Washington, DC’s chapter of the National Speakers Association has a new member: Steve Weinstein. I’ve known Steve for years, and I was genuinely pleased to see him in this new context. I met Steve through his wife, Sharon Weinstein, CSP, a longtime NSA member and colleague. Steve and Sharon kindly attended my mother’s memorial service a few years ago, and were a great support to me at that time.

During the eulogy I gave at the service, I shared that my mother was still volunteering literally until the day before she died at age 95. When Mom moved into an independent living community at 90, an age when a lot of people might have withdrawn, she instead made the decision she was going to eat dinner in the communal dining room every single night so she could meet people and build community.

I told that story at her memorial thinking about honoring her, but I didn’t give it too much more thought. When I saw Steve a few weeks ago he told me that story stayed with him, and it influenced him to become more active in his own community. He has since joined several boards.

When we speak, we shape the behavior of people around us, whether we mean to or not. We can inspire, educate, motivate. We can just as easily discourage or diminish. And we don’t only speak on a stage. It can be a meeting, a hallway comment, the offhand line in an email. All of it lands somewhere, whether we’re paying attention or not.

There’s a scene in It’s a Wonderful Life, the 1946 Frank Capra film with Jimmy Stewart, where George Bailey, convinced his life amounted to nothing, is shown by an angel named Clarence what his town would look like if he’d never existed. It turns out nearly everyone around him had been quietly, permanently shaped by things George did without ever registering them as significant. Without Clarence, George never would have known.

Most of us don’t get a Clarence. We rarely find out which sentence someone else carried for years.

So, what do you want people to feel after you’ve spoken? Not just from a stage, but in the next meeting, the next hallway encounter, the next email you send?