Margie Clayman

When you are feeling down, few things can be more frustrating than for someone to say, “I think your perspective is slanted somehow.” If you aren’t careful, you can end up becoming sort of attached to your sadness, as weird as that may sound. It becomes a possession that only you fully understand, and when people say, “I think you need to step back from this situation” or something akin to that, you can actually lash out at them. You are not as likely to hear anything helpful or constructive in what they are trying to say. What you hear are the words of people who are attacking you or people who are calling you crazy. And that feeds your sadness. It makes your possession bigger and fills your arms more.

The other interesting thing you experience when you are feeling down is that people seem to use words that really cut you to the core. They seem to know exactly what your hot buttons are, and they seem to push those buttons every day, all the time. Have you ever been through a phase like that?

When I left grad school and couldn’t seem to find a job, it seemed like everybody, in whatever they said, was looking down on me. I could almost see in their facial expressions how disappointed they were in my life’s progress. It seemed like with every word they were telling me how frustrating it was to see me wasting my life away.

Of course, nobody was really saying those things except for one person. Do you know who it was? It was me. But at the time, all I could identify was that those words and those feelings were coming out of the mouths of other people.

The really sad thing is that during that same time period, people were saying really nice things and I was seemingly unable to hear or see those words. I remember looking back on a blog post (I was on Livejournal at the time) where I had thought no one had commented. I had used that fact to feed my big sad teddy bear. Lo and behold, there were tons of nice comments there. Always had been. I just didn’t want to hear anything good. So I didn’t.

Are you going through a hard time right now? Do you feel like people are making it worse instead of better? Do you find yourself thinking all of the time, “Why can’t anyone cut me a break?”

Try to take a step back (and this is REALLY hard when you have dark sunglasses on) and see how you are describing yourself right now. Do you call yourself names that have to do with your weight? Do you feel like you’re not successful enough? Did you try something that didn’t work so now you are feeling like you are a failure? Analyze how you are talking to yourself. Analyze how you are feeling about yourself when you go into a conversation with another person. You may be surprised to find that what you think you are hearing from other people is really what your brain is saying about you. It’s really what your heart is saying about you.

It may be hard to let go of your sadness and your bad feelings, but as an interim step, allow yourself to hear good things about YOU. If someone pays you a compliment, let yourself hear it. Don’t let your own dark feelings or disbelief plug your ears.

Does that make sense?

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The other night I was watching my Cleveland Indians play the Cincinnati Reds. It was a close game – tied at 1 for most of it. The Reds had a runner on base and one of their hitters was trying to bunt him over. He bunted the ball and it looked like it was going to be the perfect bunt, about a quarter of the way between home and third. But it was moving fast – it wasn’t one of those bunts that just magically dies in the grass. Our third baseman, Jack Hannahan, started running towards the ball because he knew he’d have to make an amazingly fast play, but at the last minute he pulled himself back. The ball went foul. Barely. His patience and restraint helped out the team, preventing a play that could have resulted in a wild throw or something else that would have been a big problem in such a close game.

In life, we’re a lot like the third baseman. We’re waiting for balls to be hit towards us at lightning speed and we are programmed to run towards it and take care of it as fast as possible. That way we can move on to the next thing, right?

But what if we pulled back a minute and waited to see if the problem would resolve itself? What if we analyzed the situation and said, “Hey, there’s a chance this one might not have to be dealt with right away or maybe even at all!”

Now of course there are some situations where waiting could cause a pretty serious problem. If someone is unconscious, you don’t want to wait to see if they’ll regain consciousness on their own, right?

But I’ll bet if you think about it you could probably come up with some situations where you ran towards the ball and played it before seeing if it might go foul. Maybe you jumped into solve a problem that really could have been solved by someone else. Maybe you started to do something that you could have easily delegated to another person. Maybe you got angry at a person before learning all of the facts.

How can you prevent yourself from that gut instinct to run towards the ball? To me, it seems like it would take a lot of time invested in reprogramming your brain. Our third baseman was clearly programmed to analyze the play and react very quickly based on the information he received, even if that “reaction” was a decision not to act. For awhile, you’ll need to catch yourself consciously running towards the ball. You’ll need to say, “Wait, is there a different way to react to this?” You’ll need to make yourself stop and think where you might have simple “done” before.

What is a recent situation where you may have played a ball that was on its way to foul territory? How do you think you could have changed your reaction for the better?

I’d love to hear from you.

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Often times, humans fail to notice what we have until it is no longer accessible. This is true of our relationships with people. This is true of our every day lives. I think this is one of the most tragic aspects of human nature. We lament where we are and the we lament we are no longer there. So, let’s take a quick moment today and rewind this mistake.

Think about three things you have seen recently that you are grateful you were able to see. I was able to see my little plants growing so happily on my deck. I was able to see the scarf that I made with my own hands. I was able to see dramatic clouds and huge bolts of lightning that cut the sky. I am grateful I was able to see this things.

Think about three things you have heard recently that you are grateful you were able to hear. As I write this I am listening to birds singing outside my window. I was able to listen to some of my favorite music while I drove in to work. I was able to hear my mom’s voice on the phone. I am grateful I was able to hear these things.

Think about three places you walked to that you are grateful you were able to walk to. I was able to walk/run 13 miles over the weekend (and I saw 7 bunny rabbits). I was able to walk to my car so that I could go to my job. I was able to walk to my bed to enjoy a pleasant evening of sleep. I am grateful I was able to walk to these places.

If you are not able to see, what were you able to touch? If you are not able to hear, what were you able to smell? If you are not able to walk, what were you able to taste?

What simple sensory experiences would you lament if you were to lose them suddenly? If you suddenly lost your vision or your hearing or your ability to use your hands and feet, what would you most regret not appreciating enough?

Take a moment, right now, and embrace the things you are able to do without even thinking about it. There are people who would give anything to be able to see so that they could watch their kid play soccer. There are people who would give anything to be able to move by themselves so that they could enjoy more independence. You have, right at this moment, something that someone would give anything for.

Are you appreciating these things enough?

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I had rather an extraordinary conversation with a friend recently. What brought it about was unfortunately an unpleasant communique I had gotten from another friend. I was venting and lamenting to this friend of mine and she took me on a three-step journey that I realized could be applied to any situation where there are feelings of hurt or anger. I found it quite helpful in that particular situation, so I thought I would share the process in case you are wanting and/or needing to forgive someone these days.

Step 1: Ownership

The first thing you need to do is take a step back and say, “OK, does this person have a valid point?” This can be extremely hard to do when you yourself are feeling hurt. The natural reaction is always going to be, “Geeze, I certainly did not deserve THAT!” In fact, if someone asks you something like, “Well, did you do something to cause that reaction” you might actually end up lashing out at that person, right? Humans don’t like to think we’ve done anything wrong. Ever. Even so, it’s extremely important to step back and evaluate your actions or your words from the vantage point of another person. Did you do something that could be perceived as mean even if you didn’t intend it that way, or is this person reacting in a way that doesn’t make any sense? If you can’t determine this for yourself, find a trusted person who can look at the whole situation with an outsider’s perspective and see what they say. You might find that your effort to give results in you actually apologizing.

Step 2: Acknowledge that you might not know the full story

I often think of this story: A man and his three kids are at a shoe store. The kids are running around like wild banshees and they are irritating the store customers and the store employees. Someone finally goes up to the man and in a frustrated tone says something like, “You really need to get a hold of your kids. They’re behaving very poorly.” The man responds, “I know, I know. We just left the hospital. Their mom passed away and I really don’t know what to do right now.”

If someone lashes out at you for seemingly no reason, or if they react to something you did but the reaction seems a bit over the top, pause before you immediately retort in anger or in hurt. Maybe there’s something going on with that person that you don’t know about. Maybe, without realizing it, you said something that opened up an old wound. Human beings are covered in these invisible traps. You could mention something in passing and it could totally throw a person into turmoil for reasons you can’t even begin to comprehend. If you know the person well enough, and if the time seems right, perhaps make sure that there isn’t something else going on that is causing them to be off-balance. In this case, your path to forgiveness could result in helping someone out.

Step 3: Remember that failing to forgive only adds weight to your shoulders

Maybe someone has done something that for you hedges on the level of betrayal. Maybe they have cut you to the core. You don’t feel you deserved it and frankly you don’t care if they’re “Going through something.” You have no interest in letting them off free and clear with your forgiveness.

This might seem logical – if you are mad at someone right now maybe you’re saying “Amen.” But here’s the problem, and unfortunately it’s something people often have to learn the hard way. Forgiveness frees YOU. It in most cases probably impacts you more than it impacts the person you’re forgiving, oddly enough. By saying, “I forgive you,” and by really trying to mean it, what you are actually doing is saying, “I’m not going to carry around the results of this exchange. I’m going to leave it by the side of the road and move on.” If you don’t forgive, the event will just keep eating away at you. You’ll keep analyzing it. Maybe it will change in your head over the span of days/weeks/months/years until it becomes all-consuming.

In the worst case scenario, you will lose that person you’re mad at before things can get resolved. At that point, all you may be left with is the bad feelings about them until you can work it out, and then it is too late. Life is uncertain and too short to take such risks, don’t you think?

None of this is easy, of course, and in the online world it is all too easy to fight back before thinking. Those fingers of ours can start typing before we even realize we have a keyboard at our fingertips. But I have found that these three steps in recent times have helped me prevent relatively small events from snowballing out of control. I hope they serve you in a similar fashion.

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With our agency blog kicking off, I’ve been trying to watch webinars and talks in my free time. This is what usually gets me revved up on a subject and then I am inspired to write about it. I’ve been having a problem though. Even though I sit down to watch a lot of webinars, I haven’t been making it past ten minutes in a lot of cases. It’s not that the webinars are bad. In fact, in a lot of cases the speaker is saying things that are perfectly interesting. It’s just, well, I don’t have a whole ton of time, and as nice as stories and anecdotes can be, if you don’t start telling me what I’m going to get out of your presentation, I’m moving on.

This all makes perfect sense in the abstract, and in fact I was going to write a post advising you to make sure you establish early on what people can expect to take away from your presentation. But then I realized a tidbit of a problem.

As a blogger, I’m doing the exact same thing as those webinar presenters. In fact, most of my blog posts don’t really provide you with any actionable items. There is not usually something you can *do* after reading one of my posts. There’s nothing you can take to your boss or your peers and say, “Hey guys, Margie suggested this in her blog post and I think we should try it.” I’m starting to wonder if that’s a problem. After all, your time is just as short as mine – maybe even shorter. Although I try to be entertaining and although we have good conversations here, I’m not really living by my own code. Sadly, that makes me a bit of a hypocrite. Now that is a label I REALLY don’t like.

On the other hand…

Maybe blogging is a different kind of animal from a webinar. A webinar is usually an investment of 45 minutes to an hour. Most of my posts don’t represent that kind of a time investment. Maybe people have more expectations from a webinar. I still read and enjoy blog posts that don’t necessarily offer actionable items. I’m not as picky. But the posts that DO give me something to do or a new way of looking at things – those are the ones I always wish I had written.

What do you make of this?

What do you expect when you come here or when you go to another blog site? Are you finding that your expectations are changing?

I certainly feel like I can’t rightly fault other bloggers or webinar presenters for doing something I do myself all of the darned time, so I am feeling like I’m in a bit of a pickle. Writing about Queen Elizabeth I is all well and good, but is it really valuable?

Weigh in!

I’ve written a new e-book called The ABCs of Marketing Myths. You can read about it here!

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