How to confidently speak the truth and still be cherished
A recent episode of the How to Be a Better Human podcast, featuring an interview with Luvvie Ajayi Jones, really spoke to me. Luvvie, a writer, activist and self-proclaimed professional troublemaker, isn’t afraid to speak her mind in a crowd. “Your silence serves no one,” she says.
In the episode, she encouraged us to get a little more comfortable with being uncomfortable and emphasised that being a professional troublemaker doesn’t mean making people in the room uncomfortable for the sake of it. Speaking up means having the courage to go against the status quo, to make something better than we first found it. To fix something broken.
If we don’t speak up or take action for what we believe in, we’ll regret it later.
A big reason behind the current ‘quiet quitting’ phenomenon (an updated term for workplace disengagement) is that young and newly appointed leaders don’t dare speak up against their senior leaders who are behaving badly and creating a toxic culture. They choose to be a bystander and do nothing about it, resulting in the rest of their team becoming disengaged because their leaders are modelling inaction.
Here are my key takeaways from Luvvie Ajayi Jones’ liberating episode:
Making a difference in the world is daunting. Instead, start small. Try making a difference with your co-workers or even friends and family first. If it’s still too intimidating, try with people you trust e.g. a good friend or our partner. Be like a domino. If you want to move the world, muster the courage to be the first to ‘fall’ so that the other dominos in the line will follow suit.
We’re not born with courage. Just like building muscle, courage needs constant practice. We must choose it. If you’re feeling fearful to speak up, rejoice, because fear is a call to growth, an opportunity to take another step closer to becoming a courageous leader.
There are 3 questions to ask yourself if you’re teetering on the edge of speaking up:
Do I mean it?
Can I defend it?
Can I say it thoughtfully?
Questions are a good method of challenging a person. If a coworker is making an inappropriate joke, try asking, “I’m curious. What did you actually mean by that?” If you decide to challenge your boss, “That’s interesting. Have you thought about another way of tackling this?” I’ve repeated this many times before: oftentimes, it’s not what we say, but how we say it.
I hope this mini-series has shed more light on what it takes to be a courageous leader and how we can all get there. I myself want to learn to be better at speaking the truth directly and objectively to others in kindness and without getting all emotional. I want to live an authentic life where I’m true to myself and no longer suppress my regrets, and I hope you’ll join me on my journey.●