Word Count: 656 (reading time: 4 minutes, 20 seconds)

Bad news is caused by intentionally chosen negative language.

Peace and civility come from intentionally chosen positive language and behavior.

• How to build a constructive, positive, and happy environment at work, in the community, and home.
• How to remove the negativity of snipy, nasty, and upset people from your workplace, community, and even your home life.
• Become obsessed enough to wage peace, eradicate bad language, and have a civil, decent, and productive life.

Waging Peace

The crucial ingredients in civil, decent, helpful, and important communication are positive language and behavior. Yes, it’s that simple, but still extremely hard to accomplish every day all day. Experience shows that one of the most powerful drivers of leadership success is a relentless reliance on positive language. Talking about what to do rather than what not to do.

What’s required first is the eradication of negative language. This step eliminates negative behavior, decisions, and attitudes. How does one really do that? Can peace, tranquility, civility, and decency be that simple to achieve? A passionate commitment to positive language and behavior is challenging and persistently difficult for human beings to commit to. But help is here.

Eradicating Negative Language

When I’m teaching leadership how to get themselves out of trouble our first stop and constant commitment is to remove negativity of every kind from our daily lives, and the lives of others. This is a discipline that requires constant attention. The systematic removal of negativity from our lives will have immediate impact on everyone around you. They will notice. They will notice more when you insist that they too be positive as well and eliminate negativity. And you help them do that every day.

Getting started is the hard part but here’s a tool to help you do that.

Introducing The Bad News Eradicator

The Bad News Eradicator was designed to help eliminate defensive words and negative phrases from your speech, writing, decisions, and actions.

1. Keep the Bad News Eradicator near you. [Click here to see the complete list of bad news eradicating phrases]
2. Take it with you when you travel. 
3. Collect your own set of habitual negative phrases and words to eradicate
4. Add your negative habits to the eradicator sheet, then create their positive equivalents.
5. Get a whole new life. Give a whole new life to others.

How to use the Bad News Eradicator

Examples of Bad News Eradication

Negative Statement	Positive Change
1. “I can’t comment on what hasn’t happened.”	1. “When it happens, I’ll comment.”
2. “I can’t speak for them.”	2. “They can speak for themselves.”
3. “I don’t know.”	3. “Here’s what I know…”
4. “I wouldn’t say that.”	4. “What I would say is…”
5. “It didn’t happen that way.”	5. “Here’s what happened.”
6. “It’s never been done before.	6. “This is the first time.”
7. “It’s not too expensive.”	7. “It’s affordable.”
8. “Let’s not kid ourselves.”	8. “Let’s stay focused on what matters.”
9. “Nothing is impossible.”	9. “Everything is possible.”
10. “Please don’t hesitate to ask.”	10. “Please Ask.”
11. “That’s not a bad idea.”	11. “That could be a good idea.”

We’ll publish more soon.

Click here if you’d like to receive all 189 negative language CHANGE examples.

Click here to read: Time to Eradicate Your Bad News.

Click here to read: Time to Eradicate Your Bad News Volume 2.

Click here to read: The Seven Corrosive Powers of Negative Language.

Starting Back Up The Path To Decency: a Manifesto

Why a manifesto?

Seven big reasons:

1. To anticipate an answer to the most important questions for those interested in building a decency-based workplace culture, before they are asked.
2. To trigger and answer in advance the crucial questions you need to see, hear, and resolve. They will be about developing decency, civility, and integrity in your workplace.
3. To anticipate and answer in advance the questions that bother you most about what’s happening in our culture; the decency denial and deficit in America’s workplaces and in your workplace.
4. To help you bring your personal views of decency, civility, and integrity from your personal life, family community, and home into your working life.
5. To reveal the many pathways available to decency, civility, integrity, and trust.
6. Learn to recognize and prevent the victimization indecency and incivility cause.
7. Recognize and prevent leadership and management misbehaviors that trigger the incivility, and unconscionable behaviors that contaminate decent and civil culture.

The Pocket Decency Manifesto is your daily to-do list to inspire, to motivate, and to stimulate your energy and efforts in building a decency driven workplace. There are critical ingredients here designed to help you protect, defend, and preserve what you and others achieve along the path to a decency driven workplace.

Good luck.

Word count: 286 words (1 minute 40 seconds) 

1. The Nine Pillars Of A Decency Driven Workplace 

Candor: truth with an attitude delivered right now.  
Civility: patience, empathy, curiosity, tolerance. Small decencies. 
Ethics: seek ideal conduct, go the right way first, reject all alternatives and wrong ways. 
Humility: being humble; maintain modest opinion of one’s own importance or rank. 
Integrity: honest consideration and inclusion of other points of view. 
Openness: seeking and promptly addressing the concerns of others. 
Responsiveness: do it now, change it now, fix it now, stop it now, start it now. 
Reticence: resist the corrosiveness of negativity, criticism, and arrogance.  
Trust: Seek the absence of fear because fear is the absence of trust. 

2. The Three Most Powerful Civilities 

Listening: the greatest civility we can show another human being. 
Positivity: the only path to a successful future. All other routes lead only to trouble. 
Small Decencies: the principal ingredients of trust, respect, humility, acceptance, and greatness. 

3. The Most Crucial Ingredients Of A Decency Driven Workplace 

Obsession with civility, decency, humility, integrity, modesty, truth, and trust. 
Walk the talk: in every assembly, communication, conversation, document, event, meeting, proposal, and pitch.  
Immerse every idea, suggestion, attitude, and behavior in decency. 
Interpret everything in the context of civility, decency, integrity, trust, and truthfulness. 
Aggressively block, expose, and eliminate all barriers, interference, reluctance, and disparagement of decency, civility, and humility initiatives.  
Shun those who: belittle, demean, deny, denigrate, disparage, or espouse opposition to decency, civility, and truth. Your destiny is up to you to protect, defend, and preserve. 

An important to do list to a better, happier, more successful life: This is a life saving and happiness recovery strategy. The metaphor is the warning you get when you’re on an airliner: in case of sudden loss of cabin air pressure, put the oxygen mask on yourself first and then help others.This document reflects the ongoing loss of civility and decency in our lives and is designed to be your civility and decency “oxygen mask”. Do these for yourself first. That will enable you to help others.

Continue reading “How to Remove Indecency and Incivility from Your Life”

Introduction

Welcome to parts one and two of America’s Civility and Decency Manifesto. In this issue we feature two elements of the manifesto. The first comes from Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, who on June 9th, 2017 was inspired to initiate a national conversation about moral responsibilities of businesses. In our book, The Decency Code: The Leader’s Path to Building Integrity and Trust, Steve Harrison and I have taken elements of Tim Cook’s MIT commencement address and transformed them into the first part of America’s Civility and Decency Manifesto.In part two, The Civility Credo, Jim Lukaszewski proposes an actionable definition of civility.Dictionary.com defines a manifesto as, “A public declaration of intentions, opinions, objectives, or motives….” We would add the word “brief” and hope that you will find that as this document grows it will be useful in helping you develop your personal and organizational intentions, opinions and objectives in a way that is civil, decent and actionable.

Continue reading “America’s Civility and Decency Manifesto”