Acceptance

The first step to anything is knowing where you are starting from.  Personal growth is no different.  Are you open to learning to see yourself as you are? Without worrying about the gap between you and who you’d rather be?

Technorati Tags: self acceptance, self-perception

The No Excuses Project: Making room for romance

So how am I going to going to solve this one? I’m not entirely sure. Leaving it at ‘I have no idea’ is just another excuse so I’ll keep pressing on. The experts say when you’re stuck on how to proceed to look to something you solved successfully in the past and try the same process.

I’ve read books and tried online dating without liking the results – glad it works for some but it felt too forced for me (and trust me, feeling trapped does not project well!)

It’s a stretch, but I think the mental shift I underwent between working for a non-profit and making barely enough to pay rent and making ‘good’ money in high-tech isn’t that different from what’s required here. My skills didn’t really change – I didn’t go back to school, I looked the same, and wasn’t appreciably different in any way. The difference was in my attitude about myself and how I projected that in resumes and the like. And if you think romance and business are really that far apart try writing an online profile sometime. It’s all about stressing the good points.

It’s easy to say I’ll just change my attitude; doing it is something different. If you’ve ever tried to force a mental shift you know how hard it is. So I’ve laid it out for myself in small pieces -based on what I know I did before when I didn’t have a plan ahead of time. Will that solve everything? Probably not – it should shift enough that the next steps will become more clear. Then I’ll write the book that makes it all sound self-evident and obvious!

I’m not just leaving it at mental effort though – my other action item is simply to find more events around my other goals that will get me out of my usual haunts and mixing with new people at least once every two weeks – something other than home, work, and the train.

Next week: Treasure hunting – the hobby

Holding myself accountable

I’d say I’m holding my own on gardening, photography, and exercise – the last improved over the weekend with the threat of more drastic action.

Technorati Tags: excuses, self-perception

A lesson in self-identity from the U.S. Census

I don’t answer questions about race. I simply don’t identify myself or others that way. I wrote my college entrance essay on that topic more than 20 years ago and haven’t changed my mind since – even though the U.S. government hasn’t either. For awhile it seemed like we were making progress in moving away from this ‘standard’.  My older sister and I were born in the same hospital but while her birth certificate lists race, mine does not. So I always check that ‘choose not to identify’ box on job applications or the like. My ancestors came from more than one continent, but even so it’s an archaic set of choices based on Victorian values and not genetics (or even culture.)

The U.S. Census this year devotes 20% of the questions to race and Hispanic ethnicity with no box to choose not to identify. That’s a lot considering that the purpose of the Census is to count the population in order to assign the districts and number of elected Representatives – and it’s illegal to use race in determining voting districts.

While I’m answering the questions pertinent to apportionment in Congress I’ve chosen to leave the race and Hispanic questions blank. I doubt anyone is going to come after me for it, but it still feels like civil disobedience. Particularly given all the warning letters in my mail about how answering is required by law (I read the law cited and it wasn’t quite that specific). I’m not doing this because of some conspiracy theory or fear of Big Brother. I’m doing it because I refuse to be defined that way. I see myself as a lot of things; a woman, a member of Gen X, an American, but not as a member of a race. I think it’s important not to let others force us to apply labels to ourselves that we don’t agree with whether that’s race on the Census or a limiting disability. If someone else wants to check a box based on what they think my blue eyes mean they’re free to do so, but I won’t do it for them.

Technorati Tags: negative labels, removing limits, self-perception

The case against missionaries

Without getting too political, the whole “Haitian Incident” involving the American missionaries really rubbed me the wrong way, particularly the people I’ve heard defending their actions – ‘they had some parents’ permission’. And that makes it OK? If a van pulled up in rural Appalachia and offered to take kids to a ‘better place in Mexico with opportunities’ Americans would demand that they be arrested and any acquiescing parents be investigated by Child Services. Why on earth does anyone expect Haiti to have a lower standard for its children? Poverty, even extreme poverty, is no excuse to break up a family, a culture and a country. Poverty is not abuse.

Unfortunately it’s not an uncommon attitude. I see it in my fellow volunteers working with foster kids too. Surely ballet lessons with a middle class adoptive family should trump street dancing in the projects with her recovering birth mother? The problem is, it doesn’t. Connections with who and where we come from are some of the most powerful on Earth. Which is why we are somewhat inclined to believe that helping someone else means bringing them into our world and our connections; we value them that highly. But if we do it at the expense of someone else’s points of contact with family, culture, language, food and their world we are doing more harm than good.

Value your connections, your food, your culture as unique to you; special, not better.

Have a different opinion? Share it in the comments…

Technorati Tags: perceived value, self-perception

There are all kinds of ways to stand out

Taken in pieces there really isn’t anything that outstanding about this camellia flower – it’s doesn’t have an unusual color or shape or even number of petals.  It’s not particularly small or really gigantic and yet somehow it commands attention. Do you view yourself in terms of the pieces or the overall?

Camellia, Juliet Chase, all rights reserved

Technorati Tags: meditation images, self confidence, self-perception

The No Excuses Project: ‘My perception is skewed’

I would liken this excuse to being suddenly blind and deciding to sit in the same spot until either you could see again or magically become confident that you would never bump into a wall.  Just because I see the fallacy in the argument doesn’t mean I haven’t used it! A belief that you are always attracted to the wrong men (or women), or that you can’t seem to get a business off the ground when others are doing so fits into the excuse that you are somehow inherently flawed and can’t trust your own judgment.  The primary flaw in this excuse is the underlying belief that there is a perfect standard – some absolute truth that can be measured against.  But there just isn’t. There also isn’t a set schedule that everyone else follows nor do people usually own up to their own bumped noses.

Just like eyesight we all see things through the same technical process (light waves) but we receive slightly different data and process it differently.  No one person holds the truth on the exact shade of yellow in a daffodil or the right time to move across the country.  So how can your perception be skewed if there isn’t a single one out there that isn’t? The only real recourse is to blindly get up out of the chair, make a note of the walls you encounter and adjust course.  Being self-aware and able to acknowledge your own mistakes without recrimination will allow your judgment calls to grow with you; sitting in the chair won’t bring any more clarity.

Next week: I don’t have the right equipment

Technorati Tags: common excuses, Health and Happiness, self-perception

5 tips on how and when to label yourself

Labels are tricky things.  The world might well be a better place without them, however conversations would drag on forever. If you’ve ever watched someone converse in sign language you may have seen them spell a person’s name letter by letter and then create a spacial reference point so that they can refer to that instead of painstakingly spelling the name each and every time – that’s what labels do, create a common reference point so that we can get on with what we are trying to say.  The downside is that they tend to stick and there’s no language on earth that has enough words to be completely accurate.

1. Do spend some time thinking about what labels you apply to yourself and whether they describe the person you want to be. Get rid of as many as you can and rewrite the labels that are useful but don’t fit perfectly.There’s a lot of advice out there on never labeling yourself however there are some that are a good idea – are you single or not? are you an adult?

2. Be confident in any labels you do use – be ‘independent’, not ‘trying to be independent’. There’s a wealth of power in claiming it.

3. Don’t label yourself unnecessarily. Your Facebook page probably doesn’t need any labels whereas your LinkedIn page probably does.

4. Take the time to find the right words and be open to relearning words you already know.  Words change over time and our early understanding isn’t always complete. For whatever reason I grew up defining the word ‘artist’ to mean a painter or a sculptor. I have no idea why, but that was my internal definition.  So when I went hunting for a career label that would describe jewelry design,writing, photography and other creative pursuits I was stumped.  Until it occurred to me to look up the term again – the first definition on Dictionary.com is: a person who produces works in any of the arts that are primarily subject to aesthetic criteria.

Look at that, I’m an artist!  One word to describe all those things. Even though it’s a broad term it will do for filling in the blank on websites and forms.

5. Don’t exclude essential parts of yourself, just to conform to what’s normal or expected. Watch this
Gap ad with Eisa Davis, who juggles more than one passion simply because it’s essential and doesn’t pick just one.  She definitely fits the definition of what Barbara Sher calls scanners although that’s another label I don’t particularly like because scanning implies a lack of action.

Words have power, choose wisely!

Technorati Tags: self-esteem, self-perception, self-talk

Subtle synchronicity

I suspect that the last day of March is going to turn out to be a pivotal one for me.  In trying to follow my own advice on problem solving, I was researching in the ‘people also bought this’ section of Amazon for potential expertise. I saved off a couple of interesting books, one of them being Barbara Sher’s Refuse to Choose, but I was a little too impatient to wait on shipping.  So while I was out running errands I stopped in at the local used bookstore just to check.  They had it in stock.  Another book practically leaped off the shelf at me, This Time I Dance!, by Tama Kieves, a recounting of how she stopped being a lawyer and started being a writer (and she’s upfront with the bumps in between.) Getting them home, I poured a glass of wine and read, and read, and read.

I found myself described in both books, pretty much on the first page. One described my personality and the other my journey.  Wednesday and Thursday, I finished my first go through and then re-read certain chapters of each all the while wandering around the house feeling like someone had pulled about the half the stuffing out of me.  I didn’t feel sick; just weak.  I’ve been introspective enough over the years to have spotted my pattern of indepth obsession with a topic or career only to find that I had absolutely no further interest in it about ten years later.  But I’d subconsciously classified it as a character flaw and a case of bad choices combined with poor analysis.  Seeing it all described in Refuse to Choose as normal, predictable, and something to be celebrated instead of fixed was a shock – so was letting go of that internalized profile. Seeing my very same dilemmas and self-doubts described in This Time I Dance! was comforting and encouraging, maybe I’m not doing it wrong after all… I’m very curious to see where that takes me next.

Technorati Tags: self-doubt, self-perception, synchronicity