Next, we're going to deal with the seven deadly sins, which I spoke about on the TED stage, we have a lot longer now to go into them in some more detail. First of the seven deadly sins, gossip. Now by gossip, what I mean is speaking ill if somebody's not present, there's no problem with speaking well of somebody who's not there. And if you want to speak ill of somebody who's present, you need to take the consequences of that. And that might temper what you say. The problem with gossip is that it plays into this kind of malicious human spirit that we've all got somewhere in us, which is wanting to judge other people and find them wanting wanting scandal.

Now, that very much plays into the whole being right leech, where it's easy to be right by making somebody else wrong. It's easy to look good by making somebody else look bad. So it's about lifting ourselves up and pushing somebody else down. Very often gossip, of course, is actually untrue. Very often it's completely false. The problem also with gossip is that it makes somebody into an untrustworthy bearer of news, the gossip is probably embroidered, it's probably third hand, it's been bounced around.

And very often it's incredibly damaging and upsetting for people. The problem, of course, with the gossip is to, you know, the moment you walk away from listening to the gossip, which is seductive, and it's in all of us to be rubber necking at car accidents, or whatever it may be. However, the moment you walk away from the gossip, who are they going to be gossiping about? It's you. So, if you become a gossip, or if you involve yourself in gossip, it's degrading the power of communication. It's not true very often.

If it is true, it's malicious. It's not well meaning there's an exercise, I recommend to you. About gossip, which is to abstain from gossip, to try it for a day. And you'll find it very difficult in the modern age, it might mean not reading newspapers, not looking at the TV, not listening to the radio, not reading magazines, not looking at the Internet. Because gossip is all around us all the time. So much of news now is salacious celebrity gossip.

So it's very difficult. And you may have to walk away from your friends and just say I'm actually I'm having a day off doing this, which would make them look at you slightly strangely, maybe you could enroll one or two of the minute. If it's become a problem in your social circle, for example, what is not going to work I can tell you is to point the finger at other people and to be right about this, saying to others, oh, no, I'm not gonna you're gossiping. I'm not doing that. That's just being right again. So, you know, be compassionate people are people.

That's the kind of trees they are. That's the kind of people they are. You can't change other people by pointing the finger and judge them, what you can control is your own behavior. So I do recommend abstaining from gossip for a little bit, so that you become more sensitive to it. It's like anything. If there's a noise around you the whole time you become desensitized to it.

Take yourself away, go back into it, you go, oh, my goodness, that is worth I've been in all the time. Same thing with gossip, a little period of abstinence will really help you to understand how serious it is as an issue in your life. Next of the seven deadly sins is condemning. Now, I think I use the words the word judgment on the TED stage. What I really mean is condemning judgment. discernment, obviously, is really, really useful.

You need to have it in your life. Is this right or wrong? Is this good or bad? Do I believe in this or not? However, if you become habitual, condemned, that is very damaging for your relationships around you. So I'm talking about the kind of parents whose child comes back and says, I got 95 in the test and the parent says what happened to the other five?

You know, nothing's ever good enough. Everything is to be picked apart to be criticized. I don't know if you've seen the film whiplash, which is quite a dark film about a young would be drummer and his teacher who's a real monster in the film says there are no two words more damaging in the English language than good job. So he doesn't believe very much in praise. So again, here, I would reflect on this for you. And we'll give you the exercise of thinking about all of these values at the end all of these seven deadly sins at the end, and seeing if they're playing out in your life.

Do you tend to criticize or praise? Is there a balance in your life? Next, we have negativity and the story I told on the TED stage is absolutely true. My mother in her declining years She was actually in hospital having broken a wrist. I think it was I took a newspaper into her now, her worldview by that point was summed up as everything's awful. So she was undying, the negative about things.

Oh, the sun's out, it'll be raining later. You know, that kind of negativity, where it's really wearing. And I took the newspaper and said, Oh, look, it's October the first and she said, I know isn't it awful? Well, if October the first is awful. what hope is there really, because there's nothing awful about October the first, that's a worldview, which really doesn't serve and if that's where you are it, it kind of poisons the present moment. It's a projection of fear.

Maybe it's much more powerful to be here now. Cross the bridges that you have got to cross when you come to them being present in the moment. And having a relationship with the moment which is not colored by a fixed context, like Everything's awful. Everything's not awful. Also, to paraphrase that wonderful lego movie that my daughter enjoy so much, everything is not awesome, either. It's not either awful awesome, it is somewhere in the middle, probably.

And it's possible to make up your mind about how you feel about it at all times. So the habit of negativity is very damaging. Then we have next door to negativity complaining the British national pastime really. We complain about everything. It's relatively amusing sometimes. But I call complaining viral misery.

It's again very much about being right isn't it? complaining about the government, the sport, your useless football team, whatever it might be having a go at somebody who's not there and something that you can't do anything about. Now, I'm not saying never complain. If you're in a restaurant and you get bad food, complain, send it back. Absolutely. You can do something about that.

But in life, there are things you can do something about and There are things you can't do something about, you know, you get a chance to change the government when once every few years. In the meantime, that's the government and complaining to people is just dragging them down into your negativity. The antidote to complaining would be gratitude. just focusing, it's a question of where you put your attention. If you focus on the things that are good in your life, the things you have to be grateful for, then life becomes much more pleasant to live. If you focus on the things that you're upset about, or that are giving you some sort of pain.

Then life becomes unbearable, potentially. So complaining, let's try not to do too much of that. excuses. We've all been this guy. It was my fault. This happened.

This happened, this happened. We don't like to admit we're at fault. Again. This is about looking good. And you know, you may be surrounded by people. You have people in your life who do this But not me, somebody else, throwing the blame around and absolutely not accepting responsibility.

That's not a productive way to be for a couple of reasons. First of all, people don't like it if you just sidestep and swerve responsibility for things when you've made a mistake. And secondly, you don't learn. Because if you're saying this wasn't my fault, there's nothing you can do about it, you're a victim of what's going on. And unfortunately, in that situation, you just won't learn anything at all. So it's not a productive way to treat mistakes.

That's how we learn. And there's a lot of literature now about the importance of mistakes in processes like innovation. If you don't make mistakes, if you're frightened to make mistakes or to take responsibility for mistakes, then it's very difficult to move forward, actually, because you learn very little. Some of the greatest modern inventions have come about from mistakes. That people made. And if you take responsibility for your mistakes, what you can do, rather than simply saying it wasn't me, you can say, Yes, I made a mistake.

I'm very sorry. And this is what I've put in place to make sure that never happens again. So, admit responsibility, take responsibility and create a structure, which is going to stop that from happening in the future. And recommit, penultimate of the seven deadly sins, we have exaggeration. Now, I spoke earlier about embroidery about a practice of saying exactly what you mean. And this plays out here as well.

Again, this is completely about looking good. It's become, I think, very sadly, necessary to push the envelope in conversation to make things bigger, more powerful, expressed more vividly. And then as a result of this, there's a kind of language inflation going on, which I find quite distressing. I mean, it's no longer enough to be excited about something, you have to be super excited about something. And probably in a few years time, super excited won't mean anything. So you have to be super, super excited.

You see how it deflates the the meaning of the original meaning of the word was perfectly good. A lot of words have been repurposed and dumbed down to mean just good, like fantastic, amazing. Excellent. And these actually have different meanings. And they are very important old meanings. We don't really have a word for fantastic anymore, as in coming from fantasy, or amazing is such a devalued word that it's pretty hard to say that is amazing.

Without sounding like you're just saying, It's really good. And of course, the big one of these, which I always castigate my friends in America for is awesome. And I joked about The Lego Movie, which is ironically saying everything is awesome. Which was very funny. But if a pizza becomes awesome How do you describe a beautiful sunset, the word has gone. Final of the seven deadly sins, dogmatism, which is confusion of fact and opinion.

And I know that very well from my family background where there was a lot of confusing effects, with opinions, they're not the same thing. A fact is incontrovertible. It's not a view and opinion. And when people start to believe that their opinions are actually true or facts, then a lot of table thumping and argumentation results. I have a wonderful fantasy of a world where opinions are given by request only. Would you like my opinion on that?

No, oh, I had such a good opinion ready to go. We don't do that, do we? And you would have to be ready to be very disappointed when you have great opinions which you want to give to people. We don't do that. We just said well, in my opinion, and that's kind of fine if we're context. realizing it, giving it a frame as this is my opinion only my opinion, is what I think.

And it obviously comes from all of my filters and my experiences. Nevertheless, if we start to believe these things are true, again, we get into enormous conflict. And that's where a lot of the competitive speaking comes from. I know and competitive speaking. So your exercise for the seven deadly sins. You could leave this page up, freeze the video in a moment and just spend your time writing.

Look at how those things play out in your life who does them to you? Who do you do them to do them with? And what you're going to do about it? Now you've isolated that so for each of the seven sins, ask those questions. Who do you do it to or with? And who does it to or with you?

And what do you want to do about that? Those three questions for each of the seven. You should have 21 bits of writing at the end of this exercise. Hope it's useful for you