Leigh's Leadership Lessons: Watch Your Language!

In this episode of The Space In Between, Leigh invites us to explore a subtle but powerful force shaping our personal and public lives: the language we use —especially when it slips into “all-or-nothing” thinking. From our workplaces and friendships to dinner table debates and political discourse, extreme language can harden our hearts, box us into limiting, binary choices, and disconnect us from seeing each other as fully human. The good news: with a little awareness and practice, we can shift our habits, soften our speech, and become leaders who inspire clarity, connection, and change. Leigh shares her reflections on how to avoid language traps and stay in nuance where innovation, wisdom, and high performing teams can thrive.

Transcript

0:01

Hello and welcome to the. Space in between podcast. I'm your host Lee Morgan. Again, this podcast is for listeners who are fed up. Up with the hyperpolarized nature of the world today. And who crave. Craves spaces where current events can be discussed in construct. enlightening and delightful ways. Let's get.

Leigh Morgan: 0:29

Hello friends. Welcome back to the Space In Between A Place for Candid reflection, honest Conversations, and learning how we can hold firm to our values lead effectively and create spaces to bridge divides that keep us apart. In today's sometimes polarized world, these qualities have never been more important, both for us as individuals and for our communities. Today I wanna talk about something simple but powerful. It shows up with colleagues at work and friendships and intimate relationships. And boy, it's easy to spot on social media. It's the way we use what I call all or nothing language. These are words or phrases that describe our perception and experience in extreme terms, often suggesting only one thing can be true at a time. These definitive statements reveal our emotional temperature and box us into overly simplistic thinking. Let me give you some examples, and if we're honest with ourselves, I bet you're like me and have said these phrases more than a few times. You always do this or this country is completely falling apart. Anyone who believes this just doesn't care about justice. Or my personal favorite, or by favorite, I mean the one that makes me cringe the most. you don't agree with me, you are against me. The funny thing is when we're tired or hurt or feeling unheard. These all or nothing phrases, roll off our tongues like butter on warm toast. Here's what I know to be true. The language we use and our emotional state are deeply connected. The words we choose don't just reflect how they feel, they shape and intensify our emotions. When we're wound up, when we're near our boiling points, we tend to reach for more extreme language words, like always or never, which can add gas to the fire of polarizing rhetoric. Researchers describe all or nothing thinking as a cognitive distortion where we see things in stark extremes, good or bad, success or failure, love or betrayal. This matters whether we're talking about leadership, teamwork, relationships, or even at those heated dinner table conversations about politics. This kind of language, while it sometimes can feel good in the moment, can also slam shut doors. It hardens our minds and our hearts to new possibilities and deeper understanding. Now, I've been around long enough to know that most of us are doing our level best with what we've got, but I want us to do some gentle noticing when we speak in definitive terms, like always, never completely ruined, perfect, hopeless. We squeeze out breathing room to be the complex full humans that we are with a range of emotions and a range of perceptions. We want more psychic space for learning for grace and for that generative creative space where real magic happens. Black and white thinking tends to show up when we're anxious, depressed, or feeling disconnected. Studies show that using rigid language amplifies emotional reactivity and shame because every setback tends to feel like a total failure. this happen When we feel confused or knocked off balance, seeing things in stark terms can give us a temporary sense of certainty, and that certainty can help us feel steadier in a chaotic world. But here's the rub. It's a pretty unreliable friend. So while an occasional this world has gone completely crazy, is. Understandable at times relying on this kind of language regularly should raise a red flag for all of us. This is where self-awareness really matters. Let me share a personal story about how I first gain awareness of how easy it can be to fall into the binary thinking trap. I was in my mid twenties and I was what you might call a hardcore liberal activist. I went to national marches in dc. I protested at the Governor's mansion I was absolutely certain that capitalism was the root of all evil in the world. I worked in the nonprofit sector and many of my colleagues shared my strong aversion to anything that smelled or looked like. Corporate America or what we assumed was corporate America. Then a funny thing happened at a community meeting. I met a lovely woman named Joan Roberts. She was whip, smart, funny, and shared my conviction that diversity was a source of strength and that discrimination in any form was wrong. I was therefore shocked, and I mean, jaw on the floor, shocked. To discover that she worked in big pharma, which at the time sat on the very top of my evil private sector list. Now some of you might be chuckling thinking how naive that was, looking back, I chuckle as well. But here's what happened. I ended up befriending Joan. Within a year, she offered me an internship where I learned how to lead large scale change. She offered me an internship at a big pharma company. The place that I thought previously was the root of all evil, and that work Led to a 20 year career in biopharma Here's the thing, I learned so much working in the corporate sector. Working globally, working in these very complex systems where I learned how hard it was and what the tactics were to drive alignment and get people to drive sustainable change over a period of years. And that happened because of Joan Roberts and me opening my heart and my mind. To this person who embodied a set of values that I liked, and I thought, gosh, if she's working there, I should have an open mind about what's going on in that company. So it turns out the world was a lot more colorful than my rigid thinking had allowed me to see before I went to that meeting now before closing out, I wanna highlight one other dimension of polarizing all or nothing language. Political scientists, Stephen Levitsky and Daniel Zi, in their book, how Democracies Die, describe a common tactic in what they call an authoritarians playbook. So this is a leader of a country or a movement that is considered authoritarian. And they tend to embrace violent or binary rhetoric to paint entire groups of people as all bad or as the root of everything that's going wrong. Leaders do this by tapping into a very human instinct to seek certainty when we feel fear. So the goal of an authoritarian leader is to make complex situations in society. Feel like they can be solved by simplistic sweeping solutions. Often solutions that make certain groups the scapegoat for bad things that people are experiencing. The good news is that leaders who scapegoat and blame in this way are easy to spot because of their use of black and white language, of absolute phrases and their reliance on negative stereotypes. When we are aware of this pattern, when we have self-awareness or can understand when people are using, always never these big statements, we're much less likely to get swept up in it. And it gives us a sense of agency to think about what's really happening. So friends, even though we're living in fragmented times and while as individuals, we might not have the power to fix all the brokenness out there, we absolutely have the power to soften the edges in our language and in the way we choose to listen and speak. With just a bit of practice, we can gently shift this pattern in our own lives. When we do this work, leaders become more inspiring. Teams build stronger cultures and all of us get better at having those tricky conversations without losing our minds or our relationships. Research shows that, naming our emotions with precision, saying things like I feel overwhelmed rather than I'm freaking out, can actually cool down activity in the Brain's Fear Center and help us stay more balanced. This is called affect labeling, and it's one of the most practical tools that we have in our toolkit. So what are the steps we can all take to do this? First, start noticing black and white language that you might use or that others might use. So words like Always or never. Catch yourself when the story becomes too cut and dried with these words, then when you can try swapping these words for ones that leave room for nuance, often can be used instead of always. Sometimes I feel of, I always feel, I'm wondering if instead of that's just wrong. This shift doesn't make you weak or wishy-washy. It actually makes all of us open and openness, my friends, is where real connection grows. It's where innovation thrives and it's where we can hold firm to our convictions and keep the aperture open for connection across differences. And if we wanna come together across generations, across all kinds of difference, we have to start with the words that we choose. They are either the bridge or the barrier. So let's choose our words carefully. Let's choose generously for ourselves and for our communities and for our workplaces. Until next time, keep listening, keep seeking and keep showing up in the space in between. Have a great day.

11:46

I hope you. Enjoyed this episode of the space in between podcast. If. If you did, please hit the like button and leave a review. Wherever you listen to the show. And check out the space. Space in between.com website, where you can also leave me a message.