Have you ever felt good about saying bad things?
Hi, I'm J. D. Taylor. I'm the Principal Consultant and Coach at Crucial Transformations and the author of Taylored Tips.
Like some of you, I grew up in a pretty verbally violent house. Words were weaponized to attack, to control, to coerce, to compel, to punish, and when I went to work, I found that things weren't that much different. It seems to be that the people whose ideas won, that the people who inhabited the positions of power and authority were the people who seemed to behave the same way. They were imposing, hostile, coercive, aggressive in their approach, so I thought this must be the way that we succeed in life. This was easy for me because by nature I was a big, imposing, loud person, so this just came naturally to me as well. When I was in my early 20s, I was a young husband, I was a young father, I was a young executive and I had a cataclysmic experience that occurred in my life, that forced me to reconsider this point of view, shook me to my core. I committed then and there to set about the journey of process of trying to figure out how I could behave in a new and different, better way. One day, I had just finished cutting my grandma's grass and I sat down; and I sat down in her easy chair and was popping the top off the cold can of Country Time lemonade that she always had waiting for me. And in the bookshelf next to me, I noticed this warn, tattered spine of a book. I was intrigued so I pulled it off the shelf and I looked at the cover and it said: The Greatest Thing in the World. Well of course I wanted to know more so I opened it up and started reading. I was really interested in what I was reading and when I got to page 21, the author's words hit me with a force and a power in my head and my heart that I had never experienced before. Let me show you what he said. He said:
“We are inclined to look upon bad temper as a very harmless weakness. We speak of it as a mere infirmity of nature, a family failing, a matter of temperament, not a thing to take into very serious account in estimating a man's character.
The peculiarity of ill temper is that it is the vice of the virtuous. It is often the one blot on an otherwise noble character. You know men who are all but perfect, and women who would be entirely perfect, but for an easily ruffled, quick tempered or "touchy" disposition. This compatibility of ill temper with high moral character is one of the strangest and saddest problems of ethics.
No form of vice, not worldliness, not greed of gold, not drunkenness itself, does more to un-civilize society than evil temper.
For embittering life, for breaking up communities, for destroying the most sacred relationships, for devastating homes, for withering up men and women, for taking the bloom off childhood; in short, for sheer gratuitous misery producing power, this influence stands alone.
You'll see then why Temper is significant. It is not in what it is alone, but in what it reveals. It is the intermittent fever which bespeaks unintermittent disease within; the occasional bubble escaping to the surface which betrays some rottenness underneath; a sample of the most hidden products of the soul dropped involuntarily when off one's guard; in a word, the lightning form of a hundred hideous sins. For a want of patience, a want of kindness, a want of generosity, a want of courtesy, a want of unselfishness, all are instantaneously symbolized in one flash of temper.”
Here's the Taylored Tip: I heard it said once that rationalization is legitimizing impropriety. Think about that for a minute. Rationalization is legitimizing impropriety. I realized at that moment in that chair, with that book on my lap, that if I was going to transform my life, I was going to have to stop legitimizing the past to rationalize my future. I changed and I can help you change too.
Remember, rationalization is legitimizing impropriety.
I hope this Taylored Tip will help you leave conflict behind. Good luck!
If you’d like help with your unresolved conflict, please reach out using my contact information shown on the screen. And if you enjoyed this Taylored Tip, please share it with your family members and friends. Give it a thumbs up! Subscribe if you'd like to hear more Taylored Tips and if you need a Taylored Tip customized just for you, leave that request in the comments.
