Forced Free Will

There have been a few times in my life when I've felt like God was making it impossible for me to be able to do anything, except what he wants me to do.  This is one of those times.

I've been really sick for the past week or so while I've been hunting for jobs, networking and planning and researching what I will do next in my professional career.  First a cold, which was bad, but manageable.  Then came pink eye, or eyes, which was far less manageable.  Then came a solid 12 hours of construction in my building which might as well have been in my own living room.  It was so loud I couldn't hear anything but the drilling.  

These external arguably minor challenges mirrored the frustrations I have been feeling and thinking for far longer than this week--about the world, God and myself.  

I've discovered over the past two years who I really am, not who I think I am or want to be.  But who I really am.  A lot of that has to do with really honest people around me telling me what is--people I respect and can't ignore.  

This process has been hard.  So hard that it has made me question what I thought I believed. Unfortunately, or fortunately, this has resulted in a great deal of anger towards God.  

"Why the heck did he create the world like this?

I'd arrive at unsatisfying answers every time. I'd try to talk to God about these questions, but found myself getting more and more angry, and farther away from him.  Until this week.  

This week I've found that my feelings of need are stronger than my questions.  That my anger, while still there, is more quiet than the loud and unavoidable evidence of anger that is all around me.  

And so I am forced to freely choose to believe.  To believe that God is the answer to my need and to believe that He welcomes my questions.  Sure, I've always known this.  But today I feel it.

Back on the external front, I've also surrendered.  Fine, I'm sick.  So I'll stop and rest.  I am forced to lay down and sleep, read or just stare.    I am forced to stop the hunt and rest, knowing that God has a surprise for me in my next steps, a surprise that will still come whether I send out my resume this week or not.  

Why forced?  While I can choose whatever "solution" I want, I still know that Jesus is the answer - no matter how angry at him I might be.  So, I am forced to freely rest and heal.  I am forced to freely go to God with my angry questions.  

Here is a great quote I just found...

"The symptoms and the illness are not the same thing.  The illness exists long before the symptoms.  Rather than being the illness, the symptoms are the beginning of its cures.  The fact that they are unwanted makes them all the more a phenomenon of grace--a gift of God, a message from the unconscious, if you will, to initiate self-examination and repair." - M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled

Resigned to Naivete

I've never been a mid-way kind of girl.  I dive deep.  I don't know how to do anything any other way.  I buy into the story, drink the kool-aid and then sell it.  Every - single - time.  

And every time I believe that it won't change, that the loyalty, that the commitment and the investment won't ever be lost.  And then it happens, again.

I was recently laid off from my job.  For almost two years I believed in the company's vision, gave almost all my time, and definitely all my passion to that team.  And moments after finding out, suddenly all that blood and sweat is all put into a box that goes into storage, seemingly forgotten.

I remember someone sending me this quote by John Wooden a very long time ago:  "It is better to trust and be disappointed occasionally than to distrust and be miserable all the time." 

So I'll dive deep again.  I'm probably lucky that I don't know how to do it any other way.  I'll believe that something won't ever die.  Just so I can live all of life, trust people and trust that my work always is for something, not nothing.   Sometimes naivete is best.

My One Resolve

"I found a seat under an orange tree and opened one of the poetry books I'd purchased yesterday.  Louise Gluck.  I read the first poem in Italian, then in English, and stopped short at this line: 

Dal centro della mia vita venne una grande fontana...

"From the center of my life, there came a great fountain..."

- Elizabeth Gilbert's "Eat Pray Love".

Italy, here I come.

Huh?

How do you be strong, build relationships and get things done at work all at the same time?

Does building working relationships require a softness and intuition that only certain personalities have?

Do you need to be goal-free in conversations to show you care?

Working Women

Here is an article that touches on something I think about a lot: gender in the executive workplace...

Starting Up Women

By Alana Conner

Hidden inside most people’s minds is the belief that Warren and Bill should start businesses, but Oprah and Martha should not. This subtle, yet culture-wide association between maleness and entrepreneurship discourages women from launching their own start-ups, research shows.

Yet a new psychological study finds that “we can encourage more women to open businesses just by changing the way we talk about entrepreneurship,” says Vishal K. Gupta, an assistant professor at the Binghamton University School of Management and the study’s lead author. “You don’t have to do anything dramatic. Just make sure that the message you are sending is that entrepreneurship is gender neutral.”

For the study, Gupta and colleagues asked 469 undergraduate business students to read one of several articles about the qualities of successful entrepreneurs. In the control condition, the participants read a story that made no mention of gender. In the female stereotype condition, they discovered that humble, social, and caring people make good entrepreneurs. And in the gender-neutral condition, they learned that successful entrepreneurs show characteristics of both men and women, such as being creative, well-informed, and generous.

The researchers found that for women, entrepreneurial aspirations were highest after reading the gender-neutral story, which explicitly affirmed that gender does not matter in entrepreneurship. In contrast, women in the gender-free control condition had weaker intentions. “Even when you don’t say anything about gender, the first connection people make in their heads is with masculine characteristics,” Gupta explains. Women in the female stereotype condition had similarly lukewarm ambitions: “It may be that redefinition of a masculine stereotype as feminine is only possible when the alternative stereotype actually exists in society,” the authors write.

Although popular culture overwhelmingly depicts entrepreneurs as aggressive, risk-taking men, “it’s a myth that stereotypically male characteristics make you succeed,” says Gupta. To counteract these powerful messages, “we need to reach kids when they’re young and tell them that entrepreneurship is a good profession that men and women can do equally well. By the time they reach 19 or 20,” he adds, “it becomes more difficult to change their ideas about who can be an entrepreneur.”

From "Stanford Social Innovation Review", Winter 2009, Volume 7, Number 1.

Relatedness

"Our relatedness brings us into reality, provided we are open to it.  For instance, we prefer to avoid those people who annoy us, upset us, rub us the wrong way, push our buttons.  Yet these are precisely the people who can help us grow.  Our reaction to them exposes the egoism we try to hide, the fear we suppress, the spite we pretend isn't there.  Let's ask ourselves, 'Who is the person I most hate to be around?'  We need that very person in order to be real.

"Relationships show us what's truly happening in our life, if we have the courage to face it.  They reveal this separate, unreal self of ours who wants to isolate us from the rest of the human race...There is no such thing as a solitary Christian."

- Terence Grant, The Silence of Unknowing

I am pleased to announce....

...Teldon's newest magazine: Blush.

Now available at all Please Mum stores. For my lovely mom-friends: