Are You Building Others Up or Tearing Them Down?

Words are very, very powerful. They have the potential to transform lives, for the better or for the worse.  I think we forget that, and sometimes folks tend to be flippant with their comments, not realizing what the effect will be.

I start from the place of believing that people really intend well. If you are in a service business, I think you really have to want to help people or you won't do very well.  It's hard to fake caring, and it's impossible to fake it for very long, even if you manage to pull it off in the short run.

Part of caring about people is using your words (both written and spoken) to build people up rather than to tear them down.

I regularly follow a wide variety of grant writing blogs to keep in touch with what's going on in the field and what my fellow writers are doing.  Most of them are excellent, and I can tell from their writing that they are caring people who are trying to make a positive difference in the world.  There is one, though, that has a bit of a nasty competitive edge to it.  It's not the competitive part that bothers me (those of you who know me know that I love a good competition!), but the nastiness of it.

For example, in my posts on The Grant Goddess Speaks blog, I will often cite things that you should not do, and I'll use an example of something someone has done poorly as an instructive tool for how to do it right.  I try my best to do it gently and kindly, but sometimes the best way to explain how to do something well is to illustrate how it looks when it is done incorrectly.

But this nasty blog I'm referring to likes to post criticism of other grant writers for no good reason.  It's not instructive. It's just  mean.  Foe example, in a recent post, the author made a comment about some grant writers who seem to prefer to write about grant writing more than actually writing grants.  He made this comment as an excuse, I think, for why he hadn't been posting regularly to his own blog, to give the impression that he is just much to busy with grant writing to worry about the blog. He could have made that point simply, if he chose to, but why did he have to do it in a way that made other grant writers seem less successful?  His post was not directed at me, but it was offensive nonetheless.

In the old view of the business world, it was commonly believed that you could make it to the top by stepping all over others.  That's just not the way it is these days.  In fact, I don't think it was every really that way.  You don't build yourself up or build your business by tearing down others. The best you can hope for with that approach is to pull them into the mud with you.  Why would you want to do that?

The real path to success is through lifting others up. Examine the words you use in speech and print.  Are you building others up or tearing them down?

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