Master Your Message

In this speech, I explored how every thought and word we express — even to ourselves — shapes the quality of our lives. Awareness is the first step toward mastering our message. What is your message? What are the messages that you send to others? What messages are you sending to yourself?

Mister Chair, fellow Toastmasters and guests, you may be saying to yourselves, what does he mean, my message? He’s the one standing up there; he’s supposed to be telling us his message.

But we all have messages. You started sending them from the minute you woke up this morning. You chose how to groom yourself for the day, giving yourself a message about who you think you are. You chose what clothes to wear, giving other people a message about how to perceive you.

We live our lives awash in a sea of messages, do we not? There is the daily tide of cacophonous and competing messages that we receive from the media, and from all the electronic devices that we surround ourselves with. I personally carry with me no fewer than four such devices that give me messages, from simple to sophisticated. The pedometer at my waist gives me information about how far I’ve walked in a day. (More walking is better, but that’s a different speech.) It also has a handy little timer function. The watch on my wrist gives me info about the time, here and in Vancouver, the day and the date, and it’s got a timer function too. Simple messages. 

And then there’s my smartphone; aptly named, it’s smarter than me. (—Don’t worry, Mister Chair, I’ve turned it off!) Now we’re getting into some highly sophisticated messages. This one was sold two years ago when I bought it as being “future proof”. Ha! When I was preparing this speech I counted the number of apps and other functions on it, would anyone like to guess how many there are? … There are no fewer than 66 apps on this device, including a great timer function. —Oh, 67 now, I just added a QR reader. All those apps give me messages, especially the email app, which nags me constantly. How many of you regularly feel plagued by your email inbox? It’s impossible to keep up! 

Then there’s the tablet computer I carry in my coat pocket, a Blackberry Playbook. The main message I get from that one is, “It’s time to buy an Apple iPad!”

But all those messages are external. I want to talk to you about our internal messages, both the messages we send to others and the messages we send to ourselves. Those other messages we can’t control, though I do suggest you simply turn them all off for a certain period every day. Our internal messages we do have some control over; how are you doing in that department? 

I know that when I ask myself the question about the messages I’m sending, in a key area of my professional life, I’m forced to admit that I often come up short. As a teacher of elementary schoolchildren, aged 9 or 10 in grades 4 and 5, sending messages is my stock in trade. But I spend a lot of time during the school day haranguing and cajoling my students into doing what I want them to do. It is not uncommon for me to repeat a request for a simple action, such as taking out their planners, four, five or even more times before I get action from all the students, and by the end of that time I’m sounding pretty frustrated. 

I simply get too stressed in my interactions with them. Yesterday, for example, in one of my French classes, I got annoyed with a boy who rarely pays attention, an intelligent boy too, who would be failing French if we still held the students accountable; but that’s definitely a whole other speech. Well, I got angry with him for talking through the lesson, and I named him, and I blamed him, and I shamed him.

How can this be an effective way to send my message? It isn’t; very often I don’t even like to hear myself. The students, pretty evidently, are tuning me out. This is especially evident when a colleague of mine comes into the classroom to teach a lesson, as she occasionally does, and they miraculously snap to attention.

My challenge is to change those messages. Awareness is key, that’s the first step; but it needs to be followed by patient, consistent action.

And then there are the messages that remain inside us, the ones that we send only to ourselves, messages that we rarely talk about. I invite you to ask yourself, how are you doing with those messages? 

Again, when I ask myself that question, there’s an issue. We all make mistakes in our lives, both little ones and big ones, it’s inevitable, it’s the condition of being human. But I’ve come to realize that I have a little mantra that I play in my head whenever I make a mistake, which is multiple times daily, and that mantra is, “Andrew, you’re an idiot.” Sometimes I’ll just shorten it to, “Idiot”. And I’ll play that message to myself at odd times, just in reflecting about mistakes I’ve made in the past: “You’re an idiot.”

Think of that message, repeating itself in my mind, day after day and year after year. It occurs to me that bringing this thought down upon myself has been like pouring endless drops of acid rain into my soul. That message is poison; over time, it has hurt my life force.

Again, awareness is key. At least yesterday, after my moment with Keshawn, I didn’t do that to myself. The good news is that I went to him afterwards, and straightened it out between us.

Now, I’m talking to you, and I’m inviting you to think. I often ask my kids to show thumbs up when they’ve done some thinking. So, thumbs up if you’ve thought of one place in your life where the messages you’re sending, internally to yourself, or externally to others, are not now what they should be. It doesn’t even need to be something big; start with something small. Awareness; awareness is key. And now that you’re aware of it, what are you going to do?

I’ve made up some cards, and I invite you to take one, or more; they’re on the table over there. Write a short, simple statement on it; mine is, “Endless calm, endless patience”. Post the card where you’re sure to see it several times daily. I have one on my bathroom mirror and another inside the door of my cupboard at work. Read; repeat; reflect. Read; repeat; reflect. Use it often to reinforce your new, more effective message.

You don’t have to fix your message all in a day! But little by little, and drop by mindful drop, let’s work on our messages, let’s make them more effective. Ladies and gentlemen, I believe that I can, and I believe that you can too.