651: What Comes Out of Your Mouth Is Gospel… So Be Careful What You Say

Owning and operating a business is a continual streak of tests that ultimately prove the trustworthiness of the business that built.  The business of scammers and hucksters fall apart over time forcing them to be in a state of constant reinvention and re-huckstering. Traveling various parts of our historic world over the past few months has reminded me of the longevity and duration of things.  Walking the streets of Rome flanked by artifacts from late B.C. and early A.D. eras has a way of sobering the hardships of your time. Walking through the carved caves of the Cappadocia region of modern Turkey sobers you to the challenges and hardships of previous cultures.  Every culture endures testing.  Every generation is put on trial so as to mark the trustworthiness and endurance of that generation.  Endurance allows for longevity and the hope of seeing the days that are hoped for. Without endurance, life is short and hope is fleeting. The ingredients of our words fuel much of the cocktail of what is continually being tested through the swishing and swashing of the minds of those around. Each word that comes from the mouth of a leader is filtered through the taste buds of life’s mental truth machine and filed away in the vaults of our minds.  “But you said” has caught many a leader in moments of double-speak not realizing that a mere fit of external processing was being received by all others as gospel truth. In your strategy to be more decisive, more creative, more inventive, or more direct, always remember that “a fool who keeps his mouth shut is considered wise” (Proverbs 17:28). Your words enter the world with the longevitous ink of a tattoo.  Once out, your words are nearly impossible to cram back in and the surfaced emotions are floating for all to sense and respond. If you are a leader or an owner who uses words (ahem, all of us) then here are a few devices that will bode well for you to adopt and deploy. First, be slow to speak and quick to listen.   This was wisdom provided to a group of Jewish citizens who had been thrown out of their homeland and were living a scattered lot in unfamiliar territories.  Their house was not their home, their streets were not their domain, and the people were not their people. Look, see, listen.  Very rarely has a winning strategy been speak then think.  The fire of anger is stoked by the sparks of unfiltered words.   Want to throw a small group into a frenzied rage?  Make a habit of speaking the first thing that comes to your mind and you too will have created a remarkable and unfortunate riot, or at least a really frustrating place to work. Speak slowly.  Listen quickly. Second, place a timeline on your ideas. An idea is often birthed into an assumption of perpetuity meaning it never ends.  Want to start meeting in a small group?  What happens when you are tired of meeting?   Want to start volunteering?  What happens when it is clear that your voluntary role has run it course? There is no shame in running ideas through a test period of limited time.   Take an idea and declare, “We will try this and monitor the results for the next 3 months and then decide on DATE/TIME whether to extend or extinguish.” The boundary of a start and stop timeline will allow everyone involved to feel a sense of urgency, and also a sense of freedom knowing that if the idea does not provide its intended outcome, then we mustn’t be married to a bad idea for life. Third, remind yourself that your words are sticky. The words that come out of your mouth as a leader carry a volume and camera-like photograph that burns itself into the emotional landscape of the people with ears to hear. Your words tend to stick longer and with greater weight than other because they directly impact the day to day lives of the people you work with.   Be careful with “just spitballing”.  It is probably best to remember that spitballing can be construed as truth-telling and there is not much you can do to change that.   We can say, “Well it’s not my fault that is what they heard!”  The RPMs of great leadership can guide us in how we should speak.  Repetition ensures that what we say has fidelity over time.  Predictability ensures that what we say will remain consistent over time.  Meaning built into our words will ensure that we have baked in the mission and the values that we hold dear to our decision-making over time. Your words matter, and the matter of your words stick.