meets four times. Each session pairs a passage of Scripture with one piece of Newton’s teaching and a practice to carry out before the next meeting. In a group, the practice happens outside the room. The meeting is for reporting how it went, and each person decides how much to say. No one should be asked to tell a story they did not offer.
Before you begin: one question, four answers
Newton uses a house to show the steps. Telling someone where you live is honesty: you give true facts. Opening the door is openness. In her words, “If you open the door and let them across the threshold, that is the practicing openness.” Giving the tour is transparency. Vulnerability is opening the rooms you keep shut, the closet where everything gets thrown. What marks that last step, she says, is that “you’re exposing something that gives people the ability to hurt you if they know it.”
She then runs one ordinary question through the steps. Someone asks how your day was. Here is a paraphrase of her example:
- Open: My day was rough.
- Transparent: My boss called a meeting and told us layoffs are coming in three weeks.
- Vulnerable: I’m anxious. We already live paycheck to paycheck, the stress is coming home with me, and it’s straining my marriage.
The event stays the same on every step. What grows is how much of you the other person gets to see.
The opening exercise. Write down five people you see at least weekly: at church, at work, at your kids’ activities, at the gym. Beside each name, write the step your last real conversation reached. Do not count history or affection. A friend of ten years can live entirely at the doorstep. Keep this list. You will come back to it at the end.
Session one: honesty, starting where you already are
Read Proverbs 18:24: “A man that hath friends must shew himself friendly: and there is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother.” Lisa Fields brought this verse into the conversation. Proverbs describes how life usually works, so the verse is wisdom rather than a guarantee. Even so, its first line puts the reader in the active role. Friendship is something you take part in.
Newton’s first instruction is to “start with where you are.” She means the people you already see. The bottom step is plain information, and she observes that “you move from stranger to the next tier by just having information about people.” That means a full name, where they work and what they care about. Most of us have stood beside someone for years without knowing their last name.
Practice for the week. Choose two people from your list whose basic facts you do not know. Speak first. Learn each person’s full name, what they do, and one thing they enjoy. Then offer one true fact about yourself, so the exchange runs both ways. Resist turning it into a deep conversation.
Question 1. What makes speaking first harder for you than it should be?
For a group: when you report back, share what you learned about the other person rather than how brave you felt. That keeps attention on noticing people, which is what this step trains.
Session two: openness, answering the question you were asked
Read Ephesians 4:25: “Wherefore putting away lying, speak every man truth with his neighbour: for we are members one of another.” Paul is writing to a church about how its members treat one another, and his reason for truth-telling is shared membership. Applying the verse to small talk extends it, but fairly. Saying fine when you are not fine is a small way of treating someone as an outsider.
Newton’s instruction for this step is blunt: “If your day was awful, say your day was awful.” Doing that exposes a less obvious problem. Many people do not know what they feel. Newton recommends a feelings wheel, a chart that starts with broad words like angry or sad and moves toward precise ones like let down, betrayed or resentful. A vague sense of being upset gives a friend nothing to work with. She also names therapy, counseling and honest community as places where that self-awareness grows.
Practice for the week. Keep a feelings wheel on your phone. Twice this week, before a routine conversation, name what you are feeling with a more exact word than fine, busy or tired. At least once, when someone asks how you are, give the open answer instead of the automatic one. You do not have to explain. Let the true word stand.
Question 2. What usually goes on inside you when you answer good on a bad day?
Session three: transparency, giving the tour and asking for one
Read Galatians 6:2: “Bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ.” The command assumes something. You cannot carry a weight you have never been shown. Transparency is the step where burdens become visible.
Newton says “you can practice transparency by giving them a tour,” and defines it this way: “You’re allowing them to see through to something that they wouldn’t see unless you showed it to them.” This step also has an asking side. When a friend gives you an open answer, Newton’s follow-up phrases are simple: “help me understand what’s going on right now,” and “tell me the story behind that.” A friendship climbs when both people learn to take the tour as well as give it.
One tour most friends never give is of their own conflict habits. Lisa Fields described a recent conflict with a friend who gets louder when angry while she goes inward. They were equally angry and showed it differently. Newton, who calls herself the loud one, says the fix is to explain this ahead of time. If you go quiet to process, say so, and say when you will return to the conversation. Otherwise each person reads the other’s style as indifference or hostility, and the friendship slowly wears down.
Practice for the week. With one person who has already met you at openness, give the conflict tour. Describe what you tend to do when frustrated, what that does and does not mean, and what helps you. Then ask them the same question and listen to the whole answer.
Question 3. Think of a friendship that cooled. What do you think made it cool?
It is easy to answer that question by calling the other person toxic. Newton’s definition is deliberately narrow: a toxic person “is a person who is not only in a place of unhealth, but they’re aware of their unhealth and they’re unwilling to grow.” Apply it to yourself as honestly as to the other person. These steps are also meant for relationships that are basically trustworthy. If someone is controlling, threatening or harming you, do not practice vulnerability there. Talk to a pastor or counselor you trust, and if you are in danger, call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233.
Session four: vulnerability, opening the closet door
Read John 15:15: “Henceforth I call you not servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth: but I have called you friends; for all things that I have heard of my Father I have made known unto you.” Jesus is speaking to his disciples on the night before his death. In his words, a friend is someone who has been told. Newton grounds her teaching in this verse, and her claim that “practicing vulnerability is really where deep connection is formed” applies it to ordinary friendship. That is an analogy rather than the verse’s main subject, but it follows the verse’s own logic.
Now read Mark 14:32-41. In Gethsemane, Jesus takes Peter, James and John apart and tells them, “My soul is exceeding sorrowful unto death: tarry ye here, and watch” (Mark 14:34). This is narrative, describing what happened rather than issuing a command. It still shows something. Jesus let his closest friends see his distress and asked them to stay. Then they fell asleep, more than once.
The scene shows exactly what both speakers warn about. Lisa Fields put it plainly: “That is the cost of vulnerability that you’re going to be hurt.” Expecting never to be wounded after opening up, she argued, is unrealistic, because everyone makes mistakes. Newton says the same from the other side: “the exact same formula for being loved is the exact same formula for being egregiously hurt.” What makes the risk worth taking, in her view, is the freedom of being fully known and still accepted.
Is climbing on purpose too calculated?
A fair objection belongs here. Planning disclosure step by step can feel artificial, even manipulative. Real friendship, many people assume, should just happen. Newton rejects that assumption directly: “that is the lie, that intentionality is reserved for romantic relationships.” She grants that a friendship may start with an easy connection, but says that in any relationship that lasts, “none of it happens organically.” Lisa Fields adds one reason intention feels strange: a culture that treats intimacy as a synonym for sex makes deliberate closeness between friends seem almost romantic.
The steps also guard against the two failures the objection worries about. Manipulation uses disclosure to get something from a person. The vulnerability Newton describes does the reverse: it hands the other person the ability to hurt you. Oversharing skips steps, pouring out the closet to someone who has never met you at the doorstep. Newton is clear about starting small: “you don’t have to start there.” You move up only with someone who has already met you on the step below.
Practice for the week. Choose one person who has already met you at transparency. Offer one vulnerable piece, a small one. Say what something is doing to you, not just what happened. Then pay attention. Newton’s examples depend on whether “the other person is willing to meet you in that vulnerability.” A follow-up question tells you something. A change of subject also tells you something. Neither means you failed.
For a group: report on the experience, never the content. A sentence such as I tried it and they asked a good question is a complete report. A leader can go first by describing their own attempt in that plain way, without telling the private part.
Question 4. What would you need to see in someone before trusting them with the closet? Has anyone already shown you that?
Question 5. Think of a time someone was vulnerable with you. What did your response communicate to them?
Coming back to the list
Take out the five names from the beginning and mark each one’s step again, using your most recent real conversation. Some may have moved. Some may not, and that is information too. Newton’s claim is modest: “the steps are simple, but you have to be intentional about taking the steps.”
Question 6. Which assumption you brought into this guide turned out to be wrong? It might concern other people, your church, or what you are willing to risk.
Lisa Fields said in the conversation that “friendships are worthy of the work that we put into the romantic relationships.” If that is true, the work continues after session four. Newton’s counsel for a lonely season is to find one person you can be intentional with and start there. Look at your list once more. Choose the person you will take one step higher next month, and decide when you will see them.