December 10, 2009PowerPhrase: Dangerous pedestals
It’s human nature to want to support people who are gracious and undermine people who aren’t. When someone is on a pedestal, they have a long way to fall. As speaker coach Jane Atkinson observes, Tiger Woods illustrated this point in technicolor.
Jane’s advice is to back away form the pedestal.
It’s too easy to believe your own press. If you talk a good game but don’t walk it, you’ll go through life with a target on your back.
This comes under step 3 in Speaking Strong, which is to Mean What You Say. I detail it in the section of my SpeakStrong book called “Protect the Power” because that’s what it does. The specific chapter is titled “Match your talk and your walk.”
Don’t play small. Just avoid a superhuman image you can’t live up to. And if someone tries to pin one on you, let them know,
- I’m comfortable with who I am and proud of what I do. I am also humbly aware of my limits, and wary of being placed on a pedestal. Please relate to me as the human that I am.
2 Comments »
RSS feed for comments on this post.
| TrackBack URI
You can also bookmark
this on del.icio.us or check the cosmos
It feels that we are often living in a society of entitlement. Celebrity culture is idolized, encouraging people to rise up as far as they can and allowing them to fall. I feel when you loose grip on what really matters, your words seem to rarely match your actions.
Comment by Ashley — December 10, 2009 @ 9:31 pm
It takes a lot of maturity not to get puffed up and deflated. I find myself getting a bit full of myself when things are going well and a bit down when they aren’t. It’s an Izzie thing and I try to just stay conscious and watch rather than act it out. You’re right, Ashley, the foundation is to keep the focus on what matters.
Death does that. It strips all pretense away.
Comment by merylrunion — December 10, 2009 @ 10:01 pm