Imagine a picture puzzle.... It comes in a box filled with hundreds of pieces. When assembled, it may depict a landscape, perhaps, with large swatches of blue sea and blue sky. Imagine my mind is like one of those picture puzzles, and so is yours. I take one of those blue puzzle pieces, give it to you, and declare, “Here's a bit of the picture in my mind. I give it to you so you can see the picture I see.”

Ideas, wrapped in behaviors

Ideas, when they form and float through our minds, are just ideas.

Expressing ideas, the act of communicating, is behavior.

We like to believe that our writing, our speaking, our conversations, we like to believe we deal only with ideas. But to me that seems incomplete. It seems to me we often react to the behaviors that we perceive as much or even more than the ideas wrapped in those behaviors.

Words matter. Words matter because words create consequences. Communicating with words is a behavior.

And behaviors create consequences.

See also:
Show me, don't tell me
and
A sustainable culture begins with a healthy, sustainable attitude

Feel free to comment here, or send email to my Gmail.com account, mybluepuzzle@...

Our puzzle currently has more than 8 billion pieces, and counting ...

 
Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike2.5 License