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...

Thoughts

The glory in life is not in never falling, but in getting up every time you fall.
-many famous people

It is a good thing for leaders to know when they are appreciated
-one not so famous person

Procrastinating

It is a talent of mine.  Maybe a talent of everyone.  Putting off the things that we don't want to do.  Sometimes putting off things that are, in and of themselves harmless, but they are related to something or some outcome we don't want.  

I am doing it right now, writing this blog post instead of packing and cleaning my apartment, because I don't want it to be Sunday night, and I don't want to have to leave tomorrow morning, and it was so incredibly beautiful here today, and the city is still beautiful and warm and alive, and I have to leave my dog, and the pool and running by the river, and friends and my really comfortable bed, and my Apple computer, and yummy food and.... ok, I'll stop, cause this is just making it worse.  

Denial

Definition

a defense mechanism, in which a person is faced with a fact that is too uncomfortable to accept and rejects it instead, insisting that it is not true despite what may be overwhelming evidence. The subject may deny the reality of the unpleasant fact altogether (simple denial), admit the fact but deny its seriousness (minimisation) or admit both the fact and seriousness but deny responsibility (transference). The theory of denial was first researched seriously by Anna Freud. She classified denial as a mechanism of the immature mind, because it conflicts with the ability to learn from and cope with reality.

Types of Denial

Denial of fact: This form of denial is where someone avoids a fact by lying. This lying can take the form of an outright falsehood (commission), leaving out certain details in order to tailor a story (omission), or by falsely agreeing to something (assent). Someone who is in denial of fact is typically using lies in order to avoid facts that they think may be potentially painful to themselves or others.

Denial of responsibility: This form of denial involves avoiding personal responsibility by blaming, minimizing or justifying. Blaming is a direct statement shifting culpability and may overlap with denial of fact. Minimizing is an attempt to make the effects or results of an action appear to be less harmful than they may actually be. Justifying is when someone takes a choice and attempts to make that choice look okay due to their perception of what is "right" in a situation. Someone using denial of responsibility is usually attempting to avoid potential harm or pain by shifting attention away from themselves.

Denial of impact: Denial of impact involves a person's avoiding thinking about or understanding the harms his or her behavior has caused to self or others. Doing this enables that person to avoid feeling a sense of guilt and it can prevent him or her from developing remorse or empathy for others. Denial of impact reduces or eliminates a sense of pain or harm from poor decisions.

Denial of cycle: Denial of cycle is where a person avoids looking at their decisions leading up to an event or does not consider their pattern of decision making and how harmful behavior is repeated. The pain and harm being avoided by this type of denial is more of the effort needed to change the focus from a singular event to looking at preceding events. It can also serve as a way to blame or justify behavior.

Denial of denial: This can be a difficult concept for many people to identify with in themselves, but is a major barrier to changing hurtful behaviors. Denial of denial involves thoughts, actions and behaviors which bolster confidence that nothing needs to be changed in one's personal behavior. This form of denial typically overlaps with all of the other forms of denial, but involves more self-delusion.(source: Wikipedia.com)

Banks, foreign relations, credit cards, relationships...
Why do we all work so hard to avoid short term pain when the long term consequences are so much more vastly difficult to deal with?

Instincts and bad decisions

Instincts, we all have them. Bad decisions, we've all made them. Theoretically (at least on some level) one is supposed to keep you from the other. But as I am sure all of us can attest, that is not always the case.

But let us disect that conclusion a little.

I am going to argue that with many bad decisions, our instincts do tell us to do otherwise, we just choose to ignore them and make the bad decision anyway. Yes, of course there are exceptions, but generally if I look back on the many, many bad decisions in my life, right before nearly all of them, I felt this funny twinge in my stomach, and I didn't listen!

Why do I ignore this time tested signal? Do I really think this time will be different than all the ones before it? Do I really think that the accumulated knowledge, or reason, or common sense, or just plain fear that combine to create a surge of adrenaline that causes my stomach to do a flip flop will be wrong? Why can my "rational" brain overpower my "irrational" gut, when usually my "irrational" gut is right? I mean WTF?

I think maybe it is not quite that simple.