Bev Murrill reflects on the relationship between confidence and communciation

Bev Murrill

Hearing other people's personal experiences and journey can help encourage us in our walk. Knowing others have overcome in life helps us to face the challenges in front of us.

I'd like to share with you something Bev Murrill spoke about. I interviewed her on Fusion, my Cross Rhythms radio show. Fusion encourages young girls to rise up and discover who they were made to be.

Bev and her husband Rick moved to the UK from Australia 20 years ago where they pioneered Christian Growth International. Bev mentors leaders. She has a gift to seek the call of leadership on people's lives and help them to develop so that they can reach their destiny. Bev is also on the team for Kyria, a network for women leaders to challenge, empower and release them and she is a published author. Bev and Rick now live back in Australia and Bev continues to speak at conferences internationally.

When Bev came on Fusion she spoke about the importance of communicating effectively and communicating what we truly mean and feel.

Bev shared, "I feel that communication is incredibly important for girls today. I think this is a season when God is raising up girls and women to take their rightful places in the community; in good jobs, in special fields of study, or government, education, charity work, or business. The key to those breakthroughs isn't just our brain through our giftings, it's going to be in our communication. If our communication isn't good, people won't know that we'll be great in our field. Relationships are built on being able to communicate well. We get good jobs or special privileges because we've communicated what we want and we've communicated something that makes people want to give us their favour. But at the same time a lot of us sabotage our communication with habits that we don't even realise we have.

One of them, which I really have an issue with, is saying sorry all the time. There's two reasons for saying sorry. I'm going to mention the first one, but then I'm going to major on the second one.

One reason to say sorry is when we've actually done something wrong and we need to own up for it. That means taking responsibility for that thing and it's important not to let pride or fear stop us from being able to look at the fact we've done something wrong and to say 'I'm sorry about that'. That makes us a lot more credible with other people and especially when we're going to have to make a stand for being right.

It's good that people don't think that we're always making a stand on something - if people know that you can admit when you're wrong, they're going to trust you more. It's not a humiliating thing, it's something about being real and authentic because no-one is right all the time, and if they were we'd find it really hard to live with them. It's a great thing to be able to say you've made a mistake and just apologise and go on from there. You don't have to grovel, you don't have to make up for it, you just have to keep going. That's a really powerful thing.

However there's another reason we say sorry and girls and women particularly, say sorry a lot for this reason. It's when we apologise for things we didn't do wrong.

When people walk up to you and say, 'Oh sorry, but can I talk to you?', and all they need to do is say 'Could I talk to you please?', or when somebody makes a mistake, or they drop something, or they trip up some way and you weren't even anywhere near and you say, 'oh, sorry', when actually it had nothing to do with you. Or when you're after something and you say, 'Sorry, could you pass the butter?' - why say sorry, just say, 'Could you pass the butter please?'. Or what about when you're in a conversation with somebody and they say, 'I think the sky is green' and you say, 'Oh, sorry, look no it's not green, actually it's blue'.

We carry a guilt that isn't ours. It comes right from the very beginning. We live in a patriarchal society and when God came to Adam and Eve and said, 'What is it that you've done?' Adam said, 'It's the fault of the woman that you gave me'.

Women tend to carry that sense of guilt and they often feel like they're in the wrong, even when they're not in the wrong. Guilt in its purest form is really helpful, because it shows us that something is wrong and we need to get it right. The only lasting way to get guilt sorted out is to realise that Jesus paid for all our sins, but false guilt is a curse on our lives and false guilt is what a lot of people are plagued with, because we feel guilty even though we haven't done anything wrong.

It stops us from being effective. It's like someone did something wrong and we get questioned and we start giggling, or crying, even though it wasn't us. We look guilty and we even feel guilty, even though we didn't do that thing at all. Then someone asks me to do something and I say, 'Yeah' and they say, 'Are you sure?', and I think, I wouldn't have said yes if I wasn't sure.

The Bible says that our 'yes' ought to be 'yes', and our 'no' ought to be 'no'. Good relationships will come from good communication and good opportunities will come from good communication. That means starting off by saying 'yes' when you mean 'yes' and 'no' when you mean 'no' and 'sorry' when you've done something wrong and 'not sorry' if what happened hasn't got anything to do with you.

You don't have to be cruel, or harsh, or bad tempered when you say it; you just have to be clear because clarity comes from confidence. Sometimes even when a person has got every reason to be confident, they're so much in the habit of questioning themselves that their confidence doesn't operate.

God has given girls and women an amazing voice to speak out for Him in whatever circumstances. He's made us strong and He's made us lovely and He's made us able to see great things that other people might have missed. He's designed us specifically for a purpose that no-one else knows about but Him, and He wants us to be confident in that.

When we do things like hinting, because we're trying to get something, but we don't know how to come right out and ask for it, or when we deny that we want something that is what we do want and God created us for it, we take away our own confidence.

We don't all start out confident, but if we can make our words confident and cut out all the things that are lacking confidence - things like saying sorry when you didn't do anything wrong, or saying you don't want something when you really do, or saying no when you mean yes - when we begin to cut those things out of our conversation, more confidence will come. That's maturity, to make a decision to change the way we speak, so that what we say is what we mean and we say it in a kind or a generous way, but a confident way as well. I think we will see our whole life will change, if we change the way we speak."