Interview with Penny Haynes
Penny Haynes is a business owner, is 44 years old and lives north of Atlanta, Georgia. Check out her website at www.commercialcreationcenter.com. In regard to speaking out, she looks at the end result of what she is about to say and what it is going to affect before she decides to speak or to stay quiet. Penny believes that you just have to take everything into account before you open your mouth.
Andrea: Penny, I saw on your website that your business is a commercial creation center. Please explain how your work is connected to expressing one’s message.
Penny: I give people the tools that they need to be able to express themselves with audio and video and images, so they can express themselves on their own website, on social media sites, and on social networking sites. Audio and video and pictures transmit a lot more than text does. There is so much inflecion in a voice that you get a feeling for a person’s personality. It is harder to misconstrue what they are saying when you are face-to-face with a person, or at least virtually face-to-face. My primary goal is that people use it for business purposes, but business is going to be based on people liking you and connecting with you. Therefore audio and video lets you get your message across in a way that hopefully will allow them to connect with you, like you and then do business with you.
Andrea: You have developed software in order to do all of this. Do you also give people recommendations on how they should present themselves on audio and video?
Penny: Yes. What they do is that they sign up for the software, and it is just $19.99/month. I give them the software to use and then I meet with them every week. We talk about what projects they are going to do, what they want to do, how they can do it, what tools they should use, and we have monthly how-to classes. Then we talk about their content, their presentation, how they should be talking, whether they script it or read from an outline, so communication is pretty much everything that I do. Then, say something happens and they can’t finish their video, like their computer goes down or something like that, then I help them actually finish their videos and audios for them.
Andrea: About speaking out, please tell me about a situation where you didn’t dare to speak out and stayed quiet.
Penny: There are many times I don’t speak out.
Andrea: Please think of a situation when you didn’t dare to speak out. This is not the same as to decide not to speak out. In the first case you are afraid, and in the second case, there are some reasons why you don’t do it and you know why you don’t do it, but you could do it.
Penny: Every time I don’t speak out, there is a reason. I analyze what is going on before I speak. There is a scripture that says that you should never let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouth. So this is something that I took to heart a long time ago, which means I need to be careful what comes out of my mouth because I could tear somebody down. Once you say words, you cannot take them back. People remember them and they can cut someone’s very soul and hurt them to a point where it can affect them for the rest of their lives. So I am sure everybody has been on both sides of that; someone has said something to them and to this day they can still hear it, and they probably have said something in anger to someone else.
Andrea: I understand. But was there any situation in your life when you didn’t dare to speak out? When you were too afraid?
Penny: Yes. My husband just lost his sister this past weekend in a car accident. He is talking out loud about how he is feeling and what he is thinking, and even spiritual doubts. I know my husband well enough and I dare not say anything, because I know that he is not looking for answers from me. He is not really asking questions out loud for me to give a response. He is so very emotional and he can’t receive anything; he is just trying to work through his emotions. So even though there are things he is saying out loud that I want to address or respond to, I dare not do it because I know it will not be received, and it will aggravate him and hurt his emotional state that much more. So when you are talking to someone who is in an emotional state or when you are with someone, sometimes you feel like you need to say something because you want to make the situation better. The person is maybe saying something that you feel is fundamentally wrong. However, you have to realize that this is just part of the process that the person will have to personally work through.
Andrea: Of course.
Penny: The only times I dare not say anything, honestly - and I am realizing that as I am speaking to you right now - is when I realize the words will not be received in the way that I am intending to express them. That is when I dare not say anything.
Andrea: Do you really know that at once? Maybe you are wrong?
Penny: You have to know the person. This is for people that you know very well. As you and I went back and forth in email, I explained to you that I understand my husband; he doesn’t like to be told what to do, he doesn’t like even suggesting something because he still takes that as being told what to do. So I know with him not to say anything. Also I have been in this situation in work where I had an aggressive and very volatile and very hurtful boss who was very insecure about her job. I didn’t say anything because I didn’t think it would help. Finally it got so bad that I did go above her to the director and what I had known all along was true; that honestly I should never have said anything to him. He fired me because I complained about this woman who was harassing me. When Human Resources found out about that, they were very worried because they knew I could have sued them for wrongful dismissal because I went to her supervisor and said what she was doing and then was let go. In that case, it was not worth it to me to open my mouth and take it any further because I already had another job the moment I left there. In addition, I didn’t want to be there anymore. I was working part-time for another company that did business with the company I had just been fired from. So I didn’t want to jeopardize the relationship between my employer and my old employer.
That is another reason why I didn’t pursue anything. I did not sue. I didn’t talk to anybody; I was very thankful to have a better job at over $6000 more a year working for a company that I really liked and doing a job that I really liked. So sometimes it is just not worth it. My big deal is that I look at the end result; I am trying to look at the end result of what I am about to say and what it is going to affect. What is the end result going to be? Who is going to be affected by what I am going to say? Sometimes you will say something and it doesn’t just affect you.
Andrea: I think that is a great perspective.
Penny: After you have spoken so many stupid things and gotten yourself in trouble so many times, you finally learn, “Well, maybe I better think about who this is going to affect before I say it.”
Andrea: When you talked to the boss of your supervisor, were you afraid and was it difficult for you to do it?
Penny: It was not difficult because she had finally pushed me to the point that I knew what she had done. She did it with her door open and not only another person in the office, but everybody else in the entire office listening. She would just scream and yell at me for no reason. You are supposed to do your job and you are supposed to think about what is next and prepare for it and try to do everything you can. Well I had done something else along with what I was supposed to do because it was the next step of the task. I knew that this other thing was going to happen. However, she SCREAMED at me at the top of her lungs, “I don’t pay you to think! I pay you to do what I tell you to do!” I was so shocked!
Andrea: It was great how you worked because you already took the next step.
Penny: I was not afraid to do it because at that point I knew I needed to leave the building before I did say something back to her. So that is why I went to her supervisor and said, “I need to leave today. I need to leave the building right now before I say or do something I would regret later.” That is exactly what I said, and he knew exactly who did something wrong and did not say that I would be fired for leaving. I just got my stuff and left. I came in Monday morning, went right to his desk and said, “How do we handle this now?” He pushed forward a piece of paper that my services were no longer needed. Even though I did the right thing, I still was not done right by that company. But in the end, I got what I wanted which was a better job with people I really liked with more money. So in the end I was taken care of.
Andrea: I think there came a lot of advantages with the transition that you made. It was good for you and there was no reason to do anything about the incident.
Penny: Yes, and other people had tried speaking up about this woman and nobody ever did anything about it. Even after I left, she physically assaulted someone and they didn’t remove her. She had done a lot of stuff and she is still there to this day. Go figure!
Andrea: I believe it is better for you not to work there anymore.
Penny: I am very glad not to work there anymore.
Andrea: Did you talk again to the boss who gave you the paper that said you were fired? Did you ask him, “Why do you fire me?”
Penny: No. I knew exactly why. It was because they didn’t want anybody who was a troublemaker. I was one of those people who made it very, very clear that they would never, ever lie for any of the bosses and they would never do anything that was wrong. I also didn’t, as I can put it plainly, kiss anybody’s behind. I did not brown-nose. I would not kiss up to people just so they would like me. All I did was sit at my desk and do my job. I would not cover my boss if he did something shady. It’s not that I would tell on him, but I would not be a part of it, and they knew not to ask me to do something like that because I am a Christian and they knew that. So getting rid of me was something that didn’t bother my boss at all because I was not somebody who particularly liked him. So therefore and knowing that upfront, there was no reason to ever speak to him again because it would not make any difference at all. Remember that the end result is important. Will this make any change? I am not one of these people who have to express their feelings. Remember I told you that I grew up in a home where the thought was that if you have thoughts and feelings, it is your right to express them, but that is not necessarily true. It is not always helpful and it does not necessarily achieve any of the results that you want. I know many people who think that they just have to tell somebody what happened, even though it is not going to make any difference whatsoever. So for me, it is not worth the breath that it takes to say it.
Andrea: You can also say it to yourself. You can leave the room and go to a place where you are alone and talk to yourself. Some people just need to express themselves, so they can do it alone or perhaps talk to someone else who is not involved.
Penny: I think it is very helpful to talk to someone else. If you have a problem with someone, I don’t think you should talk about it to someone else. I think you should talk to that person, but I think your words need to be extremely well chosen. You can’t go in anger. Maybe you should wait a day so that the high adrenaline passes. It might be very helpful to write down everything you want to say to the person, and then edit it down, edit it down and take out the things that might make the situation worse, until finally you are just dealing with the issues and not the feelings, you are not resentful and vindictive and you are not just trying to hurt someone. What are you trying to accomplish? In my household it was, “I just want to feel better so I am going to scream, yell and tell you everything that comes to my mind” and it didn’t accomplish anything. So do you want to do that, or are you going to look and see, “What am I trying to accomplish? What is my overall goal?” My overall goal is for my husband and me to be closer and to have a good relationship. By me venting how I feel and what I think whenever I want to will not achieve that. At first in my marriage, I thought I would die by not being able to say these things because that was how I was raised, but now after 8 years of marriage and knowing him for 11 years, I realize that I don’t die. It really doesn’t matter if I say it or not. It does not affect my feelings that he hears my feelings.
Andrea: But don’t you feel better knowing that he understands what you are feeling?
Penny: No. Remember; what is my goal? If I let it out, it is just going to make our situation worse. Will it cause an effect? Sometimes I will say and express my feelings. When he gets upset and walks away while I am talking or he slams a door, then I will remove myself from the situation until he apologizes. So sometimes not saying anything is much more powerful than saying something. There are times when I will just go to him and say, “That was very rude and I don’t appreciate what you said or what you did…” But I mostly don’t need to say it because he already knows it. By leaving him alone with his thoughts and his actions, he gets convicted himself in the end. My husband is a Christian, though. There may be other people who don’t get convicted, who do not respond to their conscience and who just keep going. But I know my husband well enough to know that he knows it is wrong and he will apologize.
Just last night he was snappy. You have to take a look at what is going on in that person’s life and assume that there is more going on in a person’s life than what you see. Most people think that if someone is talking ugly to them “Oh; they don’t like me. There must be something wrong with me or them or they are a jerk.” But you have no clue. They may have just gotten a phone call that someone died and they are frustrated or angry. Maybe they just got a ticket for driving too fast. So I think people need to give other people the benefit of the doubt when they are acting ugly, because it probably has nothing to do with them, but it just has to do with the person. My husband had not eaten all day. It is still the day after the funeral, so he was very aggravated and very snappy, but I realized that it was not about me. I had not done anything. So even though my emotions wanted to snap back at him and say something, that would not have helped. It would not have made the situation any better. Sure enough, by the time I had dinner ready, his whole demeanor had changed, he felt very bad for how he had been snapping and he gave me a kiss. So you just have to take everything into account before you open your mouth. That is my philosophy.
Andrea: I think you are right. You should sometimes say something and sometimes you shouldn’t, and you have to make the right decision. Do you speak out when you eye witness abusive situations, for example parents abusing their children?
Penny: If someone is in danger or someone is breaking the law, then yes. This bothers my husband a lot, but I have no problem turning in a drug dealer. If my daughter who doesn’t take drugs had any idea of who might be doing drugs or who might be distributing drugs, I would be the first person to report to the police to have this kid taken out of school. Such a kid could be killing another student. My husband does not like that about me because he is worried that someone would come after me since I am doing that. My husband was a drug dealer at one point before he became a Christian so he sees the inside world of it. If I see someone being in danger, I will definitely speak out. I am less afraid to speak out in public situations then I am in private situations.
Andrea: I understand that you would speak out in abusive situations, but isn’t it possible that you would make the situation worse?
Penny: No. There was a time when my daughter had issues in high school with a boy. This boy was drinking, his father was in jail and I think his dad might have killed his mother. I think he was 16 years old, and he had really started bothering my daughter. They were not going out but he was bothering her. So I got her phone and his phone number and I dealt with him personally. I found out what was going on with him and told him not to bother my daughter and not to call her. I said “If you speak to her, or if you do anything, I am going to report you for harassment and you will get kicked out of school.” So I have no problem dealing directly with people. I even understood that the boss who had been harassing me had done it out of sheer insecurity. I was not doing anything wrong; it was just her. When someone is insecure, there is no way you can talk them out of it. If they perceive you as a threat, you really can’t do anything but try to act in a non-threatening way. But there were times when she would suggest something that might affect my reputation or she said or did something that she thought I could address. What I would do is take her aside into the office closet where we had all of our supplies and talk to her privately. I would ask her if she was upset with me about something, I would give her an opportunity to express it and I would say to her, “Joann; you seem very upset with me about something. I want to know what it is that I have done so at least I can either apologize or make it right.” I never attack. I always assume that I have done something wrong or they perceive that I have done something wrong, and I tell them, “I want to have the option to apologize and make it right.” This de-arms the other person; it actually makes them feel bad because they know they should not be acting this way. She did never have any real reason to be angry with me, which is why I finally realized that she was out of control and there was nothing I could do about it.
Andrea: I perceive that you are able to speak out very well for yourself and you just decide sometimes not to do it, if you think it might make the situation worse or if you think that it is not benefitting your long-term goals. There are some shy people in this world who are afraid to speak out. What advice would you give them?
Penny: The biggest advice that I have pretty much shared with you is to weigh out the results of what your words will cause. If it is important enough to you, if it is going to bother you and you are not going to be able to let it go and if you think by speaking it is going to be resolved, then you don’t want to carry it around. There were times when my son was living with us that my husband would say or do things that I couldn’t handle anymore. He was very, very critical of my son, because my son is rather lazy and wouldn’t do anything. However, my husband would address these things at the dinner table so that the dinner table was a dreaded place. You knew he was just going to say something and everyone was going to be miserable. So because I wanted a happy table and because I wanted dinnertime to not be a feared time or a dreaded time, I did talk to him about this. I said, “If you want to address something, can it be done after dinner or before dinner but not at the dinner table?” I am balancing my own and my husband’s feelings, and that is a hard place to be caught in between. I had to do the same thing between my daughter and my husband. No matter what you do, someone is going to get hurt. My husband said that I always took the kid’s side and my daughter said that I took my husband’s side. So no matter what I did, I was always going to be in trouble with someone. When you are scared, really think through the results. I think I was always scared because in my history I had an adult who out of anger just out of the blue hit me. So I associated anger with the possibility that I could, out of the blue, be physically harmed. Angry people scared me very, very badly, and I did not put the two situations together. I didn’t understand why angry people scared me, which is partially why I was afraid to speak out a lot of times.
I had such a fear when my former boss became angry, even though I knew she couldn’t do anything to me or at least she shouldn’t do anything to me. However, in the end she really did manhandle someone once, it was just not me. So if you are somebody who is shy, which is really rather being afraid, you are afraid of what the consequences will be if you speak up. You need to find out why you are afraid. What is it that has caused this fear? What are you associating with it? Now, once I realize that and I work through it, I am not afraid for the most part when people get angry. I know they are not going to hit me. They are not this person from my childhood, so that gives me the courage to speak even when someone is angry.
Andrea: I think you are right. This is a really good point that you made. I assume that many women think they need to be understood by their husbands because it is part of the relationship. They expect it from the relationship. What is your opinion about this?
Penny: Most husbands do understand their wives; meaning they understand as much as they want to understand. They understand that the wife is different from them. They understand that she doesn’t have the same feelings. Men are made differently than women, for example they don’t filter information the way we do. We can explain and explain and explain until we are blue in the face, and they still won’t understand because they are not made the same way. They don’t have the same points of reference. They don’t use the same terminology. It doesn’t mean the same thing to them.
Andrea: You said men have different points of reference; which points do they have?
Penny: Let’s put it this way; when a man is friends with another man, do you think they sit around talking about their feelings? No. What they do is that they go to a ballgame or they go fishing or they may talk about what is happening. These are basically external things, and they don’t dwell on their feelings about it. They might say that their wife has been in an uproar lately, but you will not hear them say, “It just hurts me to the core when I see her act like this.” This is not the discussion that is going to happen. What is going to happen is that they are going to talk about external things and external situations.
What happens when women get together? They talk about not only what happened, but also how they felt, what it was going to affect and what they were going to do about it. This is a frame of reference that men just don’t understand. To them it is; “Why are you even going there?” It doesn’t matter to them to talk about their feelings, since it won’t change anything.” They are very practical.
Andrea: Do you think men should learn how to speak about internal things and about feelings?
Penny: No, I don’t think that they should have to because obviously through all of the thousands of years, they have been this way. Very rarely sometimes you will find men who have more of a feminine side and might be more in touch with their feelings, but even if they are, they are not going to express it. Even science says that men use so many fewer words than a woman does in a day. I think the biggest problem is that women expect men to act like women. However, they will never, ever act like women. They may mellow with age and not be quite so gruff, but they are never going to be like a woman. I think the sooner that a woman comes to terms with the fact that her husband is not like them and does not have the same frame of reference for the most part, the better her marriage will become. Especially if they have married their opposite, which most people do, they should give up on needing their husband to understand them and be glad to have a girlfriend who understands. Otherwise they are fighting a losing battle, in my eyes.
Andrea: I understand what you mean. Does your husband help you with the household chores?
Penny: Yes and no. My husband has allowed me to work on my business, meaning that I have not had to go get a full-time job since I left the last business I worked at the beginning of 2007. So I have had my own home business now for almost two years and he has been solely supporting the family. He works 10-15 hours/day to take care of us. I am not going to ask him to do anything inside the house when he gets home. We have seven dogs in a kennel outside that I take care of during the day when he is gone and on the weekends he is working on that. In addition to this, we have rental houses that he is working on and fixing when needed.
Andrea: So he is earning the money and you are taking care of the kids and having your own company?
Penny: Yes. When I was working and he was at home, he was doing the grocery shopping and the cooking and all the household chores. He is willing to do it when he has the time, but in our present situation, I don’t ask him to do anything.
Andrea: This is great, Penny. Thank you so much for this interesting interview!