What’s Your Message? by Dr. Paul Chafetz

In our digital age, submitting a comment, a request, or a review generally involves typing our words into a “message” field on a company’s website.   We can type any words we like in that box.  Luckily, nothing we type means a thing until we hit “send.”  Before sending, we have time to complain, criticize, and condemn, then calm down, compose, and clarify.  By the time we hit “send,” though, we had better be clear about our meaning and committed to our message, because the message cannot be un-sent.

I believe that each of us continually sends messages out to everyone we encounter.  We do it with our actions, our grooming, our wardrobe, our face, our words, and our tone.

Is our message optimistic or not? Is it open, friendly, and welcoming or not?  Does it reflect genuine interested or not?  Does it prove us to be honest, ethical, and reliable or not?  Does it reflect that we are well-rounded, or focused on one area of life at the unfortunate expense of other important areas?

Of all the fields on the website of our life, surely the contents of our message field will have more impact and be remembered by more people than our home address and even our name.  After our death, what will people find that they can learn from our life? What will be our legacy, our guiding principle, and the lesson of our life?  Near or after life’s end is too late to establish the answers to these questions.  It will be hard to overcome the impressions we gave every day for the decades of our life.  Our daily messages cannot be un-sent.

The time to compose and send the message we want to be associated with us and our memory is today!