Are You Putting Your Money Where Your Mouth Is?

Are You Putting Your Money Where Your Mouth Is?

First of all – ewww! Don’t put money in your mouth – you don’t know where that money has been!

Now that we’ve cleared that up, let me phrase the question in a few more ways. Do you stand for what you say you believe? Do you walk the walk and not just talk the talk? Do you practice what you preach? (Do you notice we have a lot of ways to say this? Why is that?)

This morning I received an email notification that a comment was placed on a blog post where I had commented recently. The visitor was clearly not impressed with the advice in the article and took a few moments to express her feelings. It wasn’t pretty. The visitor indicated that she felt the author was full of *%^#;  inexperienced, out of touch with the real world, immature.

I clicked through to the blog see how the author had responded to the comment but it was missing from the stream. The author had deleted the comment.

This is where the irony enters. The article was about how we should not be concerned about receiving the approval of others.  Here was an opportunity to demonstrate what he had just written about but he chose not to deal with it.

I had to ask myself; would I have deleted a comment which challenged me in this way? I’ve never faced this situation and I’m sure it isn’t because nobody thought my articles were full of *%^#, but only that no one has ever mentioned it. When I look at the articles I had prepared this summer, before my son died, I know what “full of *%^#” looks like. Heaven help me; maybe ALL my pre-August 17th articles were full of *%^# and I’ve been surrounded with people too polite to point it out to me.

How would you handle a negative or challenging comment on your blog or a statement about your actions as they relate to your professed beliefs? Have you ever been challenged to put your money where your mouth is? What did you do?

photo credit: Pavel Ahmed

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About The Author


I have always loved writing and community building. I’ve written a book about healing and happiness, The Happy Place, as well as a Community Building book, Sounding the Drum: Community Building in the Digital Age,both available at any Amazon store. I’ve been through life changes that I thought were the end of my world, but I’m still here. You never know what will happen next. Isn’t that what makes life interesting?