Wordplay: You Are What You Say

Some of you have heard me tell this story before, but I believe it's worth repeating. The event had a lasting, profound effect on me.

I was opening my regular mail one day and saw a little envelope. You know, one of those that looks like a thank you note. I did not recognize the handwriting, and there was no return address. Odd, I thought, not being able to immediately conjure up anything I had done lately that would merit receiving a thank you note from anybody. I opened it, read it, and read it again. I won't bore you with the exact verbiage in the note, but the gist of it was this.

You probably won't remember me. (As they gave me only their first name and the personal contact was many years ago, I indeed did not, sad to say)
I was having some severe emotional problems many years ago.
I came to see you for help, and you saw me for several sessions to work some things through.
You said one thing to me, a very profound thing, that I used then and that helped me work through my issues.
You saved my life.
Thank you for that.

Wow.

How many times in the course of our lives do we stop to think that something we do or say might actually be done or said at precisely the right time to alter someone's personal history? To save someone's life?

Before you get too caught up in klout.com or other ways to measure your self-worth today, take a minute to think about how you really influence people. Are the number of your Twitter followers or your klout scores or your Facebook friends or other measures of your influence paramount? Or is some little tweet or post or comment or kind word of encouragement coming from you going to save someone's life?

You may find out when you open a little envelope twenty years from now.

How will you change the world today?