The long game

"Awakening is possible only for those who seek it and want it, for those who are ready to struggle with themselves and work on themselves for a very long time and very persistently in order to attain it."- G.I. Gurdjieff

I've been loving this IG account called 'Mindopennetwork' if you happen to find yourself needing some motivation, inspiration and support on the divine path of self exploration.

Soft Machine

I've been falling in love with the mysterious and emotionally dynamic work of photographer Mark Borthwick lately.  There's something very dreamlike about his images that I find mesmerizing and haunting. 

Note to self.

The most courageous, fearless people I know are the ones who let themselves be vulnerable.  Those are the strongest people I know. They are the people I can connect to most because they have felt deeply, been open to not knowing the answers and have spent some time in darkness. When I am going through something these are the people I reach out to. It got me thinking about why most of us are so terrified of being vulnerable.

I find most everything about our culture works to steer us toward never getting there. We hide in busy-ness, texting, Instagramming, shopping, facebook, overeating, drinking, video gaming, exerting our control freak selves to squeeze out any potential opportunity to become vulnerable.

 Personally speaking I have often considered it an uncomfortable feeling to sit and break the command of my 'busy' life and to get into myself. I  don't have time for it, I tell myself. I'll do it next week. Or when things calm down or when I take that meditation class.  Lately I've felt my inner voice screaming to stop so I finally slowed down and started writing and reflecting.  I was shocked to find that I didn't implode. In fact I began to become more aware of my life, my rhythms and my cycles. I have begun to see how people and circumstances have been drawn into my life and to feel a level of connectedness and symbolism that never made much sense to me before.

I think so often we associate vulnerability with weakness when really it is vulnerability that is the core of our strength. 

Monday reminder

Modern Surrealist

Seeing the most recent Schiaparelli  collection is making swoon with joy. These pieces feel like they represent the true 'esprit de la vie' of the whimsical yet tailored creations of Schiaparelli herself.  It makes me nostalgic for a time when Carole Lombard & William Powell served up witty banter over martinis and soft lighting. I would happily walk back in time wearing one of these modern versions. 

Speechless

There are no words for how much love I feel for this little girl. I am rendered speechless all the time. My heart swells for this little nugget. Grateful to every cell of her being that I get to be her mama. Even on the days that feel like a struggle.  Even when I'm working on 4 hours of sleep from a restless night. Even when we schlep our way through the city balancing grocery bags and baby bags and everything else on a little stroller and then make our way up 3 flights of stairs to get home each day.  Even then I feel like the luckiest one. 

Sunday thoughts.

Summer wardrobe goals

Truthiness.

I was just having dinner with one of my best friends. Talking about all the shit that girlfriends talk about: life stuff-work issues, relationship issues, family issues and got to thinking about how often we are all honest. Honest with ourselves about what our issues are, how we hide from parts of ourselves (we all do it,) and with each other.  I don't know about you but I connect most with people who feel real. Who's opinions and perspectives are sincere and authentic and aren't afraid to be really honest and say what they mean.  The people in my life I value the most are the ones who have said risky but real things to me- called me out on bad behaviour, told me the truth about a relationship I wasn't ready to look at or given me feedback that I needed to hear. I don't know why it feels so easy to hide the nitty gritty from one another. Who are we protecting? The people pleasing aspect of whats considered polite in our society is so superficial that I have come to lose trust in those who can't get real and offer a dissenting perspective or honest take on something. I grew up being taught to be polite and say the "right" thing but really there's no integrity in that. The right thing to me is sometimes the unpopular opinion, the thing you say to a family member when everyone else thinks your nuts because they're too scared to say it, the moment you tell your lover what you're not getting in your relationship or a co-worker that they can't talk to you in a particular way. I have spent far too much time in my life worrying about pleasing someone else and thinking about being liked that I have often sacrificed the truth in a relationship. I don't intend to continue down this path- I intend to speak with truth. I think words have tremendous power and I think we have so much residual anger (aggressively or passive aggressively) in our world because we don't communicate in truth. There is nothing more liberating than saying how you feel and letting free the words that come from your spirit. This post is as much a rumination on speaking openly as it is a declaration toward freedom. 

Happy Birthday Wisdom

Happy Birthday to the man who pushes all of us to be better. 

“Hard times build determination and inner strength. Through them we can also come to appreciate the uselessness of anger. Instead of getting angry nurture a deep caring and respect for troublemakers because by creating such trying circumstances they provide us with invaluable opportunities to practice tolerance and patience.”

- Dalai Lama XIV

Language is consciousness

Please women (and men for that matter) take 8 minutes out of your day and read this. Language is consciousness. Language is power and can empower us or push us toward subservience.  Becoming aware of the words we use and how we deflect confidence and meaning can shift the way we live in our skin and how we perceive ourselves and are perceived by others. Own your language, use it to empower yourself and speak with inention. 

Just when you finally got a handle on saying “sorry” so much, turns out there’s another detrimental phrase in your lexicon keeping you from being taken seriously as a woman: “Just.” As in, “Just checking in,” and “Just following up,” and “Just wondering if you’d decided.” A former Google exec says this “permission” word is undermining your authority, and you need to cut down on your “J Count” pronto.

Writing at Business Insider, a former exec at Google and Apple named Ellen Petry Leanse says that, a few years ago, she started noticing that the many women she worked with were using “just” a lot in emails, conversations, and presentations. Leanse writes:

It hit me that there was something about the word I didn’t like. It was a “permission” word, in a way — a warm-up to a request, an apology for interrupting, a shy knock on a door before asking “Can I get something I need from you?”

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that it was a “child” word, to riffTransactional Analysis. As such it put the conversation partner into the “parent” position, granting them more authority and control. And that “just” didn’t make sense.

Well, it does make sense if you think about how women are culturally conditioned to be so sympathetic and empathic to the needs of others well before their own that they essentially walk on permanent eggshells, as if invisibly bumping into humanity at all times. It makes plenty of sense when you think about how women live with the ever-present background fear of being perceived as a bitch or a nag, so the only way to prove we are, in fact, correctly socialized to understand that we are nothing special, innately kind-hearted, and also chill as fuck is byapologizing for every possible thing we might ever do, want, think, ask, need, feel. Sorry you bumped into me! Sorry I had a feeling and expressed it! Sorry I need you to treat me like a person! Sorry for existing at all!

The “sorry” epidemic is well-documented—women do apologize more, and perceive themselves as having committed more personal offenses than men, and the whole shebang even landed in aPantene commercial that aimed to move some units by empowering women to dial back the deference while maintaining impossibly glossy manes.

Maybe it worked, in that our gender’s favorite form of hedging a request has turned from “sorry” to “just”? Leanse writes:

I am all about respectful communication. Yet I began to notice that “just” wasn’t about being polite: it was a subtle message of subordination, of deference. Sometimes it was self-effacing. Sometimes even duplicitous. As I started really listening, I realized that striking it from a phrase almost always clarified and strengthened the message.

So she suggested a moratorium on the word with her team, who agreed that it undermined their image as “trusted advisors.” The more they caught themselves using it, the more they were able to eliminate it from communication, and the perception of their preparedness improved.

Then, Leanse decided to test out the “just” gender frequency in a mixed room of entrepreneurs who took turns speaking to the group about their startups:

I asked them to leave the room to prepare, and while they were gone I asked the audience to secretly tally the number of times they each said the word “just.”

Sarah went first. Pens moved pretty briskly in the audience’s hands. Some tallied five, some six. When Paul spoke, the pen moved … once. Even the speakers were blown away when we revealed that count.

Now, that’s not research: It’s a mere MVP of a test that likely merits more inquiry, but we all have other work to do.

Plus, maybe now that you’ve read this, you’ll heighten your awareness of that word and find clearer, more confident ways of making your ideas known.

Once you start paying attention to your own use of hedge words like “just” and “sorry,” it is indeed strange to acknowledge how often you work them into sentences and how habitual it can be. I reflexively apologize still when someone bumps into me, not because I assume I was in the wrong, but because I’m not omniscient and maybe I was being oblivious and sorry covers that regardless. I don’t even think of it as deferential, I think of it is being nice. Because in a perfect world, the other person would say sorry also as a mutual covering of the same potentially egregious ground. If a woman, she usually says sorry back. But if it’s a dude, I get a sorry as often as I am given a free monthly supply of tampons (once).

It’s not a huge deal, is it? But language shapes consciousness, and if women are the only ones softening their language or self sabotaging their own credibility—even inadvertently, only to be “nice”—it’s still reinforcing that it’s a woman trait to be nice. In a interview at GOOP with Tara Mohr, a career coach who wrote a book about such habits called Playing Big, we learn her takeon “just”:

“I just want to check in and see…” “I just think…” Just tends to make us sound a little apologetic and defensive about what we’re saying. Think about the difference between the sound of “I just want to check in and see…” and “I want to check in and see…” or the difference between “I just think” and “I think…”

And others:

Inserting actually: “I actually disagree…” “I actually have a question.” It actuallymakes us sound surprised that we disagree or have a question—not good!

Using qualifiers: “I’m no expert in this, but…” or “I know you all have been researching this for a long time, but…” undermines your position before you’ve even stated your opinion.

Asking, “Does that make sense?” or “Am I making sense?”: I used to do this all the time. We do it with good intentions: We want to check in with the other people in the conversation and make sure we’ve been clear. The problem is, “does that make sense” comes across either as condescending (like your audience can’t understand) or it implies you feel you’ve been incoherent.

A better way to close is something like “I look forward to hearing your thoughts.” You can leave it up to the other party to let you know if they are confused about something, rather than implying that you “didn’t make sense.”

I say this stuff all the time, and believe me, I don’t think what I’m saying is the least bit inferior. In fact, inside, I feel a thousand percent sure of myself because if I didn’t know what I was talking about, I wouldn’t be talking. But still, I’m using the language presentation I’ve been taught to use, because when I don’t, I’ve been told throughout my life in one way or another—from a boss, a boyfriend, a coworker, a performance review—that I sound too abrasive. Like a bitch. Not nice. Angry. Uppity.

And that, the underlying discrepancy, is the real point here. Yes, women can change a certain amount about female self-presentation if we eliminate hedge words that undermine our authority—Mohr insists that when junior women removed the qualifiers she listed from their communication, they got “quicker and more substantive responses” in return. That’s great. But that may not always be the case. For every story of a qualifier-free move forward, there are a dozen anecdotes of a woman who never had used them in the first place, who always acted like she belonged exactly where she was and knew of what she spoke—and who never stoppedcatching hell for it.

So yes, take “just” out of your vocabulary, and don’t apologize for it. But don’t be surprised, either, if there’s just a lot more sorry waiting in line.

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Contact the author at tracy.moore@jezebel.com.