 I was a painfully shy wallflower as a child, and it took me until my late 20s to grow a spine and find my voice.
Once I did, whoa Nelly. I was loud and proud in the crowd. When I got lubed up with alcohol, I bordered on obnoxious. Fortunately, those two extremes are long behind me. Today, I’m outgoing and friendly, but I don’t feel the need to be the center of attention. I’m totally comfortable striking up conversations with strangers, but if you’re not interested in chatting, I don’t take offense and move along. All of this adds up to make me a first-rate business and social networker. Good thing, too, since my freelance writing and media consulting business is all referral based. WHO I know has proven to be as important and WHAT I know in my first year as an entrepreneur. Truth. I was chatting with a friend recently, the always affable John Zeydel, who is known around town as a master networker in his own right. He has been hosting No Rules Networking and similar events for the better part of 10 years, maybe longer.
2 Comments
 Al Franken did a bit on Saturday Night Live in the 1990s called, “Daily Affirmation With Stuart Smalley,” a mock self-help show where the mild-mannered Smalley discussed his and his celebrity guests’ struggles with various addictions and afflictions.
Each satirical sketch ended with Smalley reciting his catchphrase in the mirror, “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me!” Sure, Stuart Smalley is a caricature of a person plagued with low self-esteem. But because all satire is rooted in truth, I would contend that there’s a little bit of him in all of us. I don’t know about you, but even in the best of times, I need a periodic — if not daily — reminder of my worth. I wrote a post last year about my struggles with self-doubt here, especially related to my freelance writing and media consultant business. The longer I am in business for myself, the more confident I’ve become about my abilities and potential for sustained success, but I still falter from time to time.  I was chatting with a girlfriend this weekend about the abrupt end to her most recent relationship. We are both in our 40s, better than average looking and college educated.
We take care of our bodies, nourish our minds and souls on a regular basis and try like hell to be good people. Yet we both end up dating the same guy in a slightly different package over and over. It never ends well for either of us, and we are damn sick of it. We both lamented that all the therapy and self-help work we have done does not seem to be netting any new results for either of us in the relationship department, and we wondered out loud why we neither one can seem to figure this shit out. This led me to ask the question, “How do you make yourself change the type of person you find attractive?” Reprogramming myself on the intellectual level has clearly not been enough to override my instinctive physical response to the men I meet. See, for me, there has to be some kind of chemical reaction when I first lay eyes on a man for me to be interested in pursuing him. If I do not feel that magnetic pull at first, it will never be there. Chemistry does not grow on me.  To me, folks who love winter are like morning people: curious alien creatures who compel me to commit reprehensible acts of mayhem. I just do not get you freaks at all.
I am a true babe of summer. Going to the beach isn't just an ideal vacation, it's the ONLY vacation. I love to lie by the pool, go for short runs through my neighborhood and work in my yard. I desperately miss all of those activities in fall and winter, and count the weeks until I can do them again. (FYI, there are 110 days until the pools open. Just sayin’.) As most people in this area of the country will attest, this winter has been especially brutal. I realize that the calendar shows we technically have six more weeks of winter regardless of what Punxsutawney Phil had to say this weekend, but Louisville’s temps usually warm up long before the spring equinox in March. I am not optimistic about an early warmup this year, and it really pisses me off. |
About Amy HiggsA former newspaper columnist, Amy takes her random, slice-of-life stories to the web. After 12 years, she's still just saying. Archives
September 2020
Categories
All
|
RSS Feed