The art of choosing...

People often tell me I’m a chilled personality – relaxed, calm, and a roll-with-the-punches kinda gal (comes with the territory when you’re a conflict-averse introvert who doesn’t like to rock the boat). There are the natural flip sides to this part of my personality, like lacking drive and a certain motivation to getting things done, but I do prefer a less dramatic lifestyle.

Many years ago, however, I knew this girl who was a little more into the dramatic. About 18 years old at the time, she was introverted like me, though would fly off the handle at the smallest of stresses. Banging and crashing around like the exertion would somehow change the course of the day. This temper would then bring out language that would rival Eminem.

Yikes.

That person was me. Double yikes.

I find it hard to believe that that was the person who I really was back then. The total antithesis of me now, in some respects. In my very first job in a pizza takeaway establishment, my end of the year award was ‘the employee who was most likely to lose her cool’, or something like that.

This was a defining moment for me. As much as I thought this kind of behaviour matched who I was at the time, I hated the label. I realised I didn’t want to be that person.

Roll on three years. I had been in my second clerical role and on the cusp of my third. It was my last day. The parting word from one of my superiors was, as he shook my hand, ‘Grace under pressure. That’s how I will remember you’. I hadn’t even realised I’d done it, but I had changed the course of people’s perception just by changing my attitude.

Some might say my new husband mellowed me, though if you knew his dynamic, extroverted personality you might think otherwise! Some might say it was the faith in God that I found during that time, and I can’t deny the impact of my belief in a loving Creator who gave his life for me. All these factors contributed to my change, but what was the biggest factor of all?

Choice.

I made a choice, all those years ago, NOT to be ‘that’ girl. I made a choice to take a deep breath when I was stressed and to look at what I could do, not panic over what was out of my control. Oh, I still get stressed out (just ask my children) but I choose the kind of person I want to be in that stress. Sometimes it works and sometimes I fall into a screaming heap (just ask my children) but as Anne Shirley from LM Montgomery’s book Anne of Green Gables used to say, ‘tomorrow is fresh, with no mistakes in it’. Sometimes ‘tomorrow’ is next week, sometimes it’s several, but I still try to choose to focus on my reaction, rather than the circumstances.

These days (and here’s where I start sounding like my grandmother) are troubling times. Being a victim is the flavour of the era. Kids are obese because of food advertising. Politicians are ruining the country. Intolerance is the flavour of the decade. What happens to us is often attributed to someone else’s responsibility.

But society seems to forget that we have a choice. A choice to say NO. A choice to turn off the TV. A choice to make a stand for what we believe in or who we want to be. A choice to respect the opposition in a disagreement and a choice to value people for who they are, as opposed to who they could or should be. Your choice may not be the thing that changes the world initially, but who knows, maybe collectively it could be. Maybe we CAN have a positive impact, reaching wider than we could ever imagine, if we stop blaming and start choosing.



So, who are you going to choose?

The 'F' Word

The 'F' word

There are few words that illicit a bigger gasp on its utterance.

However, before you send the censorship board to have me banned, hear me out.

I'm not talking about the Gordon Ramsay style of expletives, just an ordinary word that people find hard to say. And hear.

Failure.

It strikes everyone at some stage of life, and most likely more than once. And yet, so many anxieties are caused over the fear of facing failure. Myself included.

I'm not sure if it makes me a people-pleaser, or that my twenty years of administration experience just can't allow for the inefficiency of not getting it right the first time. Whatever the psychological reason, I have an aversion to failing.

So on a particular day when I was dwelling in my own inadequacies, I turned to social media for a welcome distraction only to be faced with a link to a motivational video from Oprah Winfrey. On, you guessed it, failure.

Rolling my eyes as I tried to scroll past the video, the subtitles grabbed my attention. 'There are no mistakes.'
Seriously? I just made several colossal ones. I know you are a multi-billionaire, but I am evidence of a challenge to your theory. But I kept watching.

'Failure is just that thing moving you in another direction. You get as much from your losses as you do from your victories. Your losses are there to wake you up. Your life is bigger than one experience.'

That's ok for her; she's uber successful and one of, if not the, richest women in the world.

Except I remembered that she was fired from her very first TV journalist anchor position. In that moment of her demise she was demoted to, you guessed it, a talk show host. This perceived 'failure' catapulted her into one of the most successful media personalities in the world.

The mind boggles (well, mine does) as to the course of history if Oprah hadn't experienced that 'failure'. That difficult, demoralising, humiliating time in her life was the very thing that pointed her toward her destiny.

Excuse me, people - there will be no more lamenting tonight. I have a destiny to chase.

School Reunion

There’s freedom in being over 40. (Well, maybe in spirit rather than in body.)

Finally, you know stuff. Stuff they could never teach you in high school. Maybe you have kids or maybe you don’t. Maybe you’re married, or not, or was. Whatever the situation, people over 40 have had to learn through different experiences and have (we hope!) more wisdom about issues than when we were teens. No matter what your teen status, adult life has delivered a level playing field.

I left my teen years behind, quicker than Speedy Gonzales (now, THAT’S showing my age). Painfully shy and a bit of a nerd, school for me was a place of fear, uncertainty and longing. Fear of doing the wrong thing, uncertainty of who I really was and a longing to be appreciated and accepted for me, even if I didn’t think very highly of myself at the time. As soon as that final exam was over, I was planning a new life, a new destiny in a new city, in the hope of leaving all the angst behind.

But insecurities have this annoying little habit of following.

Twenty years on and married with three children (thankfully nothing like the TV series of the same name), I now appear to be a confident woman with some wisdom about life. I have spoken to a crowd, sung in front of a congregation and given a eulogy or three in my time. But it has been a twenty year process. Little by little, one decision before another, I am winning the war, though the insecurities have been a constant battle ever since the school days.

Which is why a random Facebook invitation to ‘catch up’ with a school crowd I haven’t seen in ten years, or in some cases twenty, left me a little unravelled.

Do I go? Do they want me to go? But I wasn’t in the ‘cool’ crowd. But I was invited so maybe I should go? Who else is going? What if I have no one to talk to…? Yada, yada, yada. I couldn’t believe the schoolyard emotions could still be there after all these years.

These questions were followed by my own rebuke: “What are you, 16? Pull yourself together, woman!” – said out loud, because we old ladies do that sometimes.

And then I got to thinking…why? Why did those emotions resurface? Why did it bother me?

After some soul searching, I think it’s this – in the teenage years, when adulthood is emerging, classmates are there. Whether you liked them or not, they were the first friends, the first foes, the first crushes (and there were plenty of those), and maybe the first kiss. They are the first people to see your new adult self and for some reason, whether I admitted it or not, I cared what they thought.

Against my fears (which involved me saying yes, then no, then yes, then maybe) I met up with the school crowd...and it was the best thing I ever did. In some ways, it was like time hadn’t passed and we had the familiarity of a bunch of kids who grew up together. Even though, we spent very little time associating at school and many years have passed since. All of us now have the wisdom to see the person behind that unfortunate label we gave each other back in the day. This time, there were no cliques, no ‘cool’ groups, no nerds (yee-ha!) – just a group of people catching up on the last two decades.

If only I knew then what I know now….

I can’t go back and change time (wouldn’t we all, if we could?), but it did get me thinking about what this middle-aged lady (gasp, did I really just use that term to describe myself???) would tell her teenage self. Or more so, her teenage children…. 

• Acknowledge your strengths and be proud of who you are: a work in progress. And that’s okay.
• Learn how to laugh – but make sure it’s with others and at yourself, not the other way around.
• Everyone has a story, just some choose not to show it. Don't judge just on what you see.
• In twenty years, you are going to be having a beer with people you don’t speak to now…and it'll be fun. 
• In twenty years, you'll all be laughing about who was actually in the 'cool' group - we all thought everyone else was!
• Most of all, believe that childhood friends are unique and indescribable. Treasure these friendships and they will last a lifetime.