Tag: #jordanleedooley

Thoughtful Thursday posts, Uncategorized

Thoughtful Thursday – November 2, 2023

amybenoit

My intention is to post a Thoughtful Thursday column each week and share some of the insights I have learned in the past week. Here are some of the things I’ve learned this week:

SHE with Jordan Lee Dooley – A Candid Conversation About Foster Care and Adoption
  • Adoption is often perceived as a last resort only for those struggling with infertility. Adoption can be Plan A for you!
  • Adoption is a calling. It is not an obligatory ministry for the infertile.
  • Open adoption was discussed. In open adoption, you can keep in touch with the biological parent(s). Some view this as “not trying to erase the relationship with the biological parents.”

Misconceptions about adoption:

  • People saying “Congratulations” on adoption.
    • It is well-intended, but also shattering having someone else’s child not being held by her. It is better to acknowledge the emotions by saying “This is heavy. How are you doing?” “How’s mom doing? I can only imagine how hard this is for her.”
  • “I could never do that because I’d get too attached, I can never do that because of xyz, etc.”
    • We prioritize our comfort. Instead of saying “I could never…”, ask what you can do to help. Put yourself into the role to understand their story.
  • “He/she/they are so lucky to have you.”
    • Adoption is not “rescuing.” We don’t adopt because we are rescuers; we adopt because we are rescued. We are the blessed ones. Stating “they are so lucky to have you” discredits the reality that there is a trauma, separation, and grief that happens. What would the child think if he/she heard that statement?
  • The people outside the realm of foster care and adoption don’t understand that there are so many emotions. We are often told to focus on the positive, but there are so many emotions.
  • You don’t need to share your adopted child’s story. Their story deserves to be protected until they are ready to tell it. When you are sharing your experience, ensure you are only sharing your experience. Protect and guard the things that are not your experience and are not yours to share. Don’t share at your child’s expense.

Further reading recommended in this podcast:

  • “The boy who was raised as a dog”
  • “The body keeps the score”
  • “The A to Z of trauma”
  • “The Primal Wound”
How to Be Awesome at Your Job – Mastering the Four Conversations that Transform all Your Interactions
  • Storytelling – your stories are not the truth.
  • Collaboration – seek to understand and ask questions. Absorb other perspectives.
  • Creative – trust your intuition and co-create with others.
  • Commitment – action conversation – agree to do something together.
  • Become aware that your stories aren’t the truth. Become aware of how you’re presenting yourself and how you’re presenting your stories. We all have patterns around judging, being perfectionists, and being critical of how others do things. Instead of a reaction or pattern of defensiveness, we can change that. If we believe we have the answer and we are right, we are telling the story with a closed fist. Emotions and desires are often the root of our story. Standards – investigate the source of your standards and consider whether you want to keep them. Ex: men being taught not to show their emotions

In the past week, I have faced some challenging circumstances in various areas of my life, and I was feeling stressed and sad about the uncertainties. This carried over into my work life and I had formed a thought/perception about something and later used other observations to strengthen that narrative I had. After a conversation, I recognized that my thoughts are not facts and that my emotions from my other circumstances influenced my thoughts. In reality, once we form a perception about something, we often try to find anything we can to fit that narrative, no matter how unreasonable it may be.

  • When we work with different people, everyone has different stories/perspectives. The fundamental pattern is that when we enter into conversation, we enter in defensively because we want our answer to be right. The real art of the collaborative conversation is learning to not give up your position, but to keep an open mind and invite others to do the same.
  • Ask questions to better understand other perspectives rather than asking questions with the intent to prove them wrong.  The best place to start is to state what you know to be factual. Figure out if you agree on the state of things and then ask each other questions about thoughts.
  • Judgment shuts things down – saying things like “that will never work.”
  • Useful phrase: “Help me understand your position.”
  • Unhelpful phrases/actions: Not asking questions or saying “yes, but I think…” Work on being a learner instead of a knower.
  • We like to tell our stories and we like to take action. We leap from storytelling to action and bypass collaboration and creative conversations. The bypass can cause us to make bad decisions. A good commitment conversation means both sides understand what’s being asked, what’s being promised, and what success looks like.
  • Be curious about your pattern and how to change that pattern.
Mentally Stronger with Therapist Amy Morin – 7 Boundary Mistakes That Damage Relationships
  • Setting a boundary can be the kindest thing you can do to yourself and others.
  • A boundary is a rule that you set about how you’re going to allow other people to treat you. You’re really setting the rule for yourself. There are different kinds of boundaries: physical, emotional, financial, etc. Boundaries teach other people how you expect to be treated.

Mistakes:

  • not setting boundaries in the first place
    • Sometimes it doesn’t occur to people to set boundaries because they don’t want to be mean or selfish. They don’t set boundaries because they don’t want to damage a relationship. If you don’t set a boundary, the other person has to guess what you’re okay with, and when they guess wrong, you might feel uncomfortable or grow resentful of their behavior. A boundary will help you feel better in the long term.
  • apologizing for your boundaries
    • Don’t be sorry for taking care of yourself. Setting a boundary is a nice thing to do and you are modeling how to take care of yourself. Instead of apologizing, say thank you instead. Instead of “I’m sorry I have to leave right now” say “Thank you for inviting me. I appreciate it.” Unapologetically insist that you’re worth it.
  • automatically announcing your boundaries
    • It’s true in some respects, but you don’t always have to communicate them with your words. Instead, you can show people your boundaries. Ex: don’t need to answer the phone every time it rings if it is inconvenient for you, don’t need to stay at a party if people are drinking too much
  • using boundaries to try to control someone else
    • Boundaries are meant to help you manage your life, not to control somebody else’s. If you are going to set a boundary, make sure it’s about protecting your inner peace, not about forcing someone else to change.
  • being too rigid with your boundaries
    • It’s important to have boundaries, but having too many boundaries or sticking to them at all costs isn’t healthy either. Healthy relationships need compassion, empathy, and compromise. Your boundaries can be flexible sometimes; there may be exceptions to the rule. Don’t be so rigid about them that they become detrimental to you.
  • setting boundaries when you feel really emotional
    • When your emotions are high (if you’re angry or anxious), don’t set a boundary. Wait until you’re calm. Boundaries are rarely an emergency; you can usually wait to set them until you’re calm.
  • setting a boundary that you can’t uphold
    • Don’t set a boundary you aren’t emotionally ready to uphold. Start with a boundary you’re ready to enforce. Most boundaries can be taken one small step at a time if you aren’t emotionally ready to enforce a bigger one.
Our Daily Bread Podcast – Smartphone Compassion

“Was the driver late with your food? You can use your phone to give him a one-star rating. Did the shopkeeper treat you curtly? You can write her a critical review. While smartphones enable us to shop, keep up with friends, and more, they have also given us the power to publicly rate each other. And this can be a problem.

Rating each other this way is problematic because judgments can be made without context. The driver gets rated poorly for a late delivery due to circumstances out of his control. The shopkeeper gets a negative review when she’d been up all night with a sick child. How can we avoid rating others unfairly like this?

By imitating God’s character. In Exodus 34:6–7, God describes Himself as “compassionate and gracious”—meaning He wouldn’t judge our failures without context; “slow to anger”—meaning He wouldn’t post a negative review after one bad experience; “abounding in love”—meaning His correctives are for our good, not to get revenge; and “forgiving [of] sin”—meaning our lives don’t have to be defined by our one-star days. Since God’s character is to be the basis of ours (Matthew 6:33), we can avoid the harshness smartphones enable by using ours as He would.

In the online age, we can all rate others harshly. May the Holy Spirit empower us to bring a little compassion today.”

This podcast was a great reminder to treat others with compassion and to not be so quick to judgment.

While reading a book comprising of legal-based short stories in the past week, I learned about viatical settlements, which are an interesting concept.

Viatical settlements involve selling a life insurance policy to investors so that they get the death benefit when you die, and you get a check right now. These are generally done when someone has a terminal illness and a life expectancy of two years or less. This is certainly an interesting concept and I am unsure what I think of it.

This week I also read “101 Things I Learned in Law School” written by Vibeke Norgaard Martin with Matthew Frederick. This book was very interesting and I will post about it in more depth in a separate post at some point. Here are some of the most interesting facts:

  • A marijuana-related business may not declare bankruptcy. Cannabis cultivation and sale are permitted by some states but are prohibited by federal law, while bankruptcy proceedings are governed by federal law. The federal bankruptcy courts will not allow a cannabis-related business to use its process.
  • Unpublished court decisions generally cannot be used as a basis for argument in the same jurisdiction. In arguing before a California court, one may cite an unpublished case from Texas, but not an unpublished case from California.
  • A supreme court might be the lowest court. In New York, the highest court is the Court of Appeals, while the lowest court is the Supreme Court.
  • A career in law is continual preparation for a day that may never come. Over 90% of cases are resolved prior to trial.

I look forward to reading, learning, and sharing more with you soon!

Thoughtful Thursday posts, Uncategorized

Thoughtful Thursday- March 9, 2023

amybenoit

My intention is to post a Thoughtful Thursday column each week and share some of the insights I have learned in the past week. Here are some of the things I’ve learned this week:

Life Kit- The five kinds of perfectionists

Five kinds of perfectionists:

  • Classic perfectionist: highly organized. They do what they say they’re going to do, when they said they were going to do it, and in the way they said they’d do it. They are highly reliable and add structure to any environment they enter. They cannot be as spontaneous and sometimes don’t welcome collaboration and connection. People working with them can end up feeling more transactional.
    • I consider myself a classic perfectionist most of the time.
  • Procrastinator: waits for conditions to be perfect before starting. They tend to ruminate. They can prepare so well and see things from a 360-degree angle and are not impulsive. They encounter challenges around getting projects off the ground because they experience anxiety around beginnings.
  • Messy: in love with beginnings. They can start anything effortlessly. When they hit the middle of the process and the tedium that is involved in staying committed to carrying out those goals, they lose interest and energy because the middle isn’t perfect and doesn’t match the perfect romanticized energy around starting.
  • Intense: razor sharp focus. They are really great at generating outcomes. Sometimes they prize the outcome so much that they lose the sense of team/relationship building in the process. They get their desired outcome at the great expense of others around them. Others’ safety depends on their outbursts.
    • Gordon Ramsay was listed as an example of an intense perfectionist, as conveyed in his television shows, such as Hell’s Kitchen.
  • Parisian: wanting perfect connection. They often practice people-pleasing at the expense of sacrificing their own sense of identity and pleasure. They are genuinely warm people who focus on inclusion, collaborate well, and enjoy working with others.

Ways to work with and reframe our types of perfectionism:

Explaining vs. expressing. When you only explain and you don’t express, it emphasizes a transactional, no-team-oriented, get-it-done attitude. It makes people feel disconnected. If you only express (messy and Parisian types), you talk a lot about how you feel but you aren’t asserting your wants and needs. You need to explain and help others understand you better.

Control vs. power. They look very similar, but they are very different. Control is about manipulating and planning one step at a time. This leaves you frantic, and your desperate energy and anxiety can be felt by others around you.

Power is about influencing and being a visionary. You accept that, no matter what happens with the outcome, you know what’s important to you and trust yourself to understand what to do next.

You can’t think yourself through your life. You have to be open and surrender. You don’t know what’s coming next. You can’t be in surrender and in control at the same time.

Questions to ask yourself:

  • Are you hurting or helping the people around you in pursuit of your ideals?
  • Does this action serve to connect or distance you from your values?
  • Are you pursuing this ideal for the right reasons, or are you seeking some kind of arbitrary external validation?
SHE with Jordan Lee Dooley- Asking for Help as a Perfectionist

Perfectionists tend to want control of everything in their lives. When it comes to work, as the work piles on, they may become overwhelmed because they feel that they can’t delegate or trust others to complete tasks to their expectations. Here are some tips:

  1. Set up standard operating procedures. Make it easier to delegate. Test the process yourself according to your instructions before you delegate! It can be so easy to think that others will do it your way, but they won’t without detailed instructions!
  2. Start really small with one small task at a time. Delegating and giving up control doesn’t come naturally to most of us, and giving up too much control causes us to feel overwhelmed and micromanage. Delegate little bits at a time!
  3. Communicate your expectations and dissatisfactions clearly and kindly. Encourage people to ask you questions! If a question is repeated, remind them that you’ve been through this before, and challenge them to look at examples and convey that you trust them. People can’t read your mind. You have to tell them and show them what you want by example, by screensharing, etc. You have to tell them what you don’t like and correct them so it doesn’t drive you crazy for an eternity!
  4. The sky is not falling when they drop the ball. Expect them to drop the ball. Something is bound to slip from your control. Give them the room to succeed and make mistakes to help them develop as well. No one will be perfect. Mistakes are inevitable.
Optimal Finance Daily- Life Insurance Beneficiary by Jeff Rose

The biggest lesson I learned in this podcast is to have contingencies! So many people list their spouse’s name as a beneficiary with no contingencies. If a beneficiary dies, the benefits will go to the contingent. If you and your spouse are both killed in a car crash at the same time, without a contingency, your benefits are left in limbo. Several contingencies must be clearly identified.

This week I finished reading “1000+ Little Things Happy Successful People Do Differently” written by Marc Chernoff. One thing that stood out to me was an example of a tangerine.

“Imagine you had a ripe, juicy tangerine sitting on the table in front of you. You pick it up eagerly, take a bite, and begin to taste it.

You already know how a ripe, juicy tangerine should taste, and so when this one is a bit tarter than expected, you make a face, feel a sense of disappointment, and swallow it, feeling cheated out of the experience you expected.

Or perhaps the tangerine tastes completely normal— nothing special at all. So, you swallow it without even pausing to appreciate its flavor as you move on to the next unworthy bite, and the next.

In the first scenario, the tangerine let you down because it didn’t meet your expectations. In the second, it was too plain because it met your expectations to a T.”

How ironic! The tangerine can be substituted for almost anything in your life: any event, situation, relationship, person, or thought. If you approach any of these with expectations of “how it should be” or “how it has to be” in order to be good enough for you, they will almost always disappoint you in some way.

I look forward to reading, learning, and sharing more with you soon!

Thoughtful Thursday posts, Uncategorized

Thoughtful Thursday- February 23, 2023

amybenoit

My intention is to post a Thoughtful Thursday column each week and share some of the insights I have learned in the past week. Here are some of the things I’ve learned this week:

Optimal Living Daily- The Myth of the Someday/Maybe Life

The myth of the someday/maybe life refers to the urge to save things for our someday/maybe lives that are never the lives we are actually living right now.

Example listed in the podcast: a tan trench coat that has never been worn, but had been kept in case the person decided to be Inspector Gadget at Halloween some year.

If you struggle to let go of items for your someday/maybe life, ask yourself:

  • Would I buy it again today?
  • Have I used this in the last year/am I really ever going to use it?
  • What’s the worst thing that would happen if I let go of this? The worst-case scenario is usually not all that bad.

Tips: for clothing, turn the hangers around after wearing clothing to see what you wear, and get rid of clothes facing the original direction after six months or a year. I currently do this.

Pack things away in a box that you think you might need. If you don’t look for them after one year, the box is already packed and ready to donate!

In January, I challenged myself to give away 1 item each day in my local Buy Nothing Facebook page. I got rid of over 31 items–many items that were sitting in totes because I had thought I might use them someday! It was a great start to the year, and I may do this challenge again in the coming months.

Self Improvement Daily- Give Yourself Your Undivided Attention

People are always competing for our attention: marketers use clickbait headlines, Facebook and other apps send you notifications, friends text you and hope that you get back to them quickly, you may have work duties, and there are always other pressures on us to fulfill the many roles in our lives as a spouse, parent, family member, friend, volunteer, employee, etc.

In this podcast, Brian Ford prompts us to ask ourselves: When was the last time you gave yourself your undivided attention?

Take time to sit and reflect on what you want, how you are feeling, how energized you have been, how productive you have been, how your mental health is, what you are working towards and how it’s going, what you’re most excited about, and anything else you need to reflect on. Do this regularly. We know it’s the best thing we can do for others, but it’s also the best thing we can do for ourselves.

To achieve this, one habit I regularly practice is to disable Facebook and messenger notifications, personal e-mail notifications, and other app notifications on my phone. Silencing my phone while I am working or working on a task I want to prioritize, such as reading, is also helpful.

SHE with Jordan Lee Dooley- 6 Things I Wish I Knew Before Getting Married

This episode was SO relatable. After being somewhat long-distance for 7+ years and not living together or seeing each other on weekdays before marriage, it has been an adjustment! Here are the 6 things the host wishes she knew before getting married, and I agree with all of these:

Scheduling– know your partner’s schedule. It’s helpful to have a shared calendar to know obligations and appointments. I keep a whiteboard calendar in our bedroom and write down my work schedule, medical appointments, family plans, and social outings with friends each month.

Conversations about $– have conversations about income and budgeting. Get on the same page about financial goals and dreams. Have monthly check-ins.

Organization– Keep clutter to a minimum. Have a landing zone to put stuff when you come in the door, such as a basket. Have a location where you put mail that you need to get to instead of putting it on the table or counter. Have one space for the majority of the cleaning supplies. Use a file cabinet with organized tabs. Understand how you organize differently. Minimize your belongings.

The host specifically stated that her husband is into outdoor activities, such as golf, fishing, and hunting. She was tired of seeing all of his items all over the garage, so she got him a big bin to put all of his items into–out of sight.

We have implemented some of the organizational tips above. We have a large storage stand with cleaners and laundry supplies, labeled and organized bins for medications and personal beauty products, and a file bin with labeled file folders for items such as the mortgage, auto, taxes, medical records, home improvement, etc.

Expectations– Talk about expectations for regular household tasks, such as “If I do the cooking, who does the dishes?” Who should take charge of the household accounting? Who should pay which bills? Is the mortgage payment going to be split evenly? How do you prefer to unwind or relax, and how many hours a day do you like to do that? Identify who is responsible for household chores. This prevents resentment from the person who feels like he or she is doing it all because he or she expected everything to be done on a certain timeline.

All of these are great questions! One of the biggest adjustments for us as newlyweds has been sharing time and space. When dating for 7+ years, we spent weeknights apart. Upon moving in together, I was very surprised and frustrated to find that my husband watches hours of tv each night after work–something I had never done regularly on a weeknight. I have since learned that this is his method of relaxing and unwinding after a long day of physical labor. I sit all day, so I have other ways of unwinding, including working out and staying active, reading, etc. We have our separate time and come together at some point each day to unwind together.

Hospitality– practice hospitality by regularly hosting people. We LOVE hosting people and are hoping to host more often.

Grace– lastly, give yourself grace! Being a power couple isn’t the goal. The perfect couple doesn’t exist. What you see on social media is only a fraction.

I look forward to reading, learning, and sharing more with you soon!