People Should Know

People should know the best things about themselves.

I always used to cringe at the sound of my voice on a recording. I’d watch a video of myself and think, “That’s what people hear when I talk? How does anyone listen to me?”

Then people started to tell me that I was nice to listen to, that my voice had a calming or even soothing quality to it. I heard some version of this feedback from people I know well, and people I don’t know so well. The comments came in multiple live and recorded contexts, like facilitating a training, recording a podcast, and leading a simple guided meditation. The first few times I heard it, I thought I’d just come across some anomaly of a person who had peculiar preferences when it came to the art of the spoken word. But after I heard the same unsolicited feedback in different contexts from people who had no real reason to share their thoughts with me, I had to reconsider my assessment of myself and what I sound like.

Humans like what is known. Where something is unknown, the negativity bias that has been baked into our brains for hundreds of thousands of years tells us that the unknown thing is most likely not good. We spend a lot of anxiety on protecting ourselves from life’s unknowns, and we spend a lot of other types of resources creating a sense of control where there is none. We assume that the things we don’t know about ourselves are most likely be the worst things about ourselves. They are there, and we can’t see or articulate these parts of ourselves, but that others can see them. That’s not what most would call a “good time”. It’s true. Negative things about what we do and how we do it can hang out in unknown spaces in our heads. In fact, there is essentially always going to be something there. Each of us need to know that this is happening. But that’s only part of the picture.

Many people don’t know what their greatest strengths are until multiple others take the initiative to tell them. But when we know what we’re good at, we can do more of it. When we do more of what we’re good at, we’re more likely to thrive. The unknown isn’t just an invisible container for the negative. It’s just as likely to be a container for the best things about a person.

Tell people what you think they’re good at. Tell them what you like about them and what you admire about them. Tell them about the positive impact they have on you. Do it unsolicited. It doesn’t have to be big, and it doesn’t have to be a serious, emotional conversation. We change lives when we help people see the best in themselves.

Tell people the best things about themselves that they might not know. If you don’t tell them, maybe no one else ever will, and we all deserve to know.