8. Speak well of others

I’ve been in education for forty five years. I have been in seven different school systems as a teacher and as an administrator. In each district I discovered the pain that rumors and gossip can cause others. A rumor is starting a story based upon a half truth or no truth. It just starts based upon what someone sees or hears and they draw a conclusion that to them just seems logical. This logical conclusion is usually a witch hunt and the person who starts the rumor is looking for evidence to support their belief about someone or something. If it is someone the motive is revenge, if it is something the motive is usually pride or arrogance as they seek to prove a point based upon the failure of a system, a political party, or a religious belief; kind of like a see I told you so.

Gossip on the other hand is the spread of information about someone’s behavior of which the end result has nothing to do with those that are doing the gossiping. Both are painful and quite frankly immature. In school when kids do this they call it drama. Believe it or not the kids see this as mature because they have observed their parents doing this at the dinner table or even teachers doing this in conversations with other teachers or in the hallway. A faculty room can be a haven for this type of unwanted and negative behavior.

Let’s say you have a piece of wood, a nail, and a hammer. Pretend the wood is a person, and the nail is a nasty rumor about that person. If you hammer in the nail, you’re obviously hurting him or her. If you then pull out the nail…well, there’s still a hole in the wood, and the damage has been done. Rumors and Gossip can cause us to make some really bad decisions and bad choices.

Letting a rumor influence your behavior is like letting someone else make a big decision for you. Let’s say you hear that your boss plans to call a Snow Day tomorrow because of a pending blizzard. Expecting a day off, you stay up late and have a few too many cocktails.. The next morning, the blizzard turns out to be nothing more than a drizzle, and work isn’t cancelled after all. Doh! You go to work hung-over and are miserable the whole day. Worse yet you go around bad mouthing your boss like it was his fault that it didn’t snow. . Here’s another example: the gossip grapevine has it that the new secretary that was just hired is snobby and arrogant, so you avoid her. Years later, you run into her shopping and you learn that she’s an extremely nice person and not a snob at all! You missed spending a lot of time with a cool person because you judged her based on a rumor. Once you understand the damage they can do, how do you go about breaking the chain of rumors and gossip? It’s very simple, make the rumor stop with you if you decide that the rumor is hurtful in some way, make a stand. Decide that you don’t want to take part in spreading it. Others may continue to circulate the gossip, but you’ve made a personal choice to stay out of it. Chances are that the rumor will die out much more quickly than if you had joined the buzz. The bottom line, just don’t do it, and don’t be selective about it.

Do it consistently and do yourself a favor and be loyal to

those that are not present. You will earn the trust of those that are. If you join in with those that are bad mouthing others when they are not present that same group probably just can’t wait for you to leave the room so they can start talking about you.