Words are Cheap But they Shouldn't Be: Owning Your Impact with Mindful Communication

Brett Hill: 00:00:03

The Mindful Coach Podcast hello, this is Brett Hill, the Mindful Coach, and welcome to this edition of the infamous Mindful Coach Podcast. I found out today that the podcast is in the top 10% of all podcasts. And so it's like, wow, that's amazing.

I'm really happy to have to be in that esteemed company. So thank you out there if you're listening and please do like and follow the show because it matters and we'd like to hear from you as well.

So you can email me at bretthemindfulcoach.com or visit my website at the mindfulcoach.com and send in a form there and connect. I've got some good stuff there to check out this week.

I want to talk about something that's really been top of mind for me lately because, well, as a communication specialist and a coach and you know, I do a lot of coaching around how to be present and talk with other people in a way that brings us more, more connected, that helps us be, you know, happier people that we can be in a world where we love relating to other folk and we can be helpful and we can also surround ourselves with others who are encouraging and uplifting and helpful people.

I just kind of like the word helpful because if you have that as a general, you know, orientation to the world, I like to be helpful, then that makes a lot of things go well.

On the other hand, there seems to be sort of a large body of folk in the world who are advocating for being mean spirited vocally and loudly, as if there were some privilege to being able to speak whatever is at the top of your mind, however hateful or uninformed. Ill advised it is, because that's my truth. And if you don't want to hear it, then you're against free speech.

And I would like to say it's not about being against free speech. It's about being responsible for your words. It's about taking ownership for the quality of the impact you have in the world.

And you can feel me, can I get in rile up? Because I am passionate about this and I'm a little pissed off about it.

Because the thing is, if you don't own your impact, you can't really be an adult in the human race. And by owning your impact, for those of you going, well, I can't take responsibility for how other people feel. That is so. But it's only so.

It's only partly so.

Because if you walk around being mean and hateful and spiteful and sarcastic to everyone you meet and then you wonder why everyone around you is pissed off at you and you go, well, I can't be responsible for how they respond to me. Well, come on. If you walk around being mean spirited and saying mean things, then the people around you have. That has an impact.

Owning that impact is important. It really matters when it's really kind of the beginning of being in a place of empowerment.

Because whenever you begin to realize that the words you speak matter, that they, that you can then begin to choose your words in a way that affect the outcomes of conversations and relationships in directions that you wish for them to go. Would you like to be closer to people?

Would you like to have better, deeper, more meaningful, connected, inspiring, heartfelt, intimate conversations? Would you like more of that in your life? Would you like to be able to more gracefully deal with conflict?

Would you like to more gracefully and easily deal with a variety of people who aren't like you? Well, I think for most people the answer to that is yeah.

So if that's so, then how much work have you personally put into the language that you use, the words that you use, and learning how to skillfully say things in a way that other people can hear what you're saying and be inspired by whatever it is that you're connected to?

Because I am of the opinion that when you are connected to who you really are in a core way, your essence, so to speak, and you engage with other people, that's inspiring to folk because they feel you, they get you sometimes. I talk about this as something I call your embodied authority. Now some people go, oh, authority. Oh gosh.

But I don't mean institutional authority or authority over other people. Like, because you've got money or power, you have real power. And by real power I mean it's the kind that nobody bestows upon you institutionally.

Or it's not because of what you own or a weapon, a powerful weapon in your hand, right? That's not authority, that's, that's misplaced object of power that you confusing with your own.

Just to use a very obtuse one, let's say there's a, you know, a weapon on the table here and I pick it up and I feel it, I go, oh, I feel powerful. I didn't change. The weapon is having an influence on me. The object is influencing me.

And if I'm not, if I don't have a sense of who I am, I don't realize that it's. I don't have the power. I'm just holding a powerful object. Someone takes that object away from me or if I set it down, where'd my power go?

It's not mine. It's not mine.

So when I talk about embodied authority, I'm talking about what is yours and how much time have people actually spent on trying to figure that out. Now for a lot of people, that's hard work.

It's really hard work because the culture as a whole is not interested in you knowing that this conversation is going to go away. I hadn't expected.

When your capacity to be okay is dependent on what other people think and do and say, then your center of gravity, who you are, your okayness, is not in your control. That's a really disempowered and unhappy place to be because you're constantly trying to control your world so that you can be okay.

This is a really difficult place to be. People get really hyper vigilant around that kind of thing. I've got to control everything. Something's out of control. That's one orientation to it.

Another is, you may have heard of attachment difficulties. People who have attachment wounds and they're not okay unless other people are looking at them adoringly and love them and are giving them kudos.

Same thing with narcissists. It's like they're not okay unless people are like give, telling them that they're beautiful, they're wonderful, they're powerful, they're amazing.

They depend on that to make their inner world happy. Aligned. Okay. It's like, yeah, all right. That's, that's the way I like it.

And it's a horrible place to be because you're completely dependent on the way everyone else around you and everything else around you is. That's disembodied authority. Right? You're, you've put your authority. The, the locus of control is outside of you.

There is a way to connect to who you are in such a way that, that you do not need to have. Now, it's nice to have, but you don't absolutely have to have other people reflecting back to you all this goodness in order for you to feel okay.

Your power, if you will, is intrinsic. Your authority is intrinsic. And I'm using strong language here, but it's a strong feeling, it's a strong orientation to the world.

When you walk through the world from a center, connected, aligned, integrated space.

So when someone speaks to you, you don't have to be mean spirited or hateful or, or coming out, you know, expressing your top of mind judgment about things in order to feel powerful because you feel Powerful, not doing anything. And what's that power feel like?

It feels like the same as looking at the sunset or being in connection with a mountain's majesty, or noticing the grace of a bird that's flying, or looking into a child's eyes. We're seeing a mother and a daughter, a mother and a child kind of in connection with each other in a beautiful symbiotic embrace.

Or noticing the playfulness of an animal, a dog or a cat or something. Just noticing the beauty in the world in such a way where you know that that beauty, Beauty is millions of years old.

Not just that moment, but the majesty of the mountains is as old as earth. It was here before you and it will be here after you. We are just here for glimpses of this beautiful world.

And to be sure, there are ugly things as well. There's a unlimited amount of ugliness, and there is an unlimited amount of beauty.

And so the question is, given a world where there is unlimited beauty and unlimited difficulty and harm, who do you choose to be? And if you connect with your.

What I'm going to call being here, which is the point of mindfulness, a lot of ways, it's not just about how to make better decisions. That's just the surface area.

That's just the immediate, tangible benefits are, oh, now that I've calmed down a little bit, or I'm not being reactive, I can see this other person is in a lot of pain. They're angry, they're hurting. I can see that. And instead of me responding reactively, I can inquire, are you okay? What's really going on here?

Or yeah, I can see this is charged. Charged for you. This is. Is this really that important? Like, what's up, what's going on? And if they can't connect with you, that's not on you.

In that case, it is on them in terms of their response. And they have to own that they're who they are.

But you can create the conditions mindfully, thoughtfully, consciously, to give these difficult conversations and situations their best opportunity to be something more. That's all you can do. That's what I mean when I say taking responsibility for your words, for your language. There was a.

This woman who said it was this really powerful phrase. I never forgot I was in the inner MBA offered by Sounds true. And they do this series of interviews with what they call conscious CEOs.

And this one moment, and I swear I tried really hard to find. Find who this was because I'd love to give her credit, she said words Are cheap, but they shouldn't be. Words are cheap, but they shouldn't be.

I just love that so much. Investing your the best that you have, your presence, your resourcefulness, your resilience, your skill into your words.

So that rather than being top of mind, ill considered, reactive, uninformed, blurbing out, pardon me, blurbing out whatever is easiest for you to say in the name of, well, that's my truth and that's my speech. Yeah, maybe, maybe it is. But is that the best you can do? Is that really worthy of putting out there? So for other people to consume? Consider this.

Your words have an impact, a dramatic impact. Words can think about this. Hasn't someone said something to you in your life that has changed your life? Think about that. Who was that?

What was that relationship like? Someone said words to you and I'm, I'm. Hopefully you're thinking about something positive, although there are negative ones too.

But something positive. Think about something that someone said to you that was positive that changed your life.

The example for me was I was in ninth grade back in the day and there was a teacher, I was crazy about this teacher in ninth grade, Donna Cobb was her. And she was in a parent teacher meeting with my mother.

And they were talking and she was talking to my mother about me and I was present at the time and she said to my mother, his potential is off the graph. And I, I kind of blinked because no one ever said anything like that about me.

I mean people kind of say, oh, Brad, he's a little smart alec kind of guy. And I was, I was not necessarily easy to be around because I was challenging.

And when he, when she said that, it kind of like I went, oh, oh, there's potential I could be something I couldn't. Now when you're in that ninth grade, you don't really know what that means necessarily, like what becomes possible then.

But I had this feeling that something big was possible that I hadn't realized before. And I started to kind of take my own efforts more seriously. Like maybe I do have some capacity to do something that's important.

I don't know that I began to consider it and it really had a big, made a big impact on me. And there have been some others too. One, I only really had one business mentor in my whole career.

And he said to me one day, and I was in my late 20s, said, Brett, you're one of the most reactive people that I know. And now at this point, I had been meditating and actually teaching meditation for like four years.

I established The Quest Institute in Dallas and was doing some pretty powerful meditation work. And I don't mean me being powerful, but the meditations were powerful. And I had like 120, 130 students in this school.

And he said, you're one of the most reactive people that I want to go. Oh my God.

But that was really powerful words for me to hear because I trusted this guy and I took it seriously and I began to look at my reactivity and he was right. I was very reactive. I was responding to people too quickly and reactively and emotionally.

Now, fortunately, I had laid the groundwork for learning to take a breath, listen and consider. So you stop, listen, consider. What's the right thing? What's a better thing to do? No, not what's perfect, but what's better, what's better.

And so I'm going to encourage you to consider in your language, in your interactions with people that you have a choice to make. You can own your impact. You can decide. I want to be someone who is encouraging, helpful, insightful, effective for my own.

My own sort of motto is I like to, I consider myself. This is kind of personal. I don't really tell everybody this. I like to be a clarifying force.

Wherever I go, I want to be a clarifying force and I want to help people connect to something powerful within them because we all have that something.

By something, I don't mean something casual or a particular skill, but the truth of who you are and the way you discover that is by going inside and asking yourself, who have I always been? What lights me up? What do I truly care about? What have I always cared about? And maybe you can name those things, maybe you can't.

But if you go back to your early days, your precondition, before the world told you who you should be, before that, what were the things that you really liked to do? I love to explore and I love to find out how things work. I was really into that. I take my toys apart.

So I know I love to understand the inner workings of things. And I was really interested in kind of what's possible? What can a human being do? What could a little boy do? How strong could I be?

How powerful could I be? How much could I run? I used to go out and run in 105 degree weather as far as I could just to see how far I could go.

And those in the heat, nobody was around. This was just me and myself just doing it for the sheer pleasure of it. And it was, it was good.

I never, and occasionally I would get in some trouble, but generally not too much. But I know that about myself. That is what I call non negotiable.

So if somebody came to me and said, brett, one thing about you is you're just not very adventurous, I would kind of laugh a little bit inside because I know the truth about myself. And so this is one of the things that happens when you know who you are in a deeply informed way.

As John Eisman, who I learned so much from, who was a Hakomi trainer, one of the originals said, you know, in your bones, know who you are in your bones. A whole lot of things. Just relax.

And the other piece of this is something I learned from another fabulous trainer, Amina Nolan, who teaches matrix leadership, that you have an impact always, always, always. Let me give you an example. In one of her workshops, I took many, many hours working in this dynamic of matrix leadership training.

And one of the exercises was after we'd hung out together for like a day and a half, two days, people kind of get to know you a little bit.

And so they put a piece of paper on your back and taped it to the back of your shirt, and you walk around the room kind of meandering, and everybody had a little pencil and you would write on the back. On. On the piece of paper, you would find someone who you'd had some interaction with, and you write on the back your thoughts about them.

How had they impacted you?

And it was very interesting because what happens is at the end of this exercise, you take this piece of paper off your back and you have like 15 or 16 things that people are saying to you that are about how you've come across to them. And this is, you know, you're taking it at face value that these people don't have like some secondary agenda. So this was really very informative.

And of course, it was helpful for me because I learned it pretty much aligned with the way I felt about myself. But here's the thing. If you think that you're being. You're.

You show up in a group like that and you don't say anything because you don't feel safe or you don't really feel interested or engaged, and you think, well, I'm just not going to have an influence here. And that describes a lot of people, right? You go to a business meeting, you're in your team meeting, and you think, well, I'm just.

I just don't even want to be here, so I'm just going to be quiet. And you think that that's not having an influence, but it's the opposite is. So you're having a dramatic influence. It's just not dramatic.

The influence is there. It's just not in being spoken in the room. And so people are going to make up a story about you because they don't have any information.

And so if you don't want to have an influence on that narrative, you can just keep being quiet. But people are going to say things to you about, oh, you're just stuck up, or, you know, I feel like that. You feel like you're.

That we're beneath you or, you know, for some reason, you know, I get the feeling that you would rather be anywhere else but here. And that makes. Makes us feel like you're not part of the team. So all these stories that people might make up.

And maybe that's true, maybe it's not, I don't know. But the point is, if you want to have an impact on the narrative that people have about you, you have to let them know who you are.

And so I took this piece of paper off, looked at it and go, oh, yeah, this is great. And it was very heartwarming because at that point I was pretty engaged in trying to make sure that I was being a.

A loving presence for people whenever I could be. And I'm not trying to do that inauthentic like, don't you feel my loving presence is. So it's gotta have a power. It's not. No, no, it's.

It's simply authentic concern and caring for people in general. And that's the way I walk through the world most of the time. I just generally care about people, even the angry ones.

That doesn't mean I want to be near them or I don't want them in my sphere necessarily, but I am concerned about the quality of life for a lot of folk.

And so the point I'm trying to make here is that you have an impact, and I'm encouraging you to own that impact, to choose your words in the direction of aligning with the way that you want to show up in the world.

And at a certain point in, I guess I'll say our spiritual evolution of a person, you be, you've switched from simply becoming someone who is inquiring about who am I, what's true to being someone who is a light, who is a force for good, because that's how you find out what's true. And again, once again, I'm talking about being authentic, not. Not making yourself be a certain way, because that's your idea. Of it.

But it comes from a truly a deep reservoir of resilience within you. Because our being and love and compassion, there's an unlimited amount of it. There's an unlimited amount of it.

So this is a question I sometimes ask in a world with unlimited amounts of love, how much do you let yourself have?

When I was, one of the things I did on my journey is I realized that if someone said something nice to me, it was just like, oh, thank you, thank you, that's great. But I didn't really feel it right. It was just kind of like water on the duck's back. It was just roll off.

And I realized I'm not really feeling the goodness of that wish of that well intentioned support and caring when it comes my way. And so I had to go through a practice of letting myself feel cared for. That was really hard for me because I'm what they call a self reliant type.

I'm, you know, if I'm, no one can do it for me. I'm the only one. I can't trust anyone to do things for me. And so when someone was trying to be helpful, it was just almost seen as an obstacle.

Sometimes I had to stop and make an intention that when someone said something nice, I would go, oh yeah, breathe that in. Let myself feel careful. Almost like I'm getting a kind of a virtual hug. Like letting myself feel that goodness, letting my limbic system respond.

Limbic system is the, you know, the part that lets us feel emotions. Right. Letting myself feel good about the fact that someone is caring about me. That took an effort on my part.

And when you do, it changes the conversation. So again we're talking. Gets back to owning your words, owning your impact.

Someone says something nice to me, I take it in, let myself feel good about that. Ah, feel so good. I getting to live my mission.

I get to feel good about the way I'm helping people in the world and in this moment right now with this person. Yeah, it feels really good. Thank you. And when I say that, it's coming from a completely authentic and deep, heartfelt place.

And so I'm, I'm going to like begin to wrap up here because I want to keep focused on this notion of owning the language that you use to have an impact on the world that has aligned with who you are. And I just want to say a few words about this. You can't take responsibility for the way people receive that.

If you are authentically connected to being authentic, being helpful, insightful, supportive, whatever it is that you Feel like you want to be right, you can take responsibility for being ungraceful or ill considered.

Lord knows I've made plenty of mistakes in the coaching that I do and helping other people have said things ungracefully that were hard to work with, and I've learned from those things. But it wasn't because I'm bad at what I do. It's just I'm not perfect, right? I make mistakes.

And so it's not like someone say, well, you did this and so therefore you. How good could you be? So, oh, yeah, I make mistakes. My intention is good and I'm going to own that and try to do better.

It doesn't change the foundation of who I am. Just means I'm human.

And if someone comes at me with all kinds of accusations that are ill formed or they, you know, oh, Brit, you're just a liberal snowflake who believes this and this. Ah. And in my heart, my mind, I'm going, wow.

You know, it's kind of like, okay, well, I know that they don't know how crazy hard it is to get to a place where you can be touching, in touch with what's true about you and the truth of your moment. And there's nothing snow flaky about that. That's really the center of the universe right there.

That's connected to source, that's connected to being, that's connected to presence. And I can see someone like that and I can see that they are orbiting around some ideas that are not who they are. They just don't know.

And if I'm in a bit, in a good place, I can just be compassionate about the fact that they just don't know. But that doesn't mean I'm going to let myself be treated badly. No, no, no. So that's a whole other conversation is declaring and enforcing boundaries.

I insist on being treated with respect in a conversation.

And I don't mean respect like, oh, Brett, you're this or that, but like the respect that one human being just shows another out of general courtesy, right? Just treat each other nice, be nice. It's really simple. I insist on that or I'm not going to be in the conversation.

So I'm talking here about owning your impact. But you can't necessarily take responsibility for the way that comes across.

If I, in working with someone who's challenging and I just can't connect, it's not on me. I'm doing the best I can. Sometimes I put it this way, all you can do is create the Conditions that give a conversation its best opportunity.

Think of it like a garden, right? You can plant a seed. You can make sure that there's nutrients in the soil, that it's water, water, that there's sunlight.

You can't make it sprout, but you can create the conditions that give it its best possibility. That's all you can do, right? And the good news is, plenty of seeds sprout, right? But the one that doesn't, it's not on you. It's in the.

Inherent in the seed itself. That part you cannot own. But you can own the way you show up. The way you show up.

And if you are aligned and integrated with that, then the other things that happen around you are just the other things that happen around you. And you can connect to your own equanimity, your own peace, your own connection to beauty as much as you can. And.

And, you know, these days, it's super challenging, and I guess I'm coming across pretty intense in this episode because we have intense times ahead of us, and I want you to have the resources and the capacity to disengage from consistent outrage, or I should say, not consistent, but I should say, and, you know, a perpetual state of outrage that's not sustainable. So come back to yourself. Enjoy the moment that you have that's right in front of you.

Breathe in the goodness of the presence of life itself, of being in a space where there's beauty in the world, there's goodness in the world, there's creative juice in the air, there's aliveness everywhere. And let yourself be an instrument of that symphony. Learn how your particular instrument sounds. What kind of instrument are you?

Are you a string instrument? Are you woodwind? Are you percussion? And I. My wish for you is that you find a way to let yourself. Let the music flow through you.

And if people don't like the symphony, there'll be another one. So with that, blessings to you and stay present. Thank you. The Mindful Coach Podcast is a service of the Mindful Coach Association.