Using The Day Book Resources

Developing Skillful Speech

Let’s say you are writing in your Day Book and negative thoughts come out about someone you know – a work colleague perhaps. It could be something like this:

‘Dave is an idiot. He has no leadership qualities. We just don’t get along and he leaves me out of all important decisions. I can’t put up with it much longer. I’m going to have to speak out.’

The type of statement above is an expression of frustration, anger, disappointment – all the negative responses we might have to people who are close and who either hurt or upset us in some way.

Angry, emotional statements often have a recognisable physical quality. Words are scrawled across the page or bitten deep into the paper with the pen, revealing the sheer frustration with the words themselves. But when we write, even in a negative way, we are totally focussed on the thoughts we are trying to convey. We have written down these thoughts in order to release the deep seated anguish about a situation we might feel powerless to resolve. Our malicious intent, for all that we might feel justified about it, is a response from somewhere deep inside.

We might be aware that writing in this way is not really acceptable, but we are going to go ahead and do it anyway. Here’s where The Day Book becomes a powerful tool for managing the everyday problems of your life. By all means write what it is that bothers you. Write until you feel you have expressed the hurt and until your fragile, angry self has been at least in part appeased.

The point is though that it’s not possible to write malicious words without clearly focussing on them. And because we have ‘deliberate intent’ we cannot just brush these thoughts aside. It’s easy enough to dismiss angry thoughts that arise and pass away in a brief moment, but not so easy to deal with thoughts that are recorded and saved for future reference.

But the act of writing has given us pause. Before we put the words onto paper we had to step back, even momentarily, and become mindful of what it was we were about to express.

Resource Action – Step 3 on The Eightfold Path

The third step on the Eightfold Path is Skillful Speech and it represents the practice of being mindful of what we say. The practice of Skillful Speech provides us with a  framework for action in relation to how we speak to others. Before we speak we need to stand back and ask ourselves the following questions:

• Is it true?
• Is it kind?
• Is it beneficial?
• Does it cause harm to anyone?

If we could stop time during conversation we could run through this list and check them off one by one. Given that we can’t do that we have The Day Book to reaffirm our intentions when dealing with others, and to examine, not critically but with a view to learning, situations where we have caused others harm by unkind or unconsidered speech.

This is a way of strengthening our resolutions and the advantage here is that next time we want to express negative thoughts to or about someone we will be well on the way to developing the skilful ability of thinking before we speak.

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