Gratitude & (positive) Gossip
Power your TEAM
Gratitude is the generator of Past-Positive community energy. Intentional thankfulness breathes life into the heart of positive team culture. Gratitude delivers a Past-Positive focus on past wins, great relationships, actions, and memories that bring immediate smiles.
Positive gossip is a generator of Future-Positive relationships. Intentional positive gossip increases positive team language and emotion. It becomes an activator of Future-Positive people connections, and increases accomplishment.
Gratitude and Positive Gossip both build community, helping teams reduce contempt.
Jenn and I have previously shared our appreciation for Dr. John Gottman's rendering of contempt as moral superiority. Contempt increases when team members continuously point to other people's Past-Negative mistakes. Contempt thinks like and sounds like, "I know better than you." Contempt can increase injury through gossip.
Both gratitude and positive gossip demand leadership INTENTIONALITY! Forty years of leading and training leaders has taught us that gratitude and positive gossip can be easily overlooked because of the busyness of leaders.
Lets build an easy process to deliver relationship results by combining gratitude with positive gossip, using this key Past-Positive question:
1. What are you thankful for?
Let me share a few of mine to get you started.
I am so thankful for my Lord's direction this year.
I am so thankful for Jenn's friendship and how we continue to grow together.
I am so thankful for the time we have spent with our kiddos and grand-kiddos.
I am so thankful for the 100 plus amazing clients that we worked with this year.
I am so thankful for the revenue that came in.
For some of this list we can easily directly thank the people mentioned (please do).
The leadership superpower emerges when we tell others about how thankful we are for the people on this list.
Turning gratitude into (positive) gossip!
I have been working hard on increasing my positive gossip skill for many years. My intention is to move away from saying negative things about other people unless it is to their face. This is helpful because if I am not delivering negative stories about other people in current conversations, then it is easier to remember to be a positive gossip.
Successful hockey teams that I played for found ways to implement this social rule: talk to me (to my logo), not about me (to my number). Negative gossip, behind my back, delivers no value. Successful families, businesses, and communities all, at some point, implement this powerful skill.
From my list above, lets follow the gratitude to positive gossip process with my thankfulness about where my relationship with Jenn is at this point in our marriage. Jenn and I do discuss this and I do thank her face-to-face, but the superpower comes when I authentically share my positive stories about her, behind her back, to other people in other conversations. You caught the key word in that last sentence... right?
Let me end with a little study that I just finished on gossip.
The word gossip is discussed five times in the book of Proverbs.
Let's explore today's big idea within the context of this wisdom.
A gossip betrays a confidence, but a trustworthy person keeps a secret.
Trust is an issue of the mouth. Building the habit of positive gossip reduces our chance of being an untrustworthy leader.
A perverse person stirs up conflict, and a gossip separates close friends.
This current world that we live in does not need more polarization, more separation. We desperately need leaders who will heal relationships, heal their teams, and heal our governments.
A gossip betrays a confidence; so avoid anyone who talks too much.
Leadership thrives by building trust and confidence betrayed destroys teams. Leaders that positively influence successful teams talk less, listen more, and ask great questions.
Without wood a fire goes out; without a gossip a quarrel dies down.
What if our wood fired positive gossip? What if we began to build people up through the words we say to other people?
Proverbs 26:22
The words of a gossip are like choice morsels; they go down to the inmost parts.
I have found over the years that the foundation of negative gossip seeps from insecurity. Growing the self-image of our people is one of the great leadership skills of our generation.
Leaders, please add this skill to your toolbox, and practice this process daily.
Bless you, as you heal our world, one conversation at a time.
Many of our corporate clients are engaging our services to energize their teams, focus their cultural mindset, and brainstorm processes around how to maximize their team COMMUNICATION.
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