My current Kiva loans include two to groups in Sierra Leone, a country still trying to recover from a devastating civil war that only ended ten years ago. These loans will help these groups set up inventory and buy new equipment for their businesses in a country with ridiculously high unemployment. The total amount of these loans is less than I spent on flights for a recent family vacation.

Usually when life reminds me about how fortunate I am, I feel guilty. Guilty that I can drive around the country on paved roads and highways, or that I can jump on a plane to visit friends of family across the country when many people will never take a vacation, nevermind travel outside of their country or even town. Guilty that I have a refrigerator full of food and that I occasionally need to toss a spoiled item when countless people go to bed hungry every night. Guilty that I can log on to Amazon and have just about anything I need delivered to my door in two days.

Having been brought up Catholic, I’m a bit of an expert on the power of guilt. You’re supposed to feel guilty when you do something wrong, but guilt was the go-to tactic in my faith to promote certain behaviors and to dissuade others. It was used so often and so effectively that by the time I was a teenager, almost everything I did came with a sense of guilt. I felt guilty when I allowed myself to feel good when something positive happened because “pride is a sin”. I also felt guilty for feeling bad when something negative happened because so many people have it much worse than I did, so what right did I have to indulge in self-pity.

That outward guilt, the feeling that I had done something wrong, always led to inner shame, the feeling that there must be something wrong with me and that’s why I did whatever I felt guilty about. Guilt and shame are closely related and hard to distinguish. Eventually, for me, the two became very much the same thing, and they followed me like a dark cloud for most of my life.

I never really knew whether I was supposed to feel good or bad, but I always knew that I should feel guilty and ashamed.

As an adult, I’m trying to shake free from the firm grasp of guilt and shame.  When something positive happens, I want to replace guilt with gratitude. When something negative happens, I want to replace shame with compassion. Instead of the weight of the world being an anchor to my own feelings, they will serve as a reminder of how blessed I am, to take nothing for granted, and to encourage me to find ways to share that with others.

I’m not there yet, but I’m evolving.

“Timeout”, I said. “Now.” Tears streamed from his eyes like the water from my cup as he went in to his corner.

I woke up this morning realizing I had made a mistake.

When I got home from work, I asked Junior to come sit by me, which he did, smiling. I asked him if he remembered last night when I sent him in to a timeout after the water spilled. He said that he did, although he answers yes to most questions. I then told him that I had a made a mistake; that I was frustrated and that was why I had sent him in to a timeout. I said that I know he didn’t spill the water on purpose, and that he was listening to me by trying to put the water down and that it was an accident that it spilled. I told him that I was sorry.

As a parent, it’s easy to focus too much on setting the rules and enforcing them and to ignore the other lessons that we’re there to teach. As much as I’d like to never do any wrong in my son’s eyes and to keep my superhero cape, it’s more important that he see me make mistakes, admit to them, and learn from them than it is for me to keep up some unrealistic and unhealthy façade of perfection in his eyes. That’s especially true when my mistake involves him.

Maybe I’ll keep my cape.

And then, in an instant, it all disappeared.

It can be a comment in a meeting. Three lines of an otherwise positive e-mail. Something not said by a significant other. Any of these things has the power to erase every positive minute from my thoughts and draw all of my attention to pinpoint focus on the negative. Confidence gets replaced by insecurity. Happiness gets replaced by worry. And productivity gets replaced by obsessing on my self-doubt. Building momentum for positive thoughts takes a lot of energy, but the switch for flipping my thoughts to the negative is connected to a hair-trigger.

I have two options. I could sit, and stew, and let those negative thoughts consume me and validate my self-doubt, like I usually do. They’ve already taken 15 minutes from me as it is, but that is only a fraction of the time they would normally claim. My other option is challenge those feelings. It’s not enough to ignore them because they will always come back, but by challenging them, I can make sense out of why I feel the way I do, and give myself an opportunity to counter each negative thought with a positive one.

As it turns out, I’m not a complete failure. Those negative thoughts that flooded my mind were brought on by my own insecurities and self-doubts; an irrational reaction to anything that could even remotely be perceived as justification that the positive feelings during the past week wasn’t earned or deserved.

When you put yourself out there, whether at work, at home, or as a creative, it’s natural for everything to feel personal and to feel very vulnerable to the opinions of the people around us. But not every opinion is a critique. Not every critique is personal. And sometimes people are just looking for something different. That shouldn’t diminish, in any way, all that you’ve accomplished.

TIme to start generating more momentum…

Nowadays, I’m not overly competitive. Or maybe I am, but it never comes out because I’m just better at everything than everyone else and I always win. Either way, I would like to think that if the time came when I did lose at something, I wouldn’t act like many of these contestants on reality game shows.

Listen, I know you’re upset. And you might really be a better singer/dancer/photographer chef than the person that won. But they won, and you didn’t. So when your last comments before the credits roll blame the judges for making a mistake and you snidely proclaim your superiority over the winner, people aren’t going to remember how you competed or how talented you are. They’re only going to remember how you lost: poorly.

Even on the good days, when I’m feeling extremely creative, and productive, those dragons surface that try to bring me back down.

They bring with them reasons to dissuade me from continuing.

Someone is already doing what you’re doing, so you should just stop now.

Their website is nicer than yours, so you should just stop now.

They have done it longer and have more posts, with better writing and better pictures, and sales, and, and, and…

You don’t have enough training, or connections, or visibility, or money, or, or, or…

They try to distract me from what is important and what I should be doing, and then use my weakness (squirrel!) as evidence of my inevitable failure.

But even with those reasons, and those distractions, I managed to check a lot of things off my list today.

I pushed those dragons aside and I kept on going.

Some days, it’s enough to just say that you kept on going.

Enjoy.

This is our new dishwasher. She’s a beauty, right? Our previous dishwasher was ten years old, loud, with broken rails barely preventing the upper rack from crashing down on to the dishes below and breaking everything inside. Every load of dishes was a game of Russian roulette, where we would take our chances and let Fate decide whether we would wind up with clean(ish) dishes or a mess of ceramic fragments and shards of glass. Knowing that Lady Luck could only be on our side for so long, we finally went to our local big box home improvement store to buy a new dishwasher and end this game of chance.

Once in the store, we were casually looking at the row of dishwashers when a salesperson came by to ask if we had any questions. We asked our questions and he was very helpful answering them, and we were able to decide on the model we wanted. We checked out, went home, and a few days later, we were called to schedule our installation. A few days after that, the truck arrived and our new dishwasher was installed. My wife and I were both out, so the nanny was there for the installation. When I met her later to pick up my son, she asked him to tell me what color the new dishwasher was. “Blanc“, he said, or so I thought. Our brilliant child, after all, knows colors en français. “Black, that’s right” the nanny repeated. Wait, what? “Blanc? Or black?”, I inquired. “Black,” she responded. “That’s what you ordered, they checked the paperwork.”

When I returned home, I found that we did, indeed, have a black dishwasher sitting underneath the countertop in our kitchen. The problem, though, was that every other appliance in our kitchen is white.

It turns out that we ended up with the wrong color dishwasher because of a number of bad assumptions.

• I assumed that because my wife and I had a conversation with the salesperson where we mentioned that all of our other appliances were white and so we wanted a white dishwasher, that he understood that we wanted the white model.
• The salesperson assumed that because we then asked questions about a higher end dishwasher that happened to be black but came in white that we wanted the black one.
• I assumed that when the salesperson went back to get the model number that he was getting the model number for the white dishwasher.
• I assumed the right color dishwasher was ordered, so it never occurred to me to tell the nanny “Hey, make sure it’s white.”
• The install team assumed that because the model number for the black dishwasher matched what was on the paperwork that they should install a black dishwasher in a kitchen full of white appliances.

Everyone involved assumed that everyone else (including me) did their job and that, for whatever reason, we wanted a black dishwasher in a kitchen full of white appliances. Like in most situations, this entire ordeal could have been avoided at any time by asking questions. The salesperson could have asked “You wanted the black one, right?”, and I could have corrected him. When he got the model number from the dishwasher, I could have asked “That model number is for the white one, right?” But no one asked any of those questions, and now we have a black dishwasher.

We assume that if the other person doesn’t ask any questions, that they have the same information that we do, and they used that information to make a decision. That’s fine when my wife goes to pick up dinner at our burrito place because without any other information, she’ll pick up a steak burrito, extra rice, black beans, mild salsa, sour cream, cheese, and lettuce. The consequences of a bad assumption on her part that I wanted my usual order when I actually wanted a chicken burrito is that I get a delicious steak burrito. But the consequences of relying on bad assumptions at work, such as that another team is responsible for some aspect of the project, is that a project fails. Assuming that my doctor has all the updated, relevant information about me and my family history, and that he used that information when prescribing a new medication could result in much more severe consequences.

If the question is how to avoid relying on bad assumptions, the answer is to speak up; to ask your own questions. “I want a chicken burrito this time.” “Your team is responsible for deploying the hardware, right?” “You know that high blood pressure runs in my family, right?”

Sometimes, we’re afraid to speak up or to ask questions because we’re afraid of asking the dreaded “dumb question”. Or we’re afraid of looking bad for asking a question about something we assume is obvious to everyone else and, therefore, should be obvious to us, even when it’s not. Other times, we assume that a service provider will ask questions if there is anything in doubt, and that if they don’t ask any other questions, we assume that everything is clear and understood.

When everyone assumes and no one asks questions, you wind up with a black dishwasher.

Don’t wind up with a black dishwasher.

Enjoy.

[Via: 30 Dr. Seuss Quotes to Live By]