DW Community Catch-up Thread
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@The Hizzy I’m sorry about your coworker. My neighbor passed away recently from cancer and we didn’t know. We stopped seeing her but we figured that it was due to some trip or something. Her husband was really distraught, like never saying good morning to us when we bumped into each other, and we thought he was rude. Turns out he was dealing with her wife sick from cancer. She died two months ago and we found out because we saw them moving. She had a 16 year old daughter.
Yeah. I’ve gotten about 5 more calls today about it. He was a great guy. I was just talking to him two weeks ago. Planning him coming over in August. As goes life. Now I’m just waiting to hear the funeral arrangements.
So I borrowed Finding Your Half Orange from the library a couple weeks ago. Currently only two chapters in. I dunno, it’s all so cheesey to me. It’s one thing to be positive about the life you want, but some of the author’s examples of getting back what you put out there make me roll my eyes (e.g., you leave the house in a terrible mood and end up spilling coffee on yourself and getting a parking ticket — well, you *invited* that mess and ticket with your crappy attitude). I’m gonna keep reading it, but so far I’m a skeptic.
I read it a few years ago. I don’t remember a lot of it. I do believe to a certain extent that our attitudes, moods and emotions play a roll in the things that happen to us and around us, but I’m not really down with that whole “The Secret” power of positive thinking shit.
I don’t remember if it was Finding Your Half Orange or something else, but I vaguely remember this piece of advice about looking in the mirror and saying to yourself “Today is going to be the day I meet my partner!” and I felt like, 1) that’s inauthentic and 2) that’s just setting yourself up for disappointment.
I mean, I get it. If I’m having a shitty day, my attitude about that day is ultimately up to me. It’ll seem worse if my attitude sucks, better if it doesn’t. I understand that being positive means I’ll be more open/receptive to the men I meet, and it’ll make me more approachable, too, if I project that I am a happy person. I think she has a point. But I have to draw the line about that kind of thinking somewhere, and I just can’t get on board with the idea that people *invite* every misfortune into their lives.
So far the book basically amounts to: “BELIEVE IT! YOU CAN ACHIEVE IT! Sandra, 29, marketing professional, changed her attitude. A week later, she met someone and six weeks later they were engaged!” Every. Single. Anecdote. Is. The. Same. And I’m like, whoa, Book, calm down.
LMAO yeah, that shit certainly didn’t work for me. Took me 2.5 years of being single, tindering, bumbling, POFing, coffee meets bageling, taking breaks, trying again, taking more breaks, repeat. Meeting my boyfriend was not because of any magical positivity formula, it was just dumb luck.
I’ll report back when I’m deeper than two chapters in. I had a meeting on Saturday morning (urgh, why???), so I’m determined to take an actual lunch break every day this week so that I can get some mid-day down-time and reading in.
@Copa The anecdotes shared in books like that are usually made up by the author. If you skip from anecdote to anecdote they will sound the same because the author has written them all and is trying to make a point with them. They all have the same tone. They often use the same key terms. They tend to be about the same length and have the same writing style.
The anecdote about Sandra being engaged after only six weeks seems more like a system that isn’t working. She sounds positively desperate if she is engaged after six weeks.
Oh yeah I forgot to count on that…. getting engaged after 6 weeks is a recipe for disaster (although I’m not sure if Copa was exaggerating to make a point lol).
Yeah it’s definitely got a lot of CHEESE. I don’t typically read books like that, ever. But I was in a rut and stuck it out because nothing else was working for me. With any type of self-help book you need to take from it the good and leave the rest behind. It just helped me be more positive and open. And I definitely didn’t get together with my husband right after, but I was much more open to him and getting to know him better than I was the year prior (I think I’ve mentioned on here, I had known him for years and was pressured by my best friend to go out with him but kept declining).
I actually do believe that some people invite hardship on themselves. I’ll use a work example.
I manage and write proposals for an A/E firm. I’m pretty easy going on try not to stress too much because I know things will get done and will get done well. My coworker also gets things done well, but man, she’s a glass half empty kind of person.
We both have worked on similar proposals for the same client, as well as with the same internal team. I may work on hour or two late here or there for that client towards the end. She apparently works weekends and until midnight to get things done and she’s vocal about it on social media. Neither one of us had other projects we were managing while working for this client. The main varying factor is us and our personalities. To this day, I don’t get how our hours can differ so greatly. Maybe she thrives on the stress and people feeling sorry for her? IDK. But yes, part of me thinks she invites this on herself.
From page 54 of the book: “And six weeks later, they were planning a wedding.” Haha. I read that this morning, so I wasn’t exaggerating. There was another anecdote in the book that I read this morning about a woman who uprooted her life after three months of long-distance dating someone because he was “the one” and the power of positivity made it happen!
Anyway, I’m gonna give the book a fair chance. Like I said, I do think she has a valid point to an extent, so I’m curious to see where it goes. It can’t hurt.
@ktfran If your workplace is generally high-stress, she just may not be suited for it. My last company manufactured stress, and even the smallest tasks were made to seem like sky-is-falling events. Some people handled it well. Some people didn’t. I didn’t, at first, and had to change my attitude to hack it until I could get out. It helped. For awhile, I’d get home every evening, open up my laptop, freak out, and keep working. Until I decided I couldn’t do that anymore. I put a cap on the hours I would devote to work on a normal work day and generally changed my attitude by deciding I wouldn’t give in to the company culture where everything is treated like a fire drill, and reminding myself something better WOULD come along eventually. I’d been hired before, I’d be hired again. It helped a lot, and my last few months at that places were significantly less stressful. Some would leave the company without a new job lined up because they couldn’t deal, and couldn’t change how they thought. So I agree with you that attitude can make a huge difference. But, I still think that these examples are different than getting a traffic ticket because your attitude stinks, which is an example from the book.
