Part 7 of the 10 part series: Leader-friendly gardening practices to end bullying.
 
Prune gossip – Often thought as a form of harmless entertainment, the true underbelly of gossip is that it diminishes your personal power and trust with others. A thriving leader prunes gossip when it begins.
 
Desired outcome: Kindness

In Part 1, I discussed the need for social change to help end bullying and it begins with adults. In Part 2, I made an appeal for adults to step up to end bullying, and in Part 3, I discussed how adults can empower children to take the lead on this issue. 
 
The leader-friendly gardening practices began in Part 4 - Being nonjudgmental, Part 5 – Do not enable, and Part 6 - Use Empathy.
 
Today is about gossip; a social pastime that builds and destroys relationships - simultaneously. It is a menacing weed that spreads easily in the world’s human garden.
 
It is common knowledge that expressing a negative opinion about someone in his or her absence is unkind.
 
Yet, why do we do it?
 
On the surface, gossips seems like a harmless form of entertainment. It is certainly a very lucrative form of entertainment for media purveyors of gossip. There are those who defend the entertainment factor as a way to help one feel better about life and escape the harsh realities of life. However, that doesn’t make it useful to society - but unfortunately gossip does sell. Otherwise, the television series like Gossip Girls and gossip columns and magazines would not be in business.
 
Talking about the faults of others or engaging in this form entertainment, may help people feel better about their lives - but at what expense, for what purpose, and for how long?
 
In our day-to-day social circles, gossip is used for three primary purposes:

• establish social rank
• share information
• create identity

I’ll examine these social uses, to see how gossip propagates bullying. Once again, I’ll refer to the Wheatley study conducted for CNN.
 
The students in the study were asked, “whether the aggression entailed verbal harassment (calling names, threats, etc.), “indirect” or “relational aggression” (gossip, rumors, and ostracism), “cyberbullying” (using computers or cellphones to harass a peer), or physical violence.”
 
Physical violence ranked only 11% among the perpetrators, whereas, the verbal harassment, rumors and ostracism, and cyberbulling ranked 26%, 23%, 11% respectively. Therefore, well over half of the reported incidences of aggression connected to gossip by the following:

• verbal harassment is sourced from gossip
• rumors are spread through gossip
• people are ostracized from a group by gossip
• the internet provides the coward's way to broadcast gossip anonymously 

However, the issue is not just what gossip does to the victim, but also how using gossip affects the perpetrator.
 
As stated earlier, the true underbelly of gossip is that it diminishes your personal power and trust of others.
 
The Wheatley study showed that “aggression significantly decreased the likelihood of being admired by peers.” Since the study found jockeying for social status within a group was the primary reason why children bully, it is no surprise that gossip would be at the core of the bullying problem, for both the victim and perpetrator.
 
Character attacks backfire
 
You cannot maintain a thriving state of existence, let alone leadership, with malicious character attacks, rumors, and innuendoes that tear down others to build you or your group up. Gossip provides a false sense of feeling good that erodes your power and leadership as a person or a group.
 
I don’t profess that the use of gossip is going to disappear from society any time soon; especially when it such a common practice and lucrative form of entertainment.
 
However, if we want seriously want to end bullying, we must begin to practice ourselves and teach children how to prune gossip and be kind as the fundamental basis of human dignity and leadership.
 
Now we will move on to leader-friendly gardening Practice Five: eliminate blame. This will tie in nicely to this conversation and the previous practices of being nonjudgmental, not enabling harmful behavior, and using empathy.
 
In the meantime, please share your efforts to prune gossip and the difference it made for you or those around you.