Does his ‘shut up’ trump the beauty of the lesson?

08 May Does his ‘shut up’ trump the beauty of the lesson?

Hi.

I haven’t posted in a while. I found all of these saved drafts in my blog that I never made live.

Here is an imperfect unfinished post that is perfectly timed for me- based on something from over a year ago.

Here goes:

My sister sends me stuff all the time. She is brilliant. I use her brain way too much as I do what I do in the world.

There is this video of a coach in a press conference. He is having an emotional moment honoring the loss of a team member and his memory. Someone in the room answers a phone call, rudely, in the middle of the moment.

He handles it beautifully in my view. He didn’t coddle or gently tell the dude how offensive the action was. He DISRUPTED that guy pretty harshly.

My sister said today, “Sometimes the person being mean to you is trying to do what a true friend does: tell you when you are being an ass.” Okay, it shouldn’t be in quotes cuz that is the gist of what she said… I didn’t capture it perfectly.

Are we okay being caught in our behavior and hearing it? Can we then forgive ourselves for what we have done? Can we forgive others for maybe the yucky way they tried to bring it to our attention? Humans have ways of justifying our behavior and distancing ourselves from our true beauty.

We often can’t hear it. We grade how people tell us instead of just trying to hear what it is they are trying to say. Huge learning gets lost in our ease in getting offended.

Shut up. Message received. I doubt that person will ever disrespect a room that way again.

I’m not advocating for more people to be rude to each other. I do think we can listen to intent rather than actions.

Humans are way too focused these days on ‘HOW THE PERSON SAID IT TO ME” rather than “OH CRAP, I DID MESS UP?”

Perhaps the recoil we feel is just our inability to accept that we will just never be perfect…

I worry that all of our communicating classes are teaching us that emotions are bad. That we must coddle and calm each other instead of just telling someone they have spinach in their teeth.

Being nice means I won’t embarrass you by telling you that you have spinach in your teeth: KIND means I won’t let you walk around with it all day. Sometimes, I may say it in a way that does make you feel embarrassed. If we just accept that sometimes we will be OPEN and sometimes we will be CLOSED. Well, what happens then?

After watching that segment again, I wonder if that young man learned the lesson I got from the coach that day. We are not invisible. If we are in a room- BE IN IT.