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Home » Do Nice People Finish Last or Best: Christine Porath (Full Transcript)

Do Nice People Finish Last or Best: Christine Porath (Full Transcript)

Christine Porath at TEDxUniversityofNevada

Following is the full text of author Christine Porath’s talk titled “Do Nice People Finish Last or Best?” at TEDxUniversityofNevada conference. In this TEDx Talk, Christine Porath shares the costs of incivility and how civility pays. She explains how incivility is a bug — it’s contagious and we become carriers of it just by being around it. Christine Porath is author of Mastering Civility and co-author of The Cost of Bad Behavior.

TRANSCRIPT:

Who do you want to be?

It’s a simple question, and whether you know it or not, you are answering it every day through your actions.

This one question will define your professional success more than any other. Because how you show up and treat people means everything.

Either you lift people up by respecting them, making them feeling valued, appreciated and heard, or you hold people down by making them feel small, insulted, disregarded or excluded.

And who you choose to be means everything. I studied the effects of incivility on people.

WHAT IS INCIVILITY?

It’s disrespect or rudeness. It includes a lot of different behaviors, from mocking or belittling someone to teasing people in ways that sting, to telling offensive jokes to texting in meetings.

And what’s uncivil to one person maybe absolutely fine to another. Take texting while someone is speaking to you. Someone of us may find it rude, others may think it’s absolutely civil. So it really depends.

It is all in the eyes of the beholder and whether that person felt disrespected. We may not mean to make someone feel that way, but when we do, it has consequences.

Over 22 years ago, I vividly recall walking into this stuffy hospital room. It was heart-breaking to see my dad, this strong, athletic, energetic guy lying in a bed with electrodes strapped to his bare chest.