“If you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” I’m not sure when it happened. But that’s no longer the adage people live by. Now it’s, “If you don’t have something nice to say, spread your negativity all over social media.”
We learned the first truth about holding our tongue in elementary school. We learned to be nice to others. We learned that if you want friends, you have to be kind and encourage people.
But later on in life, we get rewarded for rudeness and negativity. People laugh at our cruel jokes. Followers retweet our criticisms of the Osteens. Cynical bloggers gain page views. So we drift away from the “don’t say anything negative” philosophy to the “spew all your negativity” approach.
Then something very interesting happens. We begin to see our relationships are mostly shallow. We’re surrounded by other negative people. The folks you admire the most want nothing to do with you. They avoid you at all costs.
And we wonder what happened.
Could it be that our kindergarten teacher held the secret of life? The secret of friendship?
I don’t want to get to the end of my life with 10,000 retweets and loads of laughter echoing in my mind, only to realize I’ve been extremely lonely. I don’t want to have thousands of friends but nobody who wants to hang out with me when they’re feeling discouraged.
I want to be an encourager. I want people to gravitate to me, not just because they laugh, but because they feel built up from being around me.
This is so good!! Thank you for this post, it resonates deeply within me, and is such a wonderful reminder for me in this growing season of leadership I am being pushed into.