GET RICH

Please don't help. Instead, be supportive.

Within the past month, I have had three different women help me, and all of them really pissed me off.

Every single one of them was sincere in their desire to take care of me. One followed me out of a room I left so that I wouldn't get upset in public; instead of lessening attention on me, her coming after me increased the attention. And she (again, in her attempt to be useful) intruded upon me when she wasn't welcome.

Another was in the same group, and she did the same thing--intruded upon me without my permission. Her type of help was more codependent that the first woman. She want to "handle" me, fix me, tell me what I need to do. I could barely keep my temper.

The third was the other day on the phone. A fairly new friend who I felt a connection to. I shared my experience at the presentation workshop with her, and went on to attempt to share the insights I had gained from it, how I was using the experience to learn. Instead of listening to me and acknowledging my insights, she proceeded to confer her own insights onto me, giving me advice that I hadn't asked for. I ended the conversation feeling angry and disconnected.

Why do so many women take it upon themselves to help others? Helping without permission is intrusive and inappropriate. It is caregiving gone astray.

Helping is not empowering. It is belittling, reducing the person being helped to child status, or at least to "less than" status--less than the person helping.

Yes, I know that people who help don't believe that they are belittling. And I know that they really do (mostly) seek to contribute. But helping isn't the way...

Supporting is the way. Supporting someone is empowering them. It is giving them space, listening (really listening) to them, offering the silence in which they can find their own answers. To use my own experiences as an example, Woman #1 should have stayed in her seat and let me go, given me space to work through my upset so that I could quietly come back and join the group without any further ripples. Woman #2 should have simply left me alone completely; she had nothing of value to contribute nor could she give me a nurturing silence. Woman #3 should have gotten out of the way and listened to what I was saying rather than overlaying my own insights with her (in her opinion) superior judgement.

How do we know what to do to support somone? Easy:

1. Don't offer any insights, opinions, advice or feedback unless asked to do so. I promise, I (and I'm betting pretty much everybody else, including you) am able to work through my own learning and growth experiences, and I just need you to listen and engage me in an interested but not advisory capacity. If I want your input, I will ask you for it. Promise.
2. OK, so there may be times when I am so in the midst of things I can't see straight, and I don't think to ask you. If that's the case, and you really do believe that you have something supportive to offer me, ASK ME FOR PERMISSION FIRST. Trust me to know whether I can absorb what you have to say. I may not be in a place where I can really hear you, and will only resent your input.

I know that I have helped other people in my life...meaning that I intruded with my person or my advice when neither was what was needed. I have worked hard over the past decade or so to change that, trying to remember to step back and give the hurting person space to heal themselves. It's hard though. The female urge to help is something we are taught as we grow up, or it may even be hardwired into us.But helping isn't...um...helpful.

The next time you want to help someone (husband, child, friend, stranger), consciously step back and work on being supportive. Listen, offer space and silence, and be ready to provide input when invited to do so.

I'd love to hear your ideas on this topic...please share your own experiences as helper/helpee, supporter/supportee.

Please don’t be fooled by my hard candy coating…

You have likely heard the term “steel magnolia.” It is a metaphor used to describe a certain type of woman, often from the Southern U.S., who appears delicate and fragile but is in fact tough as nails.

I’m the opposite, and I’m not sure what metaphor fits. I have a hard candy coating that surrounds an abundance of marshmallow. My natural outward appearance is one of toughness, self-sufficiency, and great self-confidence. A “take no shit” kind of broad. On the inside, I am a huge softie, very aware of the impact I have on others and the impact they have on me.

I was in a great course last week. We were each videotaped giving a five-minute talk follow by five more minutes of question and answer. Then, after two days of being instructed how to give powerful presentations, we got to watch our videos and self-critique along with the course leader. The course leader is a friend, a business-associate-to-be, who has amazing rapport with everyone he interacts with. I watch him in admiration—he can connect with the surliest person, softening them up and enrolling them into participation.

It came as quite a surprise, therefore, when he blasted me during my video critique.

To be fair, the video was ghastly. I walked around in the front of the room like an automaton spewing out a pre-programmed monolog. I had absolutely no connection with the audience. The questions I asked were rhetorical and I rushed on without giving them time to answer. The question and answer portion was even worse, I think. Pretending to understand what people were asking, blustering through my responses. It was terrible.

Still, I was stunned when the course leader kept pounding on me, and allowed one of the course participants to do likewise. He kept rewinding sections of the Q&A, three or four times in one instance, so that we could keep on watching and remarking on how badly I handled thing. Pointed out loudly how stupid I had made well-educated people feel.

Finally, he ended up telling me that I should just keep doing my talks on video rather than in person, the implication being that I was so disconnected to my audience that there is no hope for me.

I left the hot seat, and kept it together long enough to get out of the room. I was so hurt and angry I couldn’t think straight—the only clear idea was to get myself away from the group long enough to calm down and get control of my face and feelings.

As I stood outside in the cool air, several thoughts managed to surface through the chaos. First, I had to acknowledge that part of my feelings were my own, not caused by anyone else. I didn’t need someone to point out how distant I was from my audience—I could see it clearly, and it devastated me. Second, I knew for certain that the course leader had not intended to be so over the top; in fact, the more I thought about it, the more I suspected that he behaved the way he did because he thought I could take it and not have a problem. He thought he knew me and could count on me not to be fazed by such strong feedback.

The course leader talked to me after the session and apologized. It was obvious to him that I was very upset, and he was both surprised and chagrined. When we talked further, my suspicion was confirmed: He had assumed, from what he knew of me, that he didn’t have to wear kid gloves and could really dig into the video playback to underscore all the common mistakes presenters make.

I have received this kind of feedback in various forms all of my adult life. Described once by a person who worked under me by several tiers as an “ax lady” (when he was expressing his surprise that I’m not the way he thought I was at all). Told “Gee, and I thought that you always have it so together” by a friend to whom I had gone for some moral support.

Like a steel magnolia, my hard candy/marshmallow combination is not a put-on. I’m not projecting some false persona to the world at large. I am sincere in my interactions, authentic in my responses—but apparently I don’t show (or people don’t bother to look for) the marshmallow part of the picture.

Why do people make this mistake with me so often? I will think more about this over time and share any more insights that hit me. For now, I offer my story to think about for yourself.

If you are being authentic with the people you encounter every day, are they seeing all of you? If not, why not?

I would love to hear about any insights you have.

My Back Pages

"I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now."

Bob Dylan wrote and (sort of) sang it, The Byrds made it popular, but I prefer the Dick Gaughan version of same. Great song...amazing that Dylan wrote it in his 20s. Makes way more sense to me these days. In fact, My Back Pages is the theme song for my 50s.

I am lifting a part of a post I entered on my Success in Sweatpants blog to provide some of my back story here. A lot what I will write about here will refer back to or be rooted in my experiences and the realizations and personal growth that resulted from them. So, here is a portion of my story and timeline:

Sometimes I think I'm a one-off, but then I think, no, that's incredibly egotistic. Born into an Army family that was kind of a mobile "Father Knows Best" in culture, I was introduced to the idea of life beyond the U.S. at the age of 7. Lived in Iran (where my sister married a Persian) as a kid; have also lived in every region of the U.S. and been in every one of the 50 states. Graduated high school from a small American school in a small town in Italy.

Tried to fit into the "way things are supposed to be" once I got out of college, but never succeeded. I hated corporate life, and I still don't have the talent for schmoozing, patience, and savvy politics that are required to make it in that scenario.

My passion for a better world and my love of playing a big game led to my work for Werner Erhard and the est training in the late 70s. I worked in the Philadelphia center (producing events, leading groups, and lots of other intense work), then moved on to the 6-Day course for a season. Met my first husband here, and that's a whole other story.

Based on first husband's promptings, I became a cruising sailor, and stayed tied to the sea by a bowline knot for over 20 years and through 2 more husbands. I can now confidently claim to be the ultimate first mate, after three boys, three boats, and three different cruising experiences (First husband - cocaine/sex addict; second husband - verbally/psychologically abusive; third husband - wonderful person and now just a friend).

The high point of my cruising career was a 3-year cruise on a 36-foot boat from San Diego, through Mexico, Costa Rica, Panama, and Colombia. Lots of stories, lots of learning experiences.

Then.....

In 1994, I returned to the States from the Caribbean, ending a sailboat cruising life with my second husband (and ending the marriage as well). I arrived in San Diego with two duffel bags and $1,000 in cash—the sum total of my portfolio. I was four months shy of my 40th birthday.

For the first six months, I didn’t own a car (a difficult thing to be without in Southern California), I bought overripe vegetables at steep discounts from the neighborhood produce stand (I had lots of home canned veggies for a while there), and I used my decrepit laptop computer with a sloooow dial up line to figure out what had happened in cyberspace while I’d been sailing in the tropics.

In 1995, I declared bankruptcy because of outstanding debts left over from my first marriage.

Then things turned around.....

In 2004, after ten years of corporate gigs, I had a decent sized IRA, savings in a money market account, and I bought my very first house.

In 2005, I started 4R Marketing. It was a stretch financially, but I went for it.

In 2006, with the support of a great team, I broke into six figures in company revenue, and in 2007 I increased revenues by another 50%.

This year, I rented my house out and bought a new home in the Texas hill country—my own evidence that the law of attraction works. I’m living the life I used to dream about, and now I’m spinning new dreams to reach for.

In a way, these are sort of credentials. I've been through ups, downs, sides--and want to share my stories in ways that make a DIFFERENCE to the people who read them.