Message of the Day - Who Do You Believe?

Good Morning,

 

This past week, I was able to get away with Karen to visit beautify Lexington, Kentucky. We went on a Horse Tour where we saw many horse farms, visited one farm, and spent some time at the Keenland Race Track during the third week of Thoroughbred Sales. Karen and I thought about buying horses at the $1,000 mark, but the $25 a day feeding and care kind of made it too expensive for now.

 

During the weekend I read some books (big surprise there). The first book ‘The Words Can Heal Handbook’ by Hilary Rich, Irwin Katsof and Chaim Feld (www.wordscanheal.org) went into great detail of how gossip and speaking ill of others often causes pain and suffering for others and hurts friends and relationships. When you hear something that someone did or is doing, double-check the information before jumping to conclusions. If you encounter someone saying mean and hurtful things about others, either leave the conversation, change the direction of the conversation or stand up for the person whose character is being assassinated. I have lost many friendships in one organization I was a part of due to people not following the above information, and to be honest, by my own not following it as well at times. Over the last few years I have endeavored to improve myself and as part of this path, I have worked to better help rather than hurt others.

 

The next book I started reading is ‘Servant Leadership’ by Kenneth Blanchard and Phil Hodges (http://www.amazon.com/Servant-Leader-Ken-Blanchard/dp/0849996597)/. This books shows that leading others with a servant mentality is far superior to being a self-serving leader. We are all self-serving to some level, we have needs on multiple levels, but when we lead, if we think only about our own well being and success over anyone else’s we are truly self serving. The way to tell the difference between someone who is mostly a servant leader and someone is mostly a self-serving leader is how they embrace criticism. The servant leader accepts criticism to find out how to learn to improve themselves. The self-serving leader will often avoid, attack, or defend against criticism as it threatens what they have been doing.

 

Both books cover one area which hit a chord with me. A quote in ‘The Words Can Heal’ book stated that people tend to distrust the appointed spokesman of an organization and tend to trust a message from an anonymous source. In ‘Servant Leadership’ there is a section about Fear and Pride hurt a person’s ability to lead well. That is, they must identify these fears and sources of pride to reduce or eliminate their impact on your life.

 

Why would we believe an anonymous source over a known quantity? Maybe because of fear and pride and what we know of this person from personal experience or worse, gossip. If the known spokesman has given cause for not being trusted in the past, they may not be trusted now, no matter how much they changed their lives for the better. Since there is little to fear in the anonymous person, no scary face, no skeletons in the closet, no checkered past, they seem safer to believe, even though we know NOTHING about them.

 

We must work hard to eliminate gossip from our lives and the damage it causes to friendships and relationships, and work to understand those things we fear or give us false pride so that we can see people and events for what they truly are now, and not tainted by words and deeds of the past.

 

Enjoy!

 

Sanford Berenberg

Sanford@berenberg.net

http://www.berenberg.net

http://sanfordberenberg.blogspot.com/

502-533-9336

 

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