Word of the Day: Labels

Word of the Day: Labels from Blumer CPAs on Vimeo.

Transcript:

It’s word of the day, where we take a word strategically and we talk about how it applies to your practice, your firm, your life. And today’s word is labels. My partner busts me on labels. Sometimes I like labels. Labels are safe, softer. They help me live within a safe a world which is not a place where I grow and change. But it’s something I will be prone to do sometimes, is apply labels. And labels are okay, right? There’s a lot of different labels, political parties are labels or I’m a Christian, that’s a label, right? The label connotes a whole bunch of stuff.

But the thing about labels is they can be dangerous a lot of times, you can use a word, and to one person hearing that label, it means one thing, because of their past and filters. And the person using the word, it has a different connotation because of their past and their filters in the way that they perceived the world. So labels often are not fully accurate, but, they matter too. So it’s really all about a balance, which is the world of entrepreneurship, is all about balancing how you perceive things.

Like, we don’t call our team, we don’t call them staff, because that sounds like an infection. We call them team, which is a reflection of kind of collaboratively how much we love them and want to be with them. It’s a more community focused label on the group of people that we lead clients with. So it does help us accurately define what we want to do with the people we choose to work with daily. But the label to another person, team may not mean anything, or staff may not be bad, but I have a connotation about staff being wrong from my past experience. So labels are just things you want to be careful with.

You want to make sure labels though are not clouding the truth. Man, I talked about in a video not long ago, examination. Examination is where you use truth to really help you be successful and move forward in life. Labels could cloud that truth. And if you’re living in a world where you don’t have the truth about how you’re acting and how it’s affecting other people, then it’s not going to help you be successful. And labels can cloud that. So challenge your labels. Challenge, why do I call this that thing? And it’ll help you grow to kind of work through that.

So, one way you’ll find you’re challenging these labels is when you’re doing more talking. So a label is a, bam, here’s a word, stamp it on a situation, and then everybody moves on thinking they know what’s going on. And you don’t. Challenge that, stop, talk about it. Go, “What did I say?” “What did you say?” “What did we mean by that?” You know, banging through those labels through discussion. So it takes time to slow down and have those discussion, is really going to come to a better truth if you’re with the person that you trust doing that.

And you know what? We’re trustworthy, our firm, that’s what we do. We coach and consult, and we do do it on truth. We have a process to really work with people in a way that helps them see the truth of their situation, and in a kind way helps them move forward to be more successful in their life. That’s what we do. So let us know if we can help you bang through and rip apart those labels so that you can start working towards a safer place, and a more successful place in your life, and in your creative company. Thanks so much for watching. We’ll see you.