Words

From Seth Godin’s What Matters Now, I really liked the page by Rajesh Setty which suggests the following 5 steps to help enrich other people’s lives:

1. Commit - Commit to lifetime-relatinoships that span events, companies, causes, and geographic boundaries.
2. Care - Care for the concerns of others as if they are your own.
3. Connect - Aim to connect those who will benefit and enrich each other’s lives in equal measure.
4. Communicate - Communicate candidly.  Tell people what they should hear rather than what they want to hear.
5. Expand Capacity - Aim to expand people’s capacity to help them give and get more from their own lives.

I sit here and ask myself how I can apply these steps to my own life.  What can I do to enrich other people’s lives?  In the end, aren’t we all inter-connected in one way or another?

#4 actually speaks to me the most.  In corporate America, I’ve observed that people are so damn afraid of speaking candidly (this is something that Jack Welch is a huge proponent of) because either they’re too afraid to get in trouble, being wrong, or that their high-ups are so bent on being right.  Maybe people don’t like being wrong because it makes them feel negative towards themselves.  But if you’re never wrong, how can one learn?  Is speaking “politically correctly” so damn important that people have lost what they’re born with?  Think of your kids or when you yourself was a kid, did you usually say what you wanted to say?  Or did you have this massive internal filter that dictates your every sound?