Quit Being So Nice!

My friend, Stacy, is a well-known marketing maven, having had several books published by major publishers. She called me in a complete panic on Saturday morning. Apparently, she had just had the latest in a series of run-ins with a former collaborator, Stan, and couldn't figure out what to do.

Stacy and Stan had written a couple of books together about a decade ago. He began undercutting her right from the beginning -- they agreed that he'd do the East coast promo, and she'd do the West Coast, but of course, he booked a fair amount of the West Coast promo for himself. They had agreed to do the TV shows together, but he just booked shows, and never told her, so of course, he did them alone. After their first couple of successful books, he got a four book contract for himself, without ever mentioning to her that he was even thinking of more books.

In the last few years, Stan's begun one of those seminar businesses where people pay several hundred dollars to be told that they, too, can have his success, if they just buy more courses from him, and from the other people who are selling from his stage. (Of course, he's paid half of everything everyone sells from the stage.) Stan keeps inviting Stacy to be on his stage, but only as part of a panel, or in a very short time slot -- and tells her she can't sell from the stage in that case.

Last weekend, he invited her to be a part of a panel again. It wasn't worth her time to travel to LA for just that, but she figured that if she taught her usual Marketing 101 course on Thursday and Friday, then she could work the panel in on Saturday, and maybe schmooze a little and pull in a few new clients. It happened that Stan's 'seminar' and Stacy's course were held in the same hotel, a hotel they've both used for years.

When Stan found out that Stacy was teaching (all of 9 students) in the same hotel he was preaching his 'seminar' to several hundred, he hit the roof -- and began screaming at her in front of others. (Did he think he owned the hotel?)

Believe it or not, Stacy was worried about how she could fix this! She was worried that she'd offended a 'heavy hitter' in her industry.

As I pointed out, there was nothing much to lose -- he had never helped her, only himself. While she had picked up some clients from networking at his events, she could definitely live without them. And given his explosive nature (this was not the first time he'd blown up over pretty much nothing), why did she want to deal with him at all? Why expose herself to this horrendous treatment?

Stacy felt that way for a number of very common reasons, listed below. Do some of these apply to you, too?

** As a spiritual person, you feel that you must be accepting - Acceptance does not mean being a door mat for other people's bad behavior. Rather, it means accepting that this person is acting however he (or she) is acting, and that you can't change it.

The only choice you have is how to respond. By allowing someone to treat you badly, you are depriving that person of the lessons he needs to learn to grow. So a good way to operate is to have some boundaries, to have the attitude that the person can act however he chooses, and that you will not be present for it. That is, 'do whatever you want -- anywhere but here."

** You feel that if a relationship isn't working out it's your fault, so it's your responsibility to smooth things over - It takes two people, acting with integrity, respect, honor and mutual appreciation, to have a good working relationship.

Own your own part -- are you acting honorably, respecting the other person? And is the other person honoring and respecting you?

If the answer to this second question is 'no', then it is your responsibility to bring it up with the other person, along with clear consequences for not acting honorably and respectfully towards you. If this is not realistic, that is, if the other person is not likely to listen to your point of view, especially if he is in a position of power over you, then your only responsibility is to take care of yourself and get away from the situation.

** You worry about negative consequences of letting a relationship end, especially on a bad note. -- Yes, there can be negative consequences, sometimes serious ones. Most often, though, these are temporary, because when you remove a less than positive relationship from your life, you make room for better relationships. 

 

More than that, every time you allow yourself to be treated badly, you damage your own self-esteem. How can you think well of yourself if you are clearly allowing others to think less of you? Even more, each hit to your self-esteem makes it even harder to extricate yourself from this relationship and others like it. (How do you think battered spouses get that way? It's not all at once, it's a thousand little cuts, each a tiny bit more serious.)

Stacy heard all of this, and decided that the email she had sent explaining the situation was more than enough. She took a deep breath (or three) and decided to let it go -- and enjoy her newly found free time in LA.

Can you go home again? Hope... and Acceptance

Last week was quite a whirlwind — NJ for a class, visiting family and friends, and a college reunion, back to SF, only to go to Sacramento on business. But I’m finally home, thank goodness! And because there was such a whirlwind, I have a few impressions I’d like to share with you:

Can you go home again?

It’s very odd to walk around a college campus where you spent almost all of 4 years (I worked as a research assistant in the summers, and stayed for a month or so after graduation, so it really was almost all of 4 years). There is this time travel experience — you know you are you, and it’s 2007, but then, you hit a part of campus that hasn’t changed since you lived there, and... you’ve traveled back in time. I walked by a dorm I lived in one summer, and the window of “my” room had a window fan in it, just like I had. It literally stopped me in my tracks. When am I? It’s as if the present is layered onto the past in the physical place. (Read “Time and Again” by Jack Finney for a terrific novel based on this premise — and no, the movie just isn’t as good).

But then there is also this sense of the place growing and evolving as the community grows and evolves, as everything evolves. Some buildings are the same; others have only been changed on the inside. There are new buildings, housing new scholarly departments and new students. Some trees have gotten bigger, some have died and been replaced by smaller ones. The black squirrels seem to have been replaced by gray ones. The faces, of course, have changed, but the feel remains the same. Engineering students are still working their butts off -- I commiserated with a current engineering student, and one who’d been out 5 years, about how hard we all worked as undergrads. And everyone still feels connected.

So if you can accept that everything changes, then you can go home again.

Hope

I had the good fortune to get a ride (thanks, Julie & Rich!) out to the Plasma Physics Lab, which is 4 miles from the main Princeton campus, for the first time ever, so I could take a tour of the facilities. The PPL is one of the few experimental locations in the world for the development of nuclear fusion energy. Currently used nuclear energy is produced by fission, splitting atoms, and it leaves nasty by-products. By contrast, fusing types of hydrogen atoms to make helium, which is an inert gas, also frees up vast amounts of energy, and leaves only the helium as a byproduct.

Here’s the good news: according to the tour director, who is a physicist (although the communications director of the lab and not an experimenter), commercially viable fusion energy is pretty much inevitable. Certainly many things remain to be worked out, but apparently the question is not if, but when. His view is definitely by 2050. The (slightly) bad news is that the PPL would like to be doing experiments 25 weeks a year on the test reactors they have, and are only funded by the Dept. of Energy for 12 weeks a year. How much sooner could this happen if the lab were fully funded? Can we afford to wait until 2050?

A further question is which nation will commercialize fusion energy, and thereby gain the business for putting these small reactors everywhere. Other research institutions are in Russia, China, the EU, and Japan. While the research is apparently a joint endeavor of these countries with India at this point, commercializing it may not be.

All in all, from the Earth’s point of view, this is the most hopeful thing I’ve heard in years.

Acceptance

10 years ago, when I told people at my reunion that I did clairvoyant readings and coaching (which wasn’t called that then), most people who didn’t know me well, and a few who did, looked at me like I was crazy. It wasn’t much better 5 years ago.

But this time, the reaction I got from most people was “Cool!” I had pretty deep conversations, where I was passing on psychic information, with a couple of people who I’m sure wouldn’t have given my information any credence back then. And this is a pretty mainstream group of professionals. Is it because the culture has changed? Or because we’re older? Or because I speak about it in a way that’s easier to relate to? I don’t know, but I sure hope it’s the first of these. Anyway, my sense is that it’s safe to come out of the closet with your abilities (for those of you who have been in one).