Be a Better Person
A friend and I have been talking about a mutual friend. We haven’t been saying very nice things. We’ve been judging the mutual friend’s behavior. That isn’t kind at all. We have talked about how the mutual friend has poor communication skills and often talks for longer than is necessary. Having these conversations with my friend has become a little too common. Sometimes the friend says, “You should hear what our mutual friend has said.” I get excited to hear the gossip. Really, that’s what it is, just gossip.
During one of our recent gossip sessions, my friend recognized that we are flipping back and forth between being snarky in our conversations about our mutual friend then talking about how we want to practice the Buddhist teaching of right speech. It’s one thing to find humor in things, but should we be doing it at the expense of someone else? I told my friend that I don’t think this practice is the way for us to communicate.
I decided at that moment that I should come up with useful feedback for the mutual friend. I can create a message that presents my observations and then come from a place of compassion and explain my feelings and needs about the communications.
I’m getting nervous just thinking about creating this message. Conflict, even small conflict, can be difficult.
As I spent my day thinking about what the message would be, I realized how one-sided my worldview can be. I see the world through the Rocky Mountain Yogi lens. This lens can be very dualistic. I see myself as the expert communicator, the mutual friend as a deficient communicator. But how does the world see me? I mean, I’m kidding myself if I think that no one is talking about me. What are they saying? Would I want to know?
I’ve spent much of my life working toward perfection. When I was a child, my dad would say of himself, “I’ve never made a mistake. The one time I made a mistake was when I thought I had made a mistake.” Hearing those words, I set an expectation that I had to be perfect. That, of course, is impossible.
So now I am wondering, if I didn’t expect myself to be perfect, would I be kinder and gentler to the world around me? Would I stop gossiping about other people?
On one of my favorite guilty pleasures, “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” Ru always ends the show with the phrase, “If you don’t love yourself how in the hell you gonna love somebody else?” Is it my own lack of self-compassion that has me critical of others? Possibly.
Deepak Chopra is quoted as saying, “What other people think of you is none of your business. If you start to make it your business, you’ll be offended the rest of your life.” But what about me? Do I care what I think of me? While I do think that it’s important for me to recognize places that I can improve upon myself (like not gossiping), I also think some of my thoughts about myself can be too critical and become too painful. So, perhaps to alleviate that pain, I am turning outside instead of inside. I have the opportunity to take a look inside myself and see what behaviors I can do better at. But let’s be honest, being introspective is hard. Having that self awareness can even feel shameful at times. When I see a mirror of myself in others, it’s so much easier to say, “Oh look at that guy. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Did you see that? Let’s chat about it.”
I think talking about our mutual friend has been a great example for me to understand my own imperfections and recognize that they are okay. While I agree with Deepak’s quote of, “What other people think of you is none of your business,” I think I would prefer to hear from others what they are thinking, rather than having them gossip behind my back.
So for me, I am working on the message and courage to speak to that mutual friend. I’m also looking introspectively at myself and wondering how I can improve my own communication with myself. I want to be compassionate and clear with what I want. I want to be able to nudge myself to be a little bit better at least once in a while.
