Leadership to Freedom

I was approached by a gentleman at work yesterday, and was told I had to stop telling people I’m awesome. At first I was a little taken aback; thinking here is one of those guys who is always negative and can’t stand other people being in a good mood.

In any good book on leadership or personal development, it will go through the importance of having a good attitude, and how important it is to respond with something extraordinary when asked ‘how are you’ or ‘how’s it going’. It will also point out how some people will not be completely receptive to this, and we should not let it bring us down.

So now when someone tries to put down my awesomeness, I have a lot of fun!

I was told that I have to change what I say, because when someone refers to the word awesome, my name always comes up. He tried to you use this as a negative about me, but how would you like to have your name tied to the word ‘awesome’? I thought that was awesome!

He then explained to me how I was misusing the word and that I couldn’t be awesome. I told him if he preferred, I could start being amazing, great, super, fantastic or even phenomenal with him, but I wanted to know what was wrong with being awesome.

So we went to dictionary.com, and I was schooled. we found 3 lines

1. inspiring an overwhelming feeling of reverence, admiration, or fear; causing or inducing awe: an awesome sight.

2. showing or characterized by reverence, admiration, or fear; exhibiting or marked by awe.

3. Slang. very impressive: That new white convertible is totally awesome.

He pointed out that even under the slang portion, I was using the word wrong. I guess it’s not a very humble thing do to, going around telling people that you are awesome, and not that you feel awesome, as the definition shows.

He told me that awesome goes for things of godlike nature, due to line 1 and 2. So if I wanted to go around saying I’m awesome, I might as well just reply to that ‘how is it going’ question with ‘I am godlike!’. I proceeded to tell him how that is such an ‘awesome’ idea, and that from now I will answer like that, and that other Peoples reaction would become awesome in response.

But then I decided that would be just too much; after all I was trying to respond with a statement of feeling, and not a state of being.

I will continue to answer people with very positive terms, as I know this is how you end up truly feeling awesome. I know that if ever we are feeling down, and we answer with a defeating statement like ‘bad’, or ‘not so good’ we enforce those feelings, and will end up feeling worse.

This gentleman was really just trying to have some fun, and bring some levity to a boring day, but you must realize not everyone will say things like this in jest; many will actually try to bring people down because they can’t stand other people being positive when they are so negative. It’s like they don’t think it’s fair. Don’t let those people influence you. Instead be a positive influence on others.

Although I will probably still use the term awesome, as it has become a habit, I agreed with him that I should change up my responses.

Next time, I will be phenomenal! Because I think that’s awesome 🙂