Motivation, Montessori, management and GenX

I respectfully disagree. This is great for the greatest generation (Drucker was in this generation or older). It kinda lets folks off the hook for their own tasks. If the manager is responsible then the worker should reap no benefit of the work, only the manager. 

As a Montessori teacher for 9 years, I still believe that people should be intrinsically motivated by the tasks they are doing. Therefore, their work is their responsibility as is how they feel about it. 

As a GenX manager of baby boomers, one greatest generation and a millennial, with a GenX boss, I go into work assuming everyone is self motivated about their work. Their production is not my responsibility. It's theirs. I think them function and overall production is a shared responsibility between me and them. I have my own production that I am responsible for. 

I struggle with production in my greatest generation employee. Maybe I should take this approach rather than keep being frustrated. After all, we are only ever a product of our times. 

Keeping Egosystems in Balance

I both love and hate watching shows like "Four Weddings" and "Say Yes to the Dress."  I love them because you see people at one of the happiest moments of their lives.  My favorite one to love/cringe at is "Say Yes to the Dress: Bridesmaids."  

Say Yes to the Dress: Bridesmaids

I have been a bridesmaid enough times to know that it's a much tougher job than you initially think it will be. At first, you have all these warm feelings about supporting your friend, becoming the best sister-in-law of all time, and getting to dress up.  Over time, it begins to get taxing.  Then there comes the breaking point.  

That's where Say Yes to the Dress: Bridesmaids gets interesting.  During the show, the bride and bridesmaids and entourage pick the bridesmaids' dresses.  More often than not, the Maid of Honor throws an ego-driven fit grown out of jealousy (or grief that she's losing her best friend) and has to be reminded that weddings are about the Bride, not the whiny Maid of Honor.  

I hate conflict of all kinds, especially when Made For TV conflict gets a little too real.  I mean, TV drums up a lot of viewership when "regular" folks duke it out on TV.  I just heard on the radio that Jersey Shore was cancelled and that Honey Boo Boo beat out the Republican National Convention for viewership last night.  Not that J-Woww, Pauly-D, and the Situation are normal by any stretch, or that Honey Boo Boo and her family are either.  As a former Jersey Shore watcher, I have to confess I quit my GTL addiction because they treated each other so horribly.  I'm relieved that the show won't be seen again until the "Where are they Now" flashback episode on VH1 in 10 years. 

These shows all make their ratings from ego flare ups that in turn flare up the egos of others on the show.  Maids of Honor get offended that the Bride won't support their choice, so they get dramatic with things.  The Situation gets his feelings hurt because someone took his girl, so he gets dramatic.  And therein lies the show.  Ego versus ego.  Stay tuned: Whose ego will reign supreme this time?  

This is the first Friday at my new job.  It's been very interesting to see how folks operate here.  I've been careful to try to respect everyone's egos.  I am fascinated by the way everyone is telling me their stories - what they marginalize, what they emphasize, how they frame things.  The best part, though, is how they talk about each other.  

There is genuine respect among folks on my team.  They have worked together for years and years.  They have functioned for a year and a half without a team leader.  I have been careful this week to try to keep the Egosystem in balance - you know, how the egos function when they flare up next to someone else's.  Reality TV thrives on this, happy office relationships don't.  

Naturally, anyone new brings imbalance to the Egosystem no matter how large the organization.  The trick is to map this out and navigate the Egosystem with care and respect.  In turn, if your own ego gets a little trigger-happy, stop and recognize that it's not about you, and you are not the Bride here.  Plus, your office is not a TLC show, nor is it Big Brother.  You don't get to vote out the sour-est ego of the week.   

So today, I celebrate my first week in a happy new Egosystem.  I hope I can still say that down the road!

Until Then?

If I had a movie genre that defined my life, it would be romantic comedy.  Maybe that's why I don't like to actually go see them in theaters - they hit too close to home.  You know the scene, the single girl who's in a sad state then she meets/falls for the impossible guy then through some stroke of fate he falls for her.  That's all good and great, but I am stuck at the "Then" part. And have been my whole life. 

This is where my life turns more into tragedy.  It has happened to me pretty much continuously since I discovered boys in the 5th grade.  I even prolonged one of these relationships for 2 years.  

I haven't had a proper date in 4 years.  I've been hanging out a lot in the past few months with a pretty dreamy dude.  We've got a lot in common.  Family is a huge priority, learning new stuff is cool, we both like action flicks and cold beer with wings.  Life was pretty great - but - I just recently got to "Then".  

And just like the Ro-Com leading ladies, I'm at the moment where she catches the leading man in some sort of misunderstanding or they discover that they are at cross purposes.  This usually comes before the clarification of the misunderstanding after which he declares his undying love for her.  Generally during this part of the movie, it either rains or there is a gallon of ice cream involved.  (That's how you know that moment is coming...)

Insert any Katherine Heigl movie here!

I'm all kinds of good with living in Ro-Com land up until this part.  Honestly, it's pretty fun.  But it's not what I want deep down.  I'm not even sure I want a movie-perfect ending.  Heck, I'd just settle for an ending of any kind instead of languishing on the editing room floor.  For how I've been feeling - living in my Ro-Com turned Tragedy - I'd go back a scene or two and where the tension builds and builds and you begin to feel sorry for said single girl.  

So, I'm waiting for it to rain or for the gallon of ice cream moment to hit.  Someday something like that may happen to me.  Right now with this year's dreamy dude - I doubt it.  So - I'm waiting until "Then".   Again.  

Of Cover Letters and Other Truth Telling

I'm applying for a new job because my current job is like a vampire for my professional self-confidence.  Every shred of skill, ability and attitude I have honed over the past 15 years of my professional career has almost been drained away by the past 160 hours of my work life.  I took this job because it was a timely opportunity and it was something I thought I could learn how to do, but things are not progressing as I had hoped they might.  Thankfully another opportunity came up that's a better fit for me.  And I have to get out before I lose myself in the trees instead of continuing to develop forests.  I'm good at developing forests - and apparently not so good at learning how to groom the trees.  

For me, the hardest part of applying for jobs is the cover letter.  I grew up in a culture of women where you were to be demure, you were to deflect complements, and you were not to speak highly of yourself in any way.  You were not to express your true opinion because "if you don't have something good to say, don't say anything at all."  So unless you were talking about how good the Jell-O salad was, you kept your mouth shut - or you just kept shoveling food in your mouth until it was the appropriate time to get up and help with kitchen cleanup. (I've wondered on more than one occasion if this is not the root cause of many a church-lady's plumpness.) Voluntary kitchen duty for me has more than once involved "mistakenly" disposing of someone else's hot mess of a potluck dish then disavowing all knowledge about where the rest of it might have gone. 

So writing about myself in a way that places my abilities, talents and experience in a positive light has been a difficult task I have had to learn during my last semester of graduate school. I've had to shed my genteel upbringing and learn how to write about myself in ways I'm not used to.  It has helped me to put myself in the shoes of my mentors, to think about the things they would say about me and my work.  It has also helped me to let go of the control I feel like I need to have over every word I write.  The letters that have won me the interest of prospective employers have been the ones I've fired off quickly, where I've written eloquently about my passions, and the ones where I've treated my abilities and talents with (Yikes!) the most honesty.  


I still shed complements.  I still deflect glory - but only because I work with other women who can only take credit indirectly.  They're also the ones who make the best potluck dishes.  And every Southern woman worth her salt knows that silence is actually the best complement you can give a cook during any meal.  The other one is not refusing to take home leftovers. 

First International Church of Starbuck’s

I am friends with a group of people that includes several members of the staff of a large local church.  One recently was fired for being too outspoken about church policies he disagreed with.  One was even more recently promoted because her boss recommended her for the position after the woman retired.  The senior pastor of that church resigned a few weeks ago, the hiring committee asked the music minister to resign.  Drama, of course, ensued. 

The response from the church members I know has been strong to say the least.  One side trusts the hiring committee explicitly because “they know things about the situation better than the rest of us do.”  The other side wants to raise hell because they were not involved in the decision making process, ostensibly implying that they would have kept the people happy and found a way to work through things.  I regret to say that this is pretty typical of churches I have known.  The story line is always the same:  do one thing, someone else doesn’t like it, drama ensues. 

I know a lot of folks in conservative churches listen to talk radio – you know the kind I mean - where the radio host is intolerant of any liberal views, cuts people off mid-sentence, and is generally disrespectful of anyone who is even a shade of gray away from his own views.  I can’t stand that stuff, even though I agree with 99.9% of what is said.  I can’t stand it because of how the hosts treat the callers.  My Mamma taught me that that behavior was rude and any lady worth her salt doesn’t treat people that way. 

The sad part is that this is how disagreements are treated in the Christian circles I have been a part of.  Dissent is never treated as an opportunity for exploring a topic.  It’s treated like leprosy.  Only the leper colony is now bigger than the “pure” folks inside the walls of the city.  This is doubly bad for those who ask hard questions because the defensiveness that comes from being a minority compounds the need to draw hard and fast lines about which all members must make a public decision.  It’s Travis’s line in the sand – and I fear that those who stay inside will die a painful death like the rest of the Texan patriots at the Alamo. 

For this church to survive, and many like it, there has to be an intentional process of drawing out the conflict very carefully, skillfully moving toward reconciliation – or at least enough forgiveness that those who choose to stay can move forward together as a church body.  This might be a wonderful opportunity to learn the skill of debate – recognizing the merits and weaknesses of someone else’s argument and presenting your own before both sides come to a new understanding of the issue.  All of this is very Hegelian, and sadly most Christian folks know very little about this nor do they care to learn anything about how to practice it.  But it is likely the most important skill that the pure church insiders need to gain if they are to reach the lepers they have ostracized by their staunch foothold on their version of the truth.

 

I’m not advocating for a looser definition of truth here.  I am advocating for listening, for respect, for openness to others’ ideas & perspectives, for laying down your own pride and considering others as more important than yourself.  All of this is Biblical, yet these phrases do not characterize the way that this church has been treating its staff.  And the lepers become less and less interested in getting back into communities that treat people like they’re enemy guests on an afternoon radio show.  That’s why I think I’ll stay a leper and hang out with the other lepers for a while longer at Starbuck’s on Sunday mornings. The coffee's better there, anyway.  

Proud Mom of 3 Graduate Degrees

An article by Slate.com recently explored the experiences, motivations and rationale for women who remain childless.  Since I am a childless woman who is nearly 40, I was fascinated.  I’ve always said that my excuse was that I had my nose in the books and didn’t have time for boys.  Come on, I have three graduate degrees that I have collected in the past 12 years – that’s a lot of attention on the text on the page instead of the dudes across the room.

The first real truth is that I would love to find a man.  I just would like him to already have kids.  The men I know who have become dads since I’ve known them have expressed the most wonderful qualities since their kids have come along.  I remember my younger brother having a complete freak fest when he held my niece for the first time.  Now, he’s the primary care provider for his two kids, ages 2 and 6 months.  He’s more patient, more gentle, more relaxed, and has become the king of follow-through, bath time and diaper changing.  With my niece, he was in denial that there was even a living creature in the baby burrito much less was he willing to deal with the contents of her diapers.  The problem with the single men I know is that they need to be trained – in soooo many ways. 

The second real truth is that all of the moms I know who have young children is that they have lost themselves in their kids.  You see this on TLC’s What Not To Wear all the time – women who have become frumpy and without any thought of a gym membership.  No wonder it seems like celebrity moms buy their children on Rodeo Drive.  I touched base with an old friend over the weekend because I saw something that reminded me of her, and she told me she had no memory of it – which was odd because it was so much a part of who she was for all the years that I knew her.  I wondered at her response for a moment, and decided that my sister-in-law (mother of 2 under 10) swears that motherhood kills your brain cells.  My friend agreed but had to quit the conversation to go chase her boy down because he was being too quiet. 

So, between wanting a man who already has gone through the delightful dad metamorphosis and not wanting the medusa mom transformation to happen to me, I am childless and proud to be an aunt of 4 fabulous young people whom I love to spoil on a regular basis.  The possibility of children is not off the table – for me, it might be about finding the right person who could become the delightful dad and temper my medusa mom.  But for the time being, I’ll stick with the story that my graduate degrees are my children – at least if they are too quiet in the next room, I know that all’s well in there.  

A Word in Good Season

Yesterday morning as I was unlocking my office door, a friend and fellow graduate student down the hall was opening his door.  He's been about a year behind me, so I know he's going through the worst part of his program right now.  Last summer brought my qualifying exams followed by the approval of my dissertation proposal.  If this part goes awry, you're off track and you might as well quit and go back to teaching school as an ABD (all but dissertation).  More than half of those who start doctoral studies wind up in this category. 

So I felt like I needed to ask him how his program was progressing, and it turned out to be a good thing.  He told me about how nervous he was for his written exams.  I found out later that his exams had been much more demanding than mine were because of how they were organized - four hours in a room with pen and paper and whatever is stored in your beady brain.  Take that times four and you've got yourself a pretty emotionally challenging qualifying exam.  His oral exams are today, and I had the chance to encourage him and pray for him. 

He mentioned that he had not gotten the sense of internal peace that came just before his written exams.  But isn't that why we only get what we need for today?  Won't tomorrow worry about itself?  Manna doesn't keep  in the fridge so well.  Pennies from heaven rust away if you keep them for too long. 

Had I waited and postponed my talk with him, it would have been too late.  He's got a lot of people in his corner rooting for him, and yesterday morning (and today, too) he needed one more.  A word in good season is  indeed like apples of silver in settings of gold - and sometimes the season for those words only lasts a moment.  Don't save your encouraging words just for yourself, spread them in good season because you never know when someone is most in need of a shot in the arm that only you can give. 

Don’t Hate Me Because I’m Beautiful

My strongest muscle group, and my favorite to work out, is legs.  My friend was showing off the results of his intense calf work the other day, and I knew not to reciprocate because my genes have gifted me with miraculously gorgeous calves.  Jealousy often follows this kind of conversation because of this, and I have to defer to the “Thanks, Dad” sheepish comment I always make.  The dreaded look of “I hate you” inevitably follows.  My mind immediately flashes to that Pantene commercial where she flips her hair and says in her ambiguously foreign accent – perhaps people feel that foreign beauty is somehow better than domestic beauty – “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful” – just be the best you that you can be.   

This workout today – Lower Body Extreme Zone – is 40 minutes of the best of what will make it painful for me to walk the stairs today and tomorrow to my 2^nd floor office.  Quads, hams, abductors – lunges, dead lifts and squats.  I don’t often feel this way, but 30 minutes later during my awesome breakfast, my muscles are still tired (fried egg on Ezekiel toast, avocado and mandarin oranges if you were wondering).  I always feel like I’ve really accomplished something when I finish that workout because it’s one of the series that always challenges me. 

Sometimes it’s hard for me to get excited about another set of bicep curls or shoulder presses.  My body seems to think that upper body muscle is a really good idea (Thanks, again, Dad) – which it is to an extent, but developing giantific man arms is not my goal.  This is yet another reason why putting my attention into legs is beneficial for my overall approach to my aesthetic. It’s hard enough to find shirts to fit the balance between my shoulders and waist as it is without adding muscle.  If beauty is pain, then the sweaty face in the mirror with avocado stuck to the corner of my mouth and no gas in the tank – that’s beautiful.

Shifting the Balance

I’m beginning to lose sight of my goals again.  I had the opportunity to watch my team lose for a second time last night and their opponents moved on to the national tournament.  It was a late night and I relished the devil’s hour and a half of sleep again this morning, plus, I need to make up 30 minutes of work from leaving early yesterday. 

I feel discouraged because every day since Friday, I have had some social engagement that provided me with not so positive food choices that did not meet up with what I had planned and needed to eat.  If I am really interested in losing 10-15 pounds and keeping that weight off, I need to make some different choices when it comes to eating with my friends.  Most of the time, in my mind, I’m interested in losing that weight, but when it comes down to a choice between shrimp on a green salad and fried cheese, fried cheese might win every time. 

The times when I’ve been most successful at losing weight have been times in my life when I’ve been isolated socially either because a breakup/custody battle for the friend network or because I was at a multi-week training out of state.  Numerous articles demonstrate that people, especially women, will tend to be the same weight within their social network because they tend to eat the same kinds of things and exercise about the same.  It’s as if we carry around our social network around our midsections.  I don’t think I need new friends – I think I need to shift where I am on the “how much we eat together” spectrum.  I don’t think I need to stop going out with my guy friends, I just need to remember that my body does not need as many slices of pizza as they do. 

For this change to really take effect, I have to mentally practice making those choices so they become automatic when I’m in the moment.  Then, I think that when I make a better choice in the moment, I need to have a non-food reward that I get.  Thinking about that could be really fun…

Holy Relationships, Batman!

In the June 2012 edition of Baptists Today (BaptistsToday.org), there are several articles summarizing and editorializing about the recent conference for Baptists and by Baptists focusing on sexuality.  Whatever views folks might have on this issue, it occurs to me that having deep dialog about a deep topic like sexuality is one of the greatest needs on Christian life today.  Topics ranged from human trafficking to homosexuality.  The collection of articles about the conference makes for thoughtful reading if you have half an hour to take that in.

It struck me as I was reading those reports that what is lacking in this conversation is a broader concern for Christian relationality.  Sexuality is a small facet of overall human relationality.  As a single person who hasn’t really had any/many boyfriends to speak of much less been married, as one who is attracted to men, and who is 37, I think that casting any discussion about sexuality in larger terms of Christian relationality would be valuable.  Baptists Today reserves one page (my favorite page) for various quotations about hot topics.  One of them this month goes like this:

“I got to weddings and hear how the two people getting married were ‘incomplete and now they are whole.’ My heart breaks for those who are single sitting in the crowd who just heard publicly that they are not whole persons.”  Jeanie McGowan (ethicsdaily.com)

This perception pervades Christian life, and I have heard this in sermons about romantic relationships, in Christian dating books, and in cultural norms regarding the reality that most folks my age are married (and some divorced multiple times by age 37). 

As a Baptist teen, I sat in countless youth group meetings focusing on the question of “how far is too far?”  As a dyed-in-the-wool BSM-er during my undergraduate days, there were at least as many conversations and sermons about that each year as there were in 6 years of youth group.  As a university minister, I have to confess that I failed to see Christian sexuality as part of the larger issue of Christian relationality.  We encouraged students to be “in the world, but not of the world” by equipping them (sometimes quite poorly) to fend off their partner’s friskiness. 

One minister I worked with commented that he had dealt with numerous students whom he said could quote verse after verse about avoiding sexual immorality while enjoying sex with their partner.  We also taught students to share their faith and to be friends with people whose ideas were just like theirs.  There was never a discussion about how to respect differences, how to dialog about the deep divides between people, or how to be consistent in difficult relationships.  There were glib statements about loving people, helping the world, and being a good Christian.

This approach, both to sexuality and relationships, was to essentially the “moat” mentality – keep the undesirables out and go on the defensive if threatened.  No wonder dialog in Christian life is unheard of.  It’s impossible to have a discussion through a brick wall and across a ditch of your own filth.  (Unless you and your buddies yell from the tower, ‘Your father was a hamster, and your mother smelled of elderberries!’ then hoist cattle over the wall at your enemies hoping they will scream out ‘Run Away, Run Away!’ as they haul it back to the forest.) 

Because of the moat mentality, I am now not surprised that when things start to get hot and heavy, things go wrong and good Christian girls get pregnant at 17.  I am not surprised that the divorce rate for Christian couples is no different than for non-Christian couples.  Ministers are not actively offering guidance about Christian relationality.  There is enough out there about what NOT to do, but just like dog trainers tell us, if we don’t know what we WANT them to do, why do we punish when they do the opposite?  Ministers need to focus on what TO DO, which includes a greater context of holiness in Christian relationships with all people. 

If sexuality was not isolated as its own issue, and if it was included in a larger conversation about what is dysfunctional about relationships in the Christian community, and if (I know that’s a lot of if’s) this inclusive approach was taught and lived in all levels, ages and denominations of Christian life, I bet my bottom dollar that things would begin to be different and Christianity would no longer have Christians as its biggest problem.

There's a ditch on both sides of the road

As a kid, I used to ride in our giant 1970's van with my brothers and my mom out to the field to take my Dad lunch when he was plowing.  Most of our land is contiguous to our homestead, but we have one place that is 8 miles or so east down a long, straight country road.  One day, instead of driving our normal route into the field through the pasture, we needed to drop the lunch and head to town (oh, glorious day!), so we pulled off the road to wait for Dad to circle back around in the tractor. 

Little did we know that the very tall weeds there obscured a deep (very deep) drainage ditch.  Now, in the Texas Panhandle these are not full of weeds or water very often, but this was a wet year, so it had grown up with weeds which had hidden how deep and dangerous it was.  So Mom pulls off to the side of the road and within the blink of an eye the giant 1970's van was teetering on the edge of disaster, hanging from a cliff over a drainage ditch.  Luckily, my Mom's panic was allayed by a man driving by who took to rescue us from certain death (it was only three feet down).  By the time the tractor made it's way around the field, Dad reminded Mom that of course there was indeed a culvert there that had always been there - didn't she remember? This did not please her.

Generally ditches are used in one of two cases: either to avoid something bad  (say, a car passing another car in oncoming traffic and they cut it a little close) or after something bad has already happened (when there are flashing lights behind you and the man in the Ray-Bans asks you to pull over).  I almost had a convergence of these two circumstances south of Valley Mills, pulling over to let others pass me and almost hitting a highway patrolman who had someone pulled over in the ditch right in front of me. I think we both saw our lives flash before our eyes that day.

I say this sometimes when I refer to problems with extremes.  There are fundamentalists on both sides of all issues.  More often than not, they have more in common with each other than anyone in the middle.  There are problems with almost every area of human life related to extreme overuse and extreme underuse of our bodies, nutrition, work, liesure,....  Exercising too much leads to injury.  Exercising too little leads to heart problems.  Eating too little leads to digestive problems.  Eating too much leads to obesity.  Working too much leads to relational dysfunction.  Working too little leads to poverty.  Too much free time results in bad choices related to boredom.  Too little free time makes you unavailable for spontaneous fun.  When the issue of extremes comes up, I always say "There's a ditch on both sides of the road."  More often than not, people will stop and say, "Yeah, that's true!" 

The thing with life on extreme terms is that you can only be there for so long before the drainage culvert of death catches up to you.  That's when you're going to need someone to swoop in to rescue you.  When that happens, I hope your road is easy to get back on and someone kind heps you back to the middle. 

Can you imagine a place without God?

            This was my first thought when I woke up this morning.  Strange, I guess – but this is fairly normal for me – having deep thought type questions wake me up at 6:34 on Saturday mornings.  This one connects to Psalm 139:7-8 “Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I run from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there.  If I make my bed in the depths, you are there.” 

                So, can I imagine a place far from God?  I have to remember times when I felt far from God to get at this one.  I feel far from God when I am in the wrong kind of relationships. I dated a kid in college who was the wrong kind of person: more charisma than good sense, manipulative, gauged his self worth by how many people followed his lead of getting coffee and dessert after eating out at the restaurant…you know – a real winner (or so I thought at that time).  I very consciously turned my back on a lot of things that made me “me” to keep him.  I felt very far from God in that relationship. 

                I feel far from God when I hit this rock-bottom thought: “What am I gonna do?”  This is usually accompanied by rubbing of the forehead with both hands and a sense of deep panic that I feel even now just because I’m writing about it.  When I hit this thought, it has usually been triggered by some thought about the future, uncertainty about my present array of choices, or feeling like I’ve aged out of the dating market. This is a question that comes from a place of desperation, a place where I feel like all of the things I’m doing and have done have led me to a dead end and I only have bad options to choose from. I feel very far from God when I feel like I don't have any good options.

                So imagining a place far from God is for me about feeling like I’ve been painted into a corner where I have to deal with my own choices.  Being far from God feels cold and panicky to me, so should feeling close to God feel the opposite?  Should feeling close to God be warm and certain, planned and logical? 

                I am facing the most precipitous of moments less than two weeks from today: graduation.  In these times, it is a dangerous cliff indeed.  I feel like I’m being pushed toward it by the flow of time.  The closer it gets, the more panicky I feel about my future prospects.  I would love to be in a place where I could be in the right kinds of relationships and not have the question “What am I gonna do?” hang over my head.  It’s difficult for me to think that I could make these choices anywhere I am.  I guess it brings a sense of calmness to think about the prospect of new relationships and new options to choose from that God will still be there, no matter where I am or how I’m feeling about where I am.  That said, I would sure love to stay close to my support system of people I know and love.  I also would love to have a satisfactory answer to "What am I gonna do?"  I think that is the bigger issue for me -