Self-awareness
The mindful path through gossip.
We live in a society where success and gossip go hand in hand. We only need to scroll through social media to find mountains made of molehills with conjecture on people’s perceived ‘failures’ rocketing towards “cancel culture”.
Calculated clickbait headlines are designed to inflate reactions and make hearsay viral, with readers falling prey to a website’s goal to drive traffic. The notion of guilty until proven innocent pervades gossip.
Worse still, the right to privacy is void in the digital world. Private conversations are all-too-often dragged into the public eye and sensationalised into ill-founded opinions.
When my life was more public, gossip affected me on a very personal level. While I perceived it as damaging my image, luckily my reputation remained intact, and it empowered me to get to know myself and rebuild my confidence to a stronger level than before.
It takes a huge amount of willpower to overcome malicious lies – to sidestep the drama and not waste time defending yourself. It is an exhausting situation and difficult to navigate. The situation compounds when you overreact and let toxic behaviour challenge your self-beliefs.
We are all human. We make mistakes. It is inevitable at times we’ll react in ways that could jeopardise the respect we’ve accrued over many years. Millionaire Warren Buffet once said, “It takes 20 years to build a reputation, and five minutes to ruin it.”
So, what can we do when our mum’s advice “sticks and stones may break our bones, but names will never hurt us” just doesn’t cut it?
The good news is almost anything in today’s digital world is fleeting. The vast over-creation of content and the inevitable plethora of personal dramas will swamp any stories about you before long. The mountains made from those molehills erode as people become interested in the next Trump-related blunder (and there are always more of those to come).
The best way to handle a dented reputation or an intentional yet vacuous smear campaign is to lay low. Answer questions simply and authentically. Own our errors of judgement. Be utterly bland in our own commentary, and people will lose interest. Free yourself to focus on things that matter to you. Reflect. Forgive.
You deserve to move forward in life with an open heart, shoulders back and your head held high, knowing that you did what you could with what you knew at the time.
Gossiping is toxic. When we judge others, it can be because they have something we want. Perhaps we want more freedom or better boundaries? When we speak negatively about someone it erodes parts of ourselves. It lowers our vibration and damages our own reputation, relationships, and health.
By practicing mindfulness and self-reflection, we can call out our own shortcomings when a flicker of drama comes our way. We can honour karma. When we energise our boundaries and explain graciously without judgement that “we don’t want to have conversations like this” when others are fuelling gossip, it enlightens their own conscious awareness.
We feel so much better when we share stories of others’ successes and attributes rather than their shortcomings. If your reputation is under threat remember the words of Winston Churchill: “Success is not final, failure is not fatal. It is the courage to continue that counts”.
Justine is a self-awareness writer and intuitive/meditation guide.