Hey Greenblasters!

I have a spicy one for you today, but it’s a story with lots of interesting takeaways in my opinion, about who you decide to work with, difficult personalities, talking about controversial topics in a group of separately paying customers, and learning to be ok being the villain in someone else’s story.

Honestly it may be upsetting to some people, I don’t know, but I’m trying my best to be transparent and tell you how it happened and how I’m thinking about it.

Last week, I decided to kick out a member of my community Speaking Heroes.

It was a really hard decision:

• he’d been there since the beginning

• he showed up consistently

• he did the assignments

• and he engaged in the community

But he was also:

• constantly interrupting people

• taking up tons of time and space in the calls

• negative about other people’s ideas (including mine)

• using AI to write copy, and his newsletter for him (WTF)

• and making very little progress as a speaker and storyteller

That would have been ok, I think, at least at first.

I planned to have a 1:1 chat with him, and point out some of these tendencies; as a speaking coach, this is exactly what I do that so many people need, because for obvious reasons no one wants to be the one to tell them these things.

But, he was also making comments that I had problems with.

The R word (not that one. The other one.)

I hate throwing around the word racism.

It’s a great way to make people shut down and start defending themselves, and it becomes a “he said, she said” about who meant what in what way, and it gets used way too often by reactionaries on both political sides on social media.

And often when trying to solve a communication issue, loaded language and insults (which almost everyone considers “racist” to be) are profoundly unhelpful.

But sometimes, it just is what it is.

To me, these were racist comments, even if he didn’t mean them to be.

It’s far too tiresome to get into the specifics, but suffice it to say, he lives in Israel and made several comments about Arabs and Muslims that went over the line for me.

If you don’t know, my wife is Muslim, and I’m a Jew.

We’re raising our daughter to respect both her Muslim and Jewish heritage.

You can have whatever opinion of that you like, it doesn’t matter to me.

And maybe he felt that because I’m Jewish he could say that shit, and I’d either agree with him or at least not get upset cause it doesn’t personally affect me.

But it does.

And even if it was about other groups!

You cannot do the work that we do in my community and coaching sessions if you have these prejudiced ideas about people.

This work is all about looking inward and being vulnerable, about your fears, and your insecurities, and your hopes and dreams.

Ultimately, it’s about “humanisation”, of yourself & others, by telling your story, sharing real shit, and asking deep questions to become a better communicator and public speaker.

And you can’t do that while dehumanizing people, which is what he was doing with the type of comments he made.

The convo:

He was surprised. He told me I misunderstood him. And we argued a bit, before parting ways.

I refunded him his last monthly payment, and he wrote something about me being an “authoritarian lefty” on LinkedIn.

Which is all fine.

What I learned:

• I learned to pay attention to my instincts. I had bad vibes from him earlier on, but let him stay because he was so dedicated to the community. Next time, I’ll try to listen to myself.

• I learned that although I love creating a space where people can express how they truly feel, these kinds of statements don’t reflect what I want my community to be about. And it’s my community.

• And I learned that it’s ok that someone’s out there talking about how sensitive, censorious and “cancel culture-y” I am. I don’t wanna be those things, and I don’t think I was in this case, but it’s ok that he thinks that, and that other people think that about me.

Phew.

Well, we did it.

Sorry to hit you with a heavy one this week, I’ll get back to the regular goofy GIFs next Thursday. Just wanted to get this one off my chest, and thank you if you read this far, truly.

Greeenblast… out 🚀