In the speaking world, it seems like everybody wants to ask everybody else, “What’s your topic? What’s your area of expertise? What are you an expert on?”
So they ask me what are my topics, and I think they’re expecting me to say, “How to increase your sales by 20%” or, “Five success habits guaranteed to change your life today.” And I’m often met with looks of disappointment and confusion when I tell them that I’ve got a few different areas of specialty, but the themes that run through everything I do include authenticity and awareness. I’m often told, “Kevin, people don’t even know what those things are.”
How come when we see what other people are doing, we just naturally assume that might be a good thing for us to do as well? I’ll give you an example: If you’ve ever been to a hockey rink like this, especially when kids are playing, you’ll observe a phenomena where good people – people who contribute positively to their communities, maybe contribute to really worthwhile causes, maybe sit on a parent council board at their children’s school, are good parents, great friends – come to an environment like this and they turn into rabid werewolves, spitting venom at volunteer referees, screaming at children, yelling at the parents of those children and just adding their voice to a cacophony of viciousness and toxicity. Why is that okay? We don’t even seem to think about it; we just add our voice and energy into it.
It seems to me to be a microcosm of what happens on a much larger scale, especially whenever there are two sides, two different opposing points of view that are involved, then we get the hair up on the back of our neck. We’re like cornered cats, put into a position where we want to come forward with our claws out.
What Are We Doing To Ourselves … And Our Kids??
Why? Why does it always have to be, even when kids are out playing, that one side is right and one side is wrong, and we lose all sense of self-awareness? We seem to feel it’s okay, because that’s what other people are doing. Is it? Have we ever considered what that’s doing to us, let alone what example we’re setting for the generations coming up behind us?
The more I observe that behavior and I sense that kind of energy, the more I’m becoming convinced that whenever you’ve got two sides, no matter who ends up scoring more goals than the other by the time it all washes out, the real winners are the ones that can stay calm and observant and enjoy the whole thing either way.
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