Think Not Talking Will Save You?
Guess Again, While Your Reputation and Your
World Crumble

7 Toxic Reputational Disasters Caused by Self-Inflicted Silence

  1. Silence is toxic! I know you know this.
  2. Silence is communication reputation suicide.
  3. Silence is a profoundly stupid, irreversible choice.
  4. Silence is a permanent, memorable mistake.
  5. Silence, when you are wrong, betrays everyone who ever trusted you.
  6. Silence makes you look like a perpetrator or predator, or someone who helps them.
  7. Self-imposed gaps in communication often cause recurrent, forever problems.

Your silence means you:

  • Can’t blame the lawyers. Perpetrators are in charge of their own integrity.
  • Can’t blame the bosses. The perceived perpetrator manages their own sense of honesty.
  • Can’t blame the media. This kind of behavior is what they thrive on.
  • Can’t blame the bloggers, bloviators, or backbench quarterbacks. It’s your reputation vacuum, your destiny. Remain silent, and someone else will fill the void with what you are trying to avoid.

For those perpetrators who fail to manage their own destiny, someone is waiting on a digital platform somewhere, or with the evening news, to do it for them.

Silence prevents your friends and supporters from helping you.

Silence – followed by the perfect response arriving late, by surprise, and where the communications are mumbled, bumbled, and bungled – will always be described and remembered as mumbled, bumbled, and bungled.

Silence followed by the perfect response produces the same embarrassing, humiliating, predictable questions every time:

  • Where were you?
  • Is this all you have?
  • What were you thinking?
  • What were you waiting for?
  • Why did you cover this up?
  • Isn’t this just too little too late?

The Universal Law of Personally Inflicted
Communication and Reputation Disasters

No one really cares about what happens to perpetrators, especially those who are truly self-inflicted. They will be fun to poke at, though.

BEST ADVICE: Avoid the Reputation Repair Boys

Using these incredibly obvious and transparent tactics makes you both liars. Get to the truth. Say it out loud and say it often. It’s truth that restores integrity.