Think Before You Speak: Words Matter and Influence the Way People Think
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Words matter. The words that are coming out of your mouth, your parent's mouth, the President's mouth: They all matter, and they impact people. The huge anti-vax issue in the United States is a good example of this. People are being influenced in their behavior and health because of what a few individuals say about the vaccine. Things would go better if people would be more careful with what they say because the truth is in the ears of the listener. Whatever you hear, it will actually be up to you to believe or not. Join your hosts Bill Stierle and Tom as they talk about the power of words. Learn how the COVID situation isn't going to change if the narrative keeps going this way. Learn how to be informed and to believe in the narrative that serves you today.
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Think Before You Speak: Words Matter and Influence the Way People Think
Bill, we're going to talk about something that needs to be talked about. It's present in all of our episodes in some ways but it's important to really address it. Do the words we speak really matter? It's a big topic but it does sure seems like a lot of the words many of us are speaking don't matter.
This is a tough one. I know that we can do several episodes around truth regarding this. It’s because this is a conflict resolution communication show for both business, politics, personal lives and how we exist as human beings, it's understanding how to grapple, wrestle and struggle with the perception concept and reality of words making a difference. It's an important thing in our current day and age. The truth is in the ears of the beholder and it's unsettling to even say that.
It's unsettling to hear it too.
The truth is in the ears of the beholder. If the beholder believes as the Taliban does then their ears are hearing it through that filter. If it's hearing from the government that was there that was being supported by the US then it was going to be there in that space. A lot of times, human beings work better under crisis anyways. If you had a better plan for your future, would you take it?
If I had a better plan for a better future, yes, I might.
You might but do you?
Do you mean you always take action with that one? It's a different question.
It's like in that neighbourhood. If I'm not speaking and thinking in the way of that then it's hard for me to live into it. I have to use our words do matter because our words are influencing our things like thoughts and thoughts influence our physiology. Our physiology influences our actions. We need to think again and facilitate our way into picking better words, "Think again. What's my next better thought? What do I need next? What would make my life wonderful?" It's an important question because it keeps us in front of what may be our highest ideal is instead of our limiting belief, that the words that are in my head that are influencing our perspective and perception.
The Taliban, let's discuss that briefly. I don't want to go down a huge rabbit hole because we could spend a bunch of episodes just talking about what's going on in Afghanistan. One example that supports Words Matter is the fact that, when it became clear, the Taliban took over Afghanistan and the government that the US put in place rolled over and collapsed. The leader left the country.
The Republican National Party took off of their website information and language words about touting the negotiation that President Donald Trump had done with the Taliban to bring this two-decade-old war to an end. They felt, "I would imagine that those words might hurt them and they matter in that way. Therefore, let's take them off our website and we're not going to talk about that. We negotiated the end of this thing."
The way that messaging works is, "I just want people to remember the smallest thing, not to investigate the bigger issue. I put it in place and they couldn't do anything about it. If I would have stayed there, I could have won with the Taliban but I didn't want to kill a million people." Those are all sentences that meet the need for respect but also create the alternative message that "I could have done something but I chose not to because I'm a good guy."
Words do matter. There is a truth to it but it's also a human rights problem, compassion problem or even an optics problem. You go in and do something that causes a lot of death, loss or money. It's not going to look good to the general voting public. You want to take it only as far as you can and then you want to stretch it a little further than that. That's a little bit of the environment that we're in. It's, "What does it take to win?" Not, "What does it take to be right or truthful?" Truthful and right are behind winning.
What does it take to be compassionate? What does it take to make sure we don't abandon women and children? There are all sorts of things there. On the other flip side of the Republican Party taking language off their website, I thought it was interesting seeing President Joe Biden take ownership of the exit from Afghanistan saying, "The buck stops with me." It has been a long time since we've had a president take responsibility for his actions and own them.
He said, "I wasn't asking the right questions. I wasn't focusing fully on this. I was trusting others to do it. I did not give them enough power and money. I did not make those things available." It's hard about that because if he starts doing that decision-making when he comes into office in January 2021, whenever after the swearing-in ceremony, the first thing he does is allocate money for the withdraw of Afghanistan's that people's heads swirl and it becomes red meat for the opposition.
Words and actions matter. He didn't pick that first. He picked the pandemic and the vaccines first. We're just doing one thing. In fact, it was a little stunning. There was, "What is President Joe Biden going to do about transgender?" He goes, "He is focusing on the pandemic. Back off." He is not doing that one. That's not on the top of the list. The top of the list is pandemic and vaccination.
The reality is that the Donald Trump administration set the timetable for this withdrawal from Afghanistan for May of 2021. Sadly, had Joe Biden let that date stand and all this craziness happens, it's much easier to say, "We were stuck with that agreement by the previous administration. This is on Donald Trump's hands," but because he extended it several months and then this exit is still tragically not well done, you would think, "Why did you extend it? Didn't you plan during this time?" That's unfortunate.
Here's why words make a difference. Why words make a difference is we're talking about the truth of the mistakes that the Joe Biden administration made in the messaging and images. If Joe Biden would have come out at the beginning and said, "I want everybody to know at the start of this, this is going to be messy. We were focusing on the pandemic. We were not focusing on this. We are making our next best efforts as I have pivoted and chose to pivot now working towards Afghanistan." All of those pictures would have already been preset but he didn't say that. He said, "The government is not going to fall. We have time to get out. We're dealing with the issues. All the Americans will get out." He was giving a Donald Trumpian message of reassurance. I compared Joe Biden to Donald Trump.
He was setting a rosy scenario vision.
Luckily, it's not that adults can't do that and pivot. Tom, have you ever made something lighter for your kids before you brought them the bad news a week or two later? You're going to say, "I think we can get to Disneyland in two weeks." Two weeks come by, "I've got some bad news. We can't go this month. It needs to be in two more months." The kids go like, "What?" That's why words make a difference. It's like, "Can you be in truth and integrity all the time? Is our natural tendency to be optimistic, positive or in rosy-colored glasses to talk about things?" There are several things I can give former President Donald Trump a pass on by him saying something to be optimistic and supportive to calm people down but also going, "You went too far or little. I wouldn't see why you gave the rosy message but not the strongest language play." Words do make a difference.
Let's take another example of where words make a difference and some of the consequences of certain types of words and how they make a difference. We mentioned briefly in a past episode about Phil Valentine, who is a conservative radio show host. He was vocal about not being supportive of the vaccine. It wasn't that he was completely anti-vax. It was just that he was being in his opinion of it.
He picked the edge that his audience wants to listen to. That's what he did. He said, "I got to be on one side or the other. I'm picking this thing. I'm going to write a mockery song about vaccines and it's going to be catchy. I'm going to get a lot of hits, plays and viral." We could go on YouTube and see how many listens or views that video has gotten. That's called the range of influences because that's where his advertisers were looking to pay him.
He gets a lot of ears listening to his radio show and a lot of eyeballs on his videos.
That is of interest to an advertiser. There is a real dollar at making up something and doing it.
The real impact of his words, for example, he was vocal in saying he wasn't going to get the vaccine. He thought he had about a 1% chance of catching COVID. Those words to me are problematic on their face. What does a 1% chance mean? Do you have a chance of getting COVID from 1 out of every 100 people you come in contact with?
It's interesting to think about what that word means but it's certainly proportionalized to say, "There's a very low chance of me getting COVID." He gets COVID and ends up in the hospital so severely sick. He quickly realized, "My words do have an impact. I need to come out and tell people they should get the vaccine because they don't want this experience that I'm having in the hospital."
There are people that are seeing the impact now. Do his words make a difference now that he has passed? Will society weigh those words at or more than the vaccination song?
I don't know that it will. More people heard the song or saw the video because it was controversial at that time and it got a lot of attention because of that. More people saw it and more people's beliefs were solidified in not getting the vaccine or people that may have been on the fence who were like, "I guess I'm not going to get the vaccine because he said, ‘There's such a little chance of getting it.’" He was casting doubt and skepticism on the vaccine and that played into his conservative audience biases. Those words were very powerful at that time.
His brother though, as he was in the hospital, in some ways, gets a lot more attention because, let's face it. Phil Valentine's radio show is a Tennessee local radio. It has syndicated other stations but this guy was not Howard Stern or maybe even Joe Rogan in the podcast world. He is not on Fox News with a national audience every day but he has got some audience.
His brother then goes on and gets on every national TV show on CNN, Fox, MSNBC and all these different outlets saying, "My brother wants me to help share the message. Everybody should get a vaccine. When he gets back on the air, he is going to tell you this himself." A lot of us heard that message who never knew who Phil Valentine was before this such issue. Unfortunately, he has died of COVID-19. He never got out of the hospital to deliver that message so he never got to speak those words that might have made a bigger difference.
It's not a Rock Hudson or Magic Johnson moment. It's not, "We have an elite athlete that got this that has to live with the damage to his immune system, he might die over it or there are the number of deaths that took place." It's unsettling to even ask the question about how the AIDS epidemic was handled versus the Coronavirus epidemic and the Ebola epidemic. Those were all handled very differently. We were all on the Ebola thing. There was one case that got on our shore. We fought the battle there.
The whole point of going to Afghanistan or Iraq was to fight terrorism in their country, not to allow it to come to our country. That's not what the former president did. He did not try to fight it in their country. He tried to cost-cut, "We don't need all those people. Fire all those people. What do you do with all that research and preventative strategy from the virus? We don't need that."
Are you talking about the pandemic response team at The White House?
Yes. "What do you need that for?" There's no mindset to take a look at it so the thing came to our shore. It says 630,000, 640,000 people have passed on the Coronavirus.
Maybe people do have an understanding that words they say matter because they know if they say something, they could stick their foot and mouth and get in trouble. People don't understand it enough to study it, get some skill and learn how to make your words really have the impact and matter the way you want them to.
The truth doesn't matter when it comes to beliefs, perspectives and perceptions. To have a scale of things, watch how weird this gets quickly. In the mid-'80s and late '80s, the AIDS epidemic started. Until now, 700,000 people. When it really got going was in the '90s. That's 30 to 35 years, roughly speaking. In one year, 630,000 people in the United States have died of Coronavirus. That's the difference.
Both of those viruses spread and were transmitted differently. One is through sexuality and/or blood transfusions. The other one is through common cold like every day breathing in the same environment. It's not a fair comparison because of the transmission rate but the intention is problematic. The effort to preventive care for our fellow Americans is not in the same mindset and space. Do you think the pandemic would have been different if it just killed children under the age of six?
Our responses would be completely different. All these parents that are anti-mask probably would have been like, "Everybody is wearing a mask." It's because it has impacted everyone in the country. It's very different. If it was only about the children, parents have a much easier time making a decision for their children. It wouldn't be seen as much as an American issue of freedom.
It probably would be similar to how it was with polio in the 1950s. Polio impacted children more. There were adults but disproportionately, it impacted children the most. Interestingly, the most notable adult polio patient was President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, although it wasn't talked about very much. You never saw him in a wheelchair. They were careful. He had not to be on television every day.
Fast forward, it's many years since he took office. Now, we have the governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, who is in a wheelchair every day and that hasn't been an issue. It shows how much certain things have changed. Back to polio, when that vaccine became available in the 1950s, every parent in America lined their kids up to get that vaccine because they didn't want their child to be crippled for life and made their kids get the vaccine. It was not an issue of, "I want the freedom not to take the vaccine. I want the freedom to be able to catch polio."
Let's take a look at the need for trust and truth together when we look at words. If I get a sheet of paper, how do I know this sheet of paper has words that are truthful on it versus this other sheet of paper that has truthful on it? How do I know which one of those is? It's a little hard because I'm looking to read this thing to see, "How much does it fit my beliefs, knowledge and wisdom?"
If I read a sheet of paper from the Centers for Disease Control, the CDC, on the US statistics on HIV, a CDC fact sheet on the HIV/AIDS epidemic, how much weight of truth do I get on those numbers? I got to trust the researchers that they're counting the number and reporting because they're required to report that stuff. The hospitals are required so that we can keep track of those things. I looked at the CDC fact sheet for the Coronavirus. I'm looking through a belief structure that has been polluted with other disinformation and less effective information.
We can easily turn this to our personal life and business life as, "This is the data that's being reported by our marketing team and sales team. This is the market research that was done that proves that this chair is the best chair ever," but who is reporting that data? Are we getting the words and information that we need as well as the need for trust so that we can make a decision based on truth? That's unsettling very quickly because it's in the eyes and the ears of the beholder whether or not it's counted as truthful or not.
You bring up an interesting reality that most of us face every day. If I'm looking at two pieces of paper and written words on them, I probably make a judgment at the moment as to whether I believe the information or not. Is there any empirical evidence to make me know that one is truthful and another is not or they're both truthful or both are not? Probably not.
If it is a government document and then it has credentials from the Centers for Disease Control, maybe that raises my level of belief or trust in the information, as long as I don't have a specific distrust of that organization. Clearly, a lot of work went into it. I can only speak for myself. If I read something and I was like, "That's interesting. I wonder how true that is," I think that in my mind. I will go to the source material usually or do more research and figure out, "Is there further evidence to support what this paper says?" Not everybody does that.
There's not a secondary question. It's either reject or accept. That one is hard because the reject or accept is based on our already preset bias, belief or even fallacy that we've created about reality. For example, if we take a look at Herman Cain's death of COVID from the Donald Trump rally, do we then try to corkscrew? If I'm a Republican voter, do I corkscrew my belief in saying, "He could have got it someplace else. He could have got it before he came there. It wasn't the rally that created the experience?" Those things might be true but you're missing the greater truth. Someone died of Coronavirus and either spread it too or got it from that event.
We're talking about this Oklahoma rally in 2020 that was much hyped and notable because the K-pop fans signed up with so many registrants. They thought they were going to have an overflow of attendees to the event but it didn't happen. I'm putting some context for our readers on what that event was because we talked about that way back on an episode.
The main thing here is that if we look at concepts in our words mattering, mediation and communication, we need to hold a mirror up to ourselves and ask if we're coming in with a bias and be compassionate to our own beliefs that have got us to this stage of the game. At the same time, we've also got to choose our language forward.
As a person that has the same age as Phil Valentine, do I choose a vaccine or not based on a belief that somebody else is telling me? Do I corkscrew my rationale and say, "I have a good immune system. I'm probably going to be okay. It's rare?” It's like going into a casino and thinking, "In this table, I like that dealer. They smiled at me.” They usually don't but, “They were dressed nice and they looked good. I had luck there the last time I was there."
We can corkscrew our consciousness into all kinds of beliefs, biases and fallacies in a second, "Is Greg Abbott going to get out of the hospital because of the special medicine that he has received that is not fully available to the general population?" That's unsettling because there's a truth in what I said. It's not a full reality. Some hospitals have those special medicines, some do not. Some have greater access to it, some do not. Some doctors don't even know about it. Some do.
It's hard to stay updated when you're in like, "We have this new weapon but I'm in a battle right now. I just need something to choose." We're in a hard spot, is what we are. A part of the truth, which is upsetting, even having it come out of my mouth is the virus is going to do its part to change and become stable and adaptive inside the environment. No one wants to say the following sentence, "There's a couple of different versions of the AIDS virus." "It's just one thing." It's like, "It's not."
Most Americans and most people with even basic knowledge of Coronavirus in the world know that there are different variants. If they learned how different variants emerge or are created, it's because the virus takes hold in people's bodies and learns how to be better at what the virus is trying to do and that is to attack. Viruses change and mutate. What people don't seem to know or care about is that, "If we don't get the vast majority of the population vaccinated, there are going to be more variants. Look how bad this Delta thing is."
Our bodies are making changes towards things. How often do you need to get a vaccination or a booster for the tetanus virus?
My memory says once every ten years.
That means that either our immunity is going down or the virus is changing.
You're not invincible in perpetuity.
There is a process of change. It's like, "How often do you need to upgrade your computer?" 3 to 5 years because the thing is evolving and changing. We're not taught that as a part of health science. It's a little unsettling but that's one of the problems that we're in. The promotion of a wedge issue that has to do with public health is not the space. That should not be a battleground for politicians to use.
We're seeing this play out in Florida especially where the governor has aligned himself with freedom and individual rights at the expense of health science. There's quite a battle going on with counties in Florida in school districts who are wanting to and, in some cases, defying the governor's Executive Order to say that, "You cannot have a mask mandate to mandate masks in schools especially in the elementary schools where children are too young to get vaccines." This is a battle that's very unsettling because the governor is choosing something purely political and ideological at the expense of basic human health, safety and protection from the virus.
There's a certain amount of courage that's needed. It's called creating an alternative narrative. The courage that's needed is the many primaries. Our show is not just about complaining about something. It's about exposing something and then coming up with a solution. The solution is you got to create an alternative narrative that has an impact on the person but also creates the opportunity for the person to live what that value set is.
For example, if the travel industry or other different businesses of note said, "We're not going to do business in the State of Florida over the next year until they clean up their public health issue." Notice I gave it a period of time, "We're not doing business over the next year until they clean up their public health issue." Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Microsoft, any brand that has notability and even the coalition of those brands can put extreme pressure on the travel industry for Florida. The conference and hotels, we're not doing business there.
They're not going to lose all their business just the way the nation is divided but they're going to lose over 50% of it because that's the way the nation split. The hotels in Orlando and the theme parks won't like it. You got to cut it. All of a sudden the decision, "We can't run our life here," and then people start migrating out of Florida because there's no work there.
I don't know what percentage of people are avoiding travel to Florida but I did it. I was supposed to travel to Florida on business again. I'm fully vaccinated but for other reasons because Florida has become the hottest of hotspots in the United States. I have a child too young to get the vaccine and I decided, "This is not worth my risk. Even though I'm protected, I could carry it back or bring it back to her." I canceled that trip. It has definitely got to be happening.
For it to have an overt influence or impact, it has got to be more of a public place. It's the same as the Rock Hudson or the Magic Johnson coming on and saying, "I got this thing over here." It's like, "Yikes." It's problematic and unsettling. At one point, the scary honesty is that however somebody corkscrews their belief and rationale into it, it's unsettling because they're not doing truth by numbers. I said that to another person who was like, "Why am I vaccinated? It's because of the numbers. The numbers are telling me that 92% of people that are vaccinated don't go to the hospital. I'm taking that odd.” That’s the number.
It's going to be interesting to see what happens because there have been a lot of vaccine skeptics. I wonder if they had been using this as an out or if they really believe it. We're going to find out pretty soon because what they've been saying is, "I'm not taking the vaccine because it's not fully approved by the FDA. It's only under this Emergency Use Authorization."
Now, according to The New York Times, the FDA is set to give full regulatory approval to the Pfizer Coronavirus vaccine. If that happens, I wonder if we're all of a sudden going to see another surge in people saying, "It's approved. I feel it's safe. I'm not a guinea pig. I'm going to go get the vaccine." It will be interesting to see.
That will be interesting to see because it meets the need for trust and certainty, which is a very powerful need that causes people to be motivated to move into action.
What's sad, Bill, is that we're not seeing people who have cared for their fellow Americans. There's definitely much more of an outcry and vocal advocacy it seems for personal freedom than there is to care for your fellow American. It's more of me, a selfish perspective versus we, the greater good perspective for attitude.
That's the thing. You showed me the video of the father in Tennessee that was talking about the mask on his kid. He has got a kindergartener.
It's a five-year-old who he is sending to school in a mask in Tennessee, a state that is not overwhelmingly in support of masks. I'm saying that facetiously. In fact, there's quite a movement to not wear masks.
His daughter gets it, "I'm putting on a mask because I'm caring for others." He says in the school board meeting, "I understand why some adults don't get this concept. My five-year-old gets the concept. We put a mask on because we care for others. That's in the Bible. That whole freedom and independence thing you guys are working on isn't but that caring for others is. I'm making a joke about it because both of them are important, freedom and independence. Expressing yourself fully allows me to speak up."
At the same time, people are feeling scared, worried and anxious about their health and their freedoms and choices. That's the hard part about this. You want people to be voluntarily doing this because they care for others not because the government told them to. You shouldn't need that next level of rebellion. It's like, "Because the government told you to, you're not doing it?" The government is strongly recommending it.
Where was all the outcry from people when the government told them they have to wear a seatbelt when they drive? That's a law. Correct me if I'm wrong, Bill. In every state in the union, the same thing happened with Motorcycle Helmet Laws. There may be 1 or 2 states in the whole union that don't have that but at one point, none of them had it. Where's the outcry of freedom for that? It wasn't to the level, even though I know there was some of it for the Helmet Law.
The Seatbelt Law is less so. People get angry if they get pulled over for that and get a ticket but they're not trying to make a huge issue of this, "My rights are being oppressed. America is no longer free." This vaccine is very similar and probably even has a more direct impact on the health and safety of others. Whereas if you don't wear a seatbelt and you get in a car accident, you're probably going to kill yourself. You may not kill others because of not wearing the seatbelt itself.
I appreciate your example because it immediately gets me thinking about headrests behind the seat of the car because that saves 5,000 lives of broken necks.
Also, other injuries too. I've heard people say, "Why is there a headrest in my car? If I rest my head back, get comfortable and go to sleep, I'm not going to drive at all." That's not its purpose. It's called the headrest but it's easier to call the headrest than to call it a whiplash protection device. It's when you break, lean forward and there's this backlash where your head snaps back. If you look at any car from the '50s and even early '60s that didn't have them, antique and beautiful cars, "I would love to have that car," I don't know that I would drive that car a whole lot without having that.
That's the point. Now, you can do it in retrospect. I'm thinking about it creatively as my marketing brain is coming into here, it's that if the vaccine's narrative shifted to, "A vaccine is like an airbag in the car. You take the vaccine so that in case you run into the virus, the vaccine goes off and provides you protection so you don't go to the hospital and die. If you don't have a vaccine, it's like not having an airbag in the car. The chances of you going through the windshield, hitting your head and having more damage, hurting your neck or dying is higher. It's more like an airbag. Doesn't it make sense to have an airbag through the vaccine?"
If that message was populated in the person's belief, it's getting it to be associated with something they already know rather than being peeled off as a political piece based on freedom, independence and identity, which it isn't. It's like, "We're just trying to provide protection." It doesn't mean you're not going to get hurt.
It doesn't mean you're not going to get sick if you get the vaccine. You might get sick but I'm not going to end up in the hospital and I'm not going to die.
There are messaging problems. To tip my hat to people that write in about this show, somebody said, "Bill, you're pro-vaccine. We don't have the long-term consequences." I'm thinking to myself, "Yes but we also don't have the long-term consequences of an airbag." When they first came out, we never had the long-term consequences. They had to adjust the airbags at the beginning because they were too strong coming out too soon.
We had to adjust because a child died because they were in the front seat. They had to have a warning, "Don't put a kid under twelve in your front seat because the airbag, if it goes off, the kid is too small and the airbag will hurt them. It will kill them if you put them there. They got to be in the back seat." There is a learning process as human beings do something new. It's just, "What are the numbers showing us? Where is that going to take us?" Having a solution is creating an alternative narrative that is going to be away from the separate political narrative that's taking place.
I appreciate your example of the airbag. I understand people's skepticism about a vaccine that was created in such a very short period of time and has not had a decade of testing. I completely understand and respect that but if you do dig into it in detail, you'll find all the numbers that exist. Remember, there are more numbers being tallied every day around this vaccine. We had a surge in vaccines. There was another day where we had more than one million people vaccinated in this country.
From not only all the trials that were done before, even the Emergency Use Authorization but now the numbers of people that are not going into the hospital who had the vaccine, are supporting these vaccines in the right direction. If you also do some research on why they were able to develop these mRNA vaccines, in particular, the Moderna and Pfizer, if you look into why they were able to do that so quickly, you realize these vaccines were in development for more than a decade. It's just not specifically tuned to COVID-19. There is a lot more history than you might have been led to believe.
One of the things is individualism versus cooperation. It's something as a topic we can pick up next time because our individualism and cooperation have to do one thing. The way our truth meter hooks to either a cooperation narrative or an individualism narrative can be helpful for us personally. Are we more tilting towards cooperation or individualism? Tilting towards cooperation, we might say, "Who are the people that are closest to us that need support?" We make a decision in that direction. If we're tilting towards individualism, it's like, "They got to take care of themselves and it's up to them in their world."
There's a personal, business and government piece to it because all those things have got to collaborate with each other. They can't be done in isolation, although that's the way it has been done in the past. Now, we've got to upgrade the way we think, do things and make our changes. We need to adapt to the language of our current environment because words do make a difference.
Thank you for that. I appreciate it. Always know, anything we talked about and referenced, you can get at PurchasingTruth.com.
Thanks for reading. It has been a great show. I appreciate it.
Thanks, Bill.
Important links
- Phil Valentine - Past Episode
- YouTube – Phil Valentine Vaxman
- Episode - Past Episode
- Video – Dad Delivers Passionate Speech Defending Masks in Schools.
