Learning to trust yourself again

I used to think I was a pretty good judge of people. That I could get a sense of what they were about within 10 - 15 minutes of meeting them. I have had to realize that this is not the case. In fact I take a very naive view of people and generally give them more benefit of the doubt than they deserve. Basically, I don't judge them, and try to hold off forming my opinion of them until I get to know them well. In fact, if I manage to think that you are a bad person after 10 - 15 minutes of meeting you, chances are that you are total and complete asshole, because seemingly those are the only people that I can make a fair thumbs down judgement on that quickly.

These total and complete assholes are thankfully not the majority of the population, but that leaves a whole lot of people who are just assholes, that I don't recognize and in fact believe to be generally nice. Sort of the innocent until proven guilty stance.

I suppose I am too trusting and I don't intentionally play political games with people, so I don't expect people to play them with me, and consequentially I get blindsided when they do. I am slowly and sadly learning that I am actually not that great a judge of people. I have made a couple of massive mistakes, most notably with men, or at work. And I have had to reevaluate my abilities.

Since I have now lost trust in my abilities to judge people, I am affraid of trusting people in general, for fear of getting really hurt again. I fear that I will get too deeply involved with someone, to the point that I will loose my ability to step back and objectively evaluate them, then they will hurt me. How does one overcome this? Because really you have to just jump in and allow yourself to get to know someone. How do you do both? get to know someone and maintain a certain objectivity that allows you to judge their character, values, beliefs, morals, etc. so that you can protect yourself if they are not who they first portray? I don't know yet, but working on it....

Choosing Courage II

Is it still courage if you don't have any other options left?

Yes, partly because even if you are finally faced with a situation where you have no alternatives, you had to make a series of decisions that led you to that place. And even if each of those decisions was not necessarily a defining courageous act, to finally stand where your only option is courageous tells me that each of those decisions was a small step in that direction.

More interesting logic...

Given a certain situation, maybe you always have more than one option, but some people don't even see all the options because based on their values, upbringing, strength of character, the options that would go against these things never even enter their mind.

Choosing courage

Sometimes you do what is courageous because you have run out of all other options.

Some People are lucky, others have to make their own luck

I am not lucky. It is ok, I have come to terms with this fact. Some people are lucky. They seem to glide through life getting everything they want with seemingly little effort. I have had to realize that I am not one of these people. At first I was a bit annoyed, maybe jealous, even angry. There is the temptation to wallow in defeat and be the victim of your own life. But then I put on my big girl panties and manned up (how is that for an interesting mix of sayings).

After realizing I am not lucky I figured out a few things:
1. There is no sense crying about not being lucky, cause you can't change it.
2. People who are not naturally lucky, are not doomed in life, they just have to make their own luck.

Ah ha! More on this later, need to work now.

The really good things about marriage

1. free massages

2. someone to snuggle with every night

3. sex - the freedom of knowing that even if you royally screw up you will get to try again the next night, and the next, and the next, until you figure it out

4. Someone to cook dinner with and for, someone to eat with

5. Someone to go out to breakfast with

6. Sex: for women - whenever you want it; for men - probably more often than you are getting it when you are single

7. Someone else to live for

8. A welcoming smile when you get home

You can't always get what you want

I was taught from a very young age that if you worked hard enough you could accomplish anything. I think it is true, in most cases. However, I have had to realize that even when we work really really hard, and we want something really really badly, we don't always get what we want.

I am one who also likes to hold out hope. Hope in spite of unbelievable odds, hope when it defies logic and reason. So it takes me a long while to finally confront that I really am not going to get what I want. Sad.

As the song goes... You get what you need. I am not yet convinced of this....I suppose only time will tell.

Convergence

Continuing from the previous post....So while I was thinking about the Tricia Sulick online marketing campaign that I was launching, I had coffee with a good friend, and we started talking...

She, interestingly, backed up my sense that people who try to maintain two (or more) images don't seem to do it very well. We specifically talked about our experiences at business school. She mentioned that she didn't feel like she knew many of our classmates very well. Besides a few close friends, she said there was this weird disconnect with people in business school. You knew almost nothing about where they were from, what they valued, what their families were like, and what things they had gone through. It was like people had two years to craft an image of themselves. This image could be completely from scratch, and pretty self contained. Classmates never had to know that they were the fat kid in dodge ball, or the skinny, dorky math counts champ (and lets face it we went to MIT, we were all at least one of these, if not some funny combination of both).

There are a few ironic things about this. First, in hindsight our classmates seemed shallow and disconnected from themselves, not exactly the makings of the great leaders they were trying so hard to be. Second, people worked so hard to create a professional image and didn't share "personal" details about their lives, values and backgrounds, but then they would go out, get completely wasted, and sleep with three classmates in the course of a week. I mean WTF?! So it was ok to drink till you threw up, and make unbelievably stupid decisions while you were drunk in the name of partying hard, but it was not ok to talk candidly about divorce, or to honestly admit failure? That seems pretty messed up to me.

A lightbulb went off....

I took this completely amazing class as an undergrad called Person Centered Leadership with a really terrific professor Jeanne Plas. By forcing us to be completely candid in front of a classroom of strangers, she made us realize that the strongest leaders are the ones who do not have multiple images, or personalities. They live their lives seemlessly integrated. The reason they are such powerful leaders is that they can make decisions from their gut because they are so in tune with what they believe and value and they never have to question whether it will fit in this or that image. Additionally, people are drawn to them because they are genuine. People trust them because they feel like they are getting the whole story. And people like being around them because there are no pretenses.

I know some people like this. I know some classmates like this. In fact, they come easily to mind, and the greatest thing is that I knew from within about five minutes of meeting them that they were the kind of people I wanted to follow, work with, be friends with.

I want to be one of these people.

Converging

So I have been doing a lot of thinking lately around what kinds of things to share with the public, and what exactly is the right forum for discussing issues that are not clearly "professional" in nature, but that I think are important for people to talk about. I have also had a number of good conversations with friends around this topic and I realized that this discussion/thinking is really at the heart of my blog and why I started it in the first place.

All of this started when I did a post on this blog that was quite personal in nature and a friend of mine wrote me that I should take care about the things that discuss in a public domain. He didn't necessarily say I should not share, he just said that I should understand and craft the image that I am portraying to the world at large, and probably potential future employers/employees/investors.

This really bugged me at first. The post was talking about some lessons I learned about relationships, and I felt pretty strongly that people need to talk about these lessons in order for others to keep from making the same mistakes I made. I argued that it is precisely this fear of tarnishing our image that keeps us from sharing our mistakes, learning from them and helping our friends keep from making the same ones. Hence my post on Denial below.

I did battle with myself about how to proceed. Did I want to continue to share my values, hardships, lessons and big mistakes in such an openly searchable forum with my real name attached? Did I want to write anonymously? What was the image I was trying to portray to the world, to potential employers, to potential boyfriends, to whoever knows how to search for patricia sulick on google?

I realized that I was not ashamed of anything I had writen about. I was sometimes brutally honest, candid, and lets face it, when I make mistakes I like to make big ones that are pretty publicly humiliating and/or life changing (hey, go big or go home). But that being said, I had to think about what the people reading my blog would think of me, and whether I liked the potential consequences of that. Yes, people are quick to judge and bring to the table their biases and pre conceived notions. Humm....

I also realized that I had a huge opportunity in front of me. I am a bit shy in person. I am a terrible interviewer (and first date with someone I like). I am an introvert and I get nervious and that makes it hard to be myself and to share what I really think on the spot. I am generally much better at expressing myself after I have had time to think and usually better at writing down my thoughts than speaking them. Thus, my blog represented a really great opportunity for me to share things about myself and for people to get to know a little bit more about me in a forum that I was better with.

So I decided for the time to put the more personal posts in an anonymous blog and to think some more about how I wanted to weld this new found power...