Musings

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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The years following the Renaissance, which was all arty and fluffy (except for stuff like the Spanish Inquisition) came to be known as The Enlightenment or the Age of Reason. Just as the Renaissance boasted great figures like Michelangelo and the other Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the Age of Reason had its own cast of stars, including John Locke, Sir Isaac Newton, Spinoza, and Voltaire. Spanning through most of the 17th century and believed to be the spark that lit the fires of the American Revolution and the French Revolution, the Age of Reason was about science, math, and philosophy. One of its great stars was Rene Descartes.

Descarte was, if you pardon the pun, a real Renaissance man. He was a mathematician (you math nerds are probably thinking of your  Cartesian Coordinate System), a writer, and a great philosopher. Perhaps his most well-known contribution was his pondering on the idea, “I think, therefore I am.”

These days, I fear that some folks have altered this line of reasoning a bit. I fear that for some people, their online identity has become their only identity. They are online, therefore they are. What are they when they are offline? Perhaps that scares them.

On Being Seen

I first ran into this idea on Chris Brogan’s site. He wrote:

I continue to maintain the fantasy that if I don’t blog every day, if I don’t tweet several times a day, if I don’t publish something interesting to Google+ a few times a day, then people will forget me and move on to other sources of information. In some ways, I know this to be true. We are a consumption society, hungry to click to the next thing and the thing after that. from You’re Not As Busy As You Think

I wondered, when reading that, how many people that statement resonated with. I suspect quite a few. Once you’ve gone to the trouble of building an online reputation, it’s almost horrifying to think that people could forget about you if you take a day off or a week off or *gasp* a month off. How did you live before you started tweeting or blogging or Facebooking? How did you track your value and your accomplishments? The possibility that you could lose everything you built over a year or two span because of one or two days off is enough to motivate people to keep on working online, even if their hearts aren’t in it anymore.

Has this happened to you?

Does Social Media lower our self-esteem?

If you begin to think that people will forget you after a day of not blogging or a day of not tweeting, what are you really saying?

To me, it seems like you are saying, “I’m not memorable. I don’t make enough of an impression on people. My presence is so fleeting that people will forget me unless I keep myself in front of them at all possible hours of the day.” This is sort of like what toddlers go through once they reach the age of about 1. Suddenly they start to get really upset when their mom or dad leaves the house. Are they coming back? Are they going to forget I exist? And where’s my bottle, anyway?

As adults, we are seemingly starting to go down this same path of reaction. To me, this would indicate that we are placing more and more value on what other people think of us and less and less value on what we think of ourselves. Granted, not everyone in the online world is going to remember you based on one tweet or one blog post, but you need to value yourself enough to trust that to the people who matter, your presence is appreciated and is missed when it is absent.

You continue to exist in peoples’ minds and hearts whether or not you are tweeting at them. Do you believe that about yourself? If you are feeling skeptical, I might toss out that what’s missing is not your ability to wow others. What’s missing is your ability to wow yourself.

What do you think? Are we basing our sense of self too much on whether or not we are present online? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

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

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Originally, Queen Elizabeth I had hoped that the religious strife in England would not be something she’d have to deal with. As she said, she did not want to create windows into mens’ souls. Although Elizabeth was herself a Protestant who had been viewed as a suspicious character by her older half-sister Queen Mary, one gets the feeling that Elizabeth hoped that she and England could skate by. Of course, just the opposite occurred. Europe itself was divided, and Catholic supporters abroad were willing to help any Englishman who wanted to see Elizabeth removed from the throne.

Things got particularly tricky when Elizabeth’s cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots, was discovered to be at the core of an assassination plot against Elizabeth. Everyone in Elizabeth’s court declared that Mary should be executed, but Elizabeth had a few problems with this. First, her mother, Anne Boelyn, had been beheaded at the Tower of London. Though Elizabeth had been a little girl at the time, this clearly left a mark on her. She likely also knew that her father had several other wives summarily executed, too.

Also, Elizabeth was ruling at a time when it was believed that monarchs were gods on earth (kind of a nice position to have). To show that a monarch was flawed was fairly frowned upon. To execute another monarch, well, that would send the message that monarchs were not only mortal, they were also fallible. This would put Elizabeth herself up for more questioning.

In the end, Elizabeth was convinced that she should indeed execute Mary. There were too many transgressions, and if they went unpunished Elizabeth would look weak. Sentimentality did not have a place in 16th century London. Still. one gets the sense from Elizabeth’s biographers that she always deeply regretted this episode. One wonders if she felt a little bit like she had cut off her own head to spare her rule.

Cutting off your own head

There is a moral that can be learned from the impossible situation Elizabeth had to deal with. She had often said that she did not want to make religion an issue, but it became a big one. She said she did not want to execute another queen, but she did. One might imagine that she did not want to be viewed as the cruel, malicious person her father had been. But to many who fell at the hands of her spies and torturers, she was likely thought of just that way.

In the online world, it’s easy for us to say a lot of things, with great gusto even. We can be for or against this kind of approach. We can for or against this or that person. We can be for or against a specific platform, a specific practice, or a means of communication. But when the time comes, when those views are tested by someone else or by our own changing minds, do we also fall into the trap of chopping off our own heads? Do we end up committing the same errors that we had recently railed against? Do we end up doing things we maliciously reproached others for doing? Do we allow others to sway our opinions from those which we had so staunchly defended?

I have seen it happen. And to me, it always strikes me as a sad moment – the same kind of sadness and disappointment Elizabeth must have felt in herself when she allowed another queen to be executed.

What we do and say matters

In the online world, it seems like criticism is the easiest form of communication. It gets a lot of attention, it’s a shortcut to make us look superior, and people tend to enjoy “piling on.” There’s a trick to the online world though. Everything you do and say online – it tends to stick around. People don’t have to remember what you say. They can find it. If you are not mindful of what you say or do at any given moment, you could end up revealing your own flaws, your own weaknesses, your own, dare I say, hypocrisy.

Don’t put yourself in a position where you feel like you’re chopping off your own head, whether it’s in terms of your credibility or your reputation (or both). Be careful about what you say. Be careful about who you point the finger at, and be mindful of why you’re doing so. Life has a funny way of proving us wrong, and in the online world, there is plenty of evidence heaped up against us for whenever we change our minds about something.

Let’s all keep our heads, eh?

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

Queen Elizabeth I is an endlessly fascinating figure to me. She was a female ruler in a country that had predominantly known rulers to be men. She ruled as a man but made constant references to her womanhood. She refused to marry, unthinkable in those times, but said she was married to the country she ruled. One could study any single segment of Elizabeth’s life and learn about overcoming challenges, defeating impossible odds, and finding an internal core of strength that is indestructible.

My friend Gloria (@grandmaondeck) suggested that I write about self-expression for those bloggers who might be shy, and Elizabeth immediately came to mind. She was not shy, but given what stood in her path, one could have forgiven her for being so. Given unbelievable obstacles, Elizabeth remained eloquent and powerful. How did she do that, and what can we bloggers learn from her example? Let’s take a look.

1. “I do consider a multitude doth make rather discord and confusion than good counsel.” 

Elizabeth did not surround herself with a massive court, despite the fact that as a woman “prince” many thought that she could not rule successfully on her own. She opted to trust a few people to give her good counsel rather than tossing out a broad net that may or may not catch good advice.

As a blogger, it’s important to write as if you’re talking only to a few people, and people you trust. You of course cannot be true friends with everyone who might read your content, but if you write that way – if you write as if you’re sitting at a table with a coffee cup and a friend, it becomes much easier not only to receive counsel but also to give it out.

2. “I have no desire to make windows into mens souls.” 

Elizabeth tried her best to prevent the rift between Catholics and Protestants from becoming a gaping wound. While her sympathies were more with the Protestants, she seemed to believe that everyone could worship the way they wanted, in peace. She did not want to explore why any one person believed the way they did.

As a blogger, it can be easy to take advantage of your platform to try to hammer something into your readers’ minds. You can write and end up creating a post that is sort of like Krushchev banging his shoe on the podium. While this may be self-expression of a sort, it is not the kind that invites people in. Don’t try to create or understand peoples’ souls. Share what you think and be ready to learn or to change your mind based on what people tell you.

3. “A strength to harm is perilous in the hand of an ambitious head.”

It might be odd to think that Elizabeth, a queen, would say something like this. In her case, however, she was surrounded by men who wanted to work their way either into her good graces or into the good graces of her enemies. Ambition ran riot through her palaces. If an ambitious person in her court wanted to do harm, they certainly had the means – and they knew it.

I firmly believe that if you sit down to write a blog post with ambition on your mind, your readers will sniff it out. You might try to stuff your post with buzz words or keywords. You might try to populate your sentences with links and mentions. These are not great ways to offer people insight into how you think. Moreover, if your ambition motivates you to “call out” someone else, you really can do great harm. Again, that might be self-expression, but it is not the kind that will keep people close to you

4. “I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king.”

Now this might seem really strange for a great ruler like Elizabeth to say. Weak and feeble? Hardly. So why did she talk this way? Well, Elizabeth knew her audience. She knew what “baggage” they were bringing to whatever she said. She knew their expectations (or lack thereof). She based what she said on those expectations, all the while acting as she darn well wanted.

As a blogger, it’s important to know your audience. This can be tricky when you first start out, and that’s why a lot of people advise that you do a LOT of reading before you start writing. What do people in your field expect? What kind of tonality is most common? Are there important words that get bandied about? While you might put your own particular spin on it (being a female prince is a pretty good spin), showing that you know who you’re talking to is a great way to use self-expression to connect to your readers.

5. “There is no jewel, be it of never so rich a price, which I set before this jewel; I mean your love.”

Before you roll your eyes and say that I’m about to get really squishy, let me explain that the love a queen receives from her subjects is not *exactly* what I’m talking about here. But there is one thing you can learn from Elizabeth as you read this quote. She never lost track of whose lives were at risk based on her decisions. She was always acutely aware of her people and often spoke as if she was the mother of England, not the queen.

As a blogger, you are never too big to appreciate your readers. There is never (in my opinion) a good reason to refuse to answer comments. There is never a good reason to stop thanking people for sharing your posts. Your posts won’t go anywhere without those folks. A queen is not really a queen if she has no subjects to rule, right? If you blog but nobody reads, it’s going to be hard for you to build anything.

Let your readers know you appreciate them. Write for them. Write with them in mind. That is the best way to use self-expression to connect with your audience.

What other lessons can you think of that we as bloggers could draw from Elizabeth I? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

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

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