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The Smoker's Club

Aug 04, 2016
 
It’s funny how we have a feeling of invincibility when we’re young, isn’t it? I used to smoke like a chimney and I never gave a thought to the impact it had on my health. Now, many years later, I feel bad if I don’t cut the fat off my bacon properly!

I remember, as a smoker, going out for a cigarette one day, while I was working for a French bank in the City of London. I stood and chatted to the other smokers and shared a joke or two with an eclectic mix of the company’s employees. Same faces every day, same time every day, from secretaries and mailroom staff to head traders and executives.

I remember Clive came out to talk to me while I was asking a bond trader if he invested his own money as well as his clients. (He didn’t!) As we walked back inside, Clive said, ‘People say smoking is antisocial, but you know more people than I do and I’ve been here 10 years longer.’

It was an interesting thought that smoking was a club, a members only club, and a club that had a certain solidarity to it.

A few years later I was coaching someone who really wanted to give up smoking. 
 
We discussed all the benefits and eventually she took the plunge. She gave up cold turkey and has never smoked since. In our sessions that followed, we discussed an interesting dynamic that had appeared in her ‘smoking club’.

Her relationship with the other smokers, and one in particular who she worked closely with, changed forever the moment she left the club.

Wouldn’t you have thought that your ‘friends’ would salute your efforts at a healthier lifestyle?

It is a peculiar realisation indeed when you begin to change and grow (in any area) that the people around you, many of whom you love and who love you, don’t like it!

Whatever we may say, and no matter how much we may protest, no one really likes change! We particularly don’t like change happening to us, and even more so, change we can’t control.

There’s a certain dynamic to any club or group and the homeostasis is maintained by everyone doing and being the same. If someone goes and changes, it ruins it for everyone else!

This is especially true of ‘negative’ type groups – smoking, vandalism, partying and irresponsible behavior, drug use, etc. If you change your life and stop going to the club, then you are, in essence, reminding everyone else at the club that maybe they really shouldn’t be living like this anymore either.

Worse yet, you’re saying that you have the courage to change and they don’t.
Now things are awkward and they have a decision to make. Stay or go too? And if they stay, they have to justify their choice to stay, and very often they do this by rubbishing you and your noble attempt at a better life!

‘Who do you think you are anyway? So, you’re better than us now?’

It’s confusing and it hurts when people around us don’t support our growth like we expect them to. Sometimes people in our lives will actively try and convince us that we’re wrong, or make us feel bad for stepping forward into growth. More often they’ll act more like they just don’t care. Their apparent indifference can be even more baffling.

In all cases though, it’s simply because they don’t understand the plans you have for you!

Awareness that this is an inevitable part of the process of growth is sufficient inoculation for most of the pain.

The best thing you can do though, for you and for them, is to show them what success looks like in that particular area. Their criticism of you is not at all helpful or productive .. or effective. And similarly, your criticism of them and their behaviour doesn’t work either. ‘The world doesn’t need criticism, it needs example!’ Your example. Your big, bold, successful example.

Love them anyway or let them loose, but either way: insulate your thinking, stick to your plans and step forward into growth. When you‘re there, they’ll see your success and tell you they knew you could do it all along!
 
Until next time .. 

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