Gossip or Moral Lesson: Determining Your Intent

Life fully loved
25 February 2024

Gossip or Moral Lesson: Determining Your Intent

“What do you think of Matilda?”

My daughter’s friend asked me this question last week when I visited Montreal to spend a few days.

I had thoughts about Matilda and, frankly, they weren’t positive. My instinct was to remain silent and reveal nothing.

Confidentiality

Working in HR for 20 years and now as a coach, people tell me lots of confidential information. I maintain confidentiality because it’s professional as well as ethical. Confidentiality allows people the space to explore thoughts and feelings in a trust-filled environment. Violating confidentiality destroys trust, hence, the reason I clam up.

I’ve noticed that, over time, my respect for confidentiality has gradually morphed from “keeping secrets” to “not sharing what I’m really thinking.” It happened slowly, without my awareness, until I eventually realized this isn’t particularly healthy.

Positive Intelligence

A fine line exists between judgement and blameless discernment. Positive Intelligence describes the difference as being in saboteur mode, judgement, versus sage mode, blameless discernment. I’ve blurred the line between the two, seeing them as the same.

I’ve judged confidentiality as all-encompassing. Simply put, to be ethical, I thought I must always keep my mouth shut.

Socialization

As a child I was taught, If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.

I firmly believe that what you put out in the world returns to you in equal measure. If I speak ill of others, others will speak ill of me. The same is true of speaking positively.

At the same time, at what point does this childhood maxim become toxic positivity? You know what I mean – that false, chirpy, avoidance-of-reality way of behaving.

Learning through Experience

I learn best by hearing life experiences from other people, and I suspect you do too.

Humans have a deep-rooted need for stories and the ones based on personal experience resonate most:

Think about Aesop’s Fables or Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Lessons in morality, taught for children’s ears;
Consider how many businesspeople enjoy reading biographies about other leaders. They want to apply the learnings to their own careers;
Podcasters like Mel Robbins say their top-ranked episodes are always the ones about success stories – how someone got from A to B.

Seeing confidentiality as all-or-nothing means none of the lessons from experiences or stories gets shared.

Determining Intent

I need to identify my intent when asked to share my opinion or lessons learned that involve other people. Is my intent to wound (saboteur energy) or to heal (sage wisdom)?

If my intent is to wound, it’s gossip and I should clam up. That’s Judge Judy speaking. If I want to instruct, which can potentially lead to healing, maybe I can apply blameless discernment to the situation and find appropriate ways to share by hiding names and certain identifying life circumstances. I see that reading articles regularly.

Matilda

Back to Matilda, whom you likely realize by now is a made-up name. I won’t share the context of how I know her because that’s an “identifying life circumstance.”

Intent: would I want my daughter or her close friend to know how to handle a person like Matilda? Yes, undoubtedly. My intent isn’t to wound Matilda but to teach them the lesson I learned.

So I did. I shared my personal experiences with Matilda. I explained that I ignored my gut reaction to her for too long. My gut warned me about Matilda when I met her, but I ignored it and let myself be swayed by pretty words instead. Then I got bitten.

My lesson was about trusting your intuition as another source of information and to look beyond the surface to what’s underneath.

I can maintain confidentiality while sharing lessons learned by allowing my sources to remain anonymous. It’s not about who, it’s about how and what.

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