GenMeh celebrates its first birthday today! An entire year of pep talks and pedantry under my belt, who could have predicted it?

So, in the interests of self-indulgence, I made a little video* to mark the occasion (it’s out of sync for the first 20 seconds only). I respectfully request that you ignore the bags under my eyes; sleep and I have been on the outs for months now.  Also, I should clarify that gluten-free vegan cupcakes are ordinarily delicious. Full blame goes to my baking prowess in this case.

And yes, if you were expecting the stern ghost of Susan B. Anthony and are instead smitten with my wholesome chirpiness, you should totally let me know.

Happy Birthday, GenMeh! from Generation Meh on Vimeo.

*First and only take and no script. That’s how I roll.

Imagine 25 people (strangers, even) all staring at you while they throw out words and terms to describe their perceptions of you and then more words and terms for areas you need to work on. And you just have to sit there and absorb it. That was my Sunday. It was challenging. Not because I was surprised by what words came up, (I could have predicted most of them), but the not being able to argue or defend myself or explain why when you say you see A, it’s really B. I took it less personally than others, just crawled into the mental storm cellar, closed the hatch and waited until it was safe to pop my head back out.  I did appreciate that the feedback was framed in terms of what qualities the group recognized that you possess and wanted to see more of from you and not simply telling you to be less timid/pushy/loud/insert adjective here.

Photo by confidence, comely.

The end result of the exercise (only a few of us got the full group treatment, the rest had their profiling in clusters of four or five) was that everyone ended up with a name tag that had a word or descriptor to dictate how you should conduct yourself for the rest of the day. Mine was one of the few name tags that called on the bearer to emphasize softness, vulnerability and touchy feely stuff (the older man who ended up with Casanova also comes to mind). The majority focused on encouraging participants to be bolder, more assertive, more selfish, more confident (Tiger! Xena! Wonder Woman! Boxer!). I couldn’t help but be a little jealous. It seemed a much easier task to simply front as if you have natural swagger than shift into nurturing earth mother mode if that doesn’t come naturally.

The point of the exercise was about achieving a balance. We’re all adept at tapping into and projecting certain aspects of our character. Call it our comfort zone, wheelhouse, whatever. But we’re more than that narrow range, the name tags were meant to assert. Venturing farther afield to bring out child-like wonder or no-nonsense straight-talking might feel foreign or artificial, but it’s possible. Those capacities are underdeveloped and maybe even undiscovered, but we can go there and doing so in a space where we won’t be called out or socially penalized for getting it wrong or screwing up is absolutely the right context for taking the first few halting steps in this direction. That safety for fail-proof experimentation is a luxury I wish more people had access to.

And that’s where I come in. Our whole lives are spent attempting to be in the world and to figure out what that looks like for us when it comes to relationships, jobs, self-esteem, etc. Is it making ourselves as small as possible, trying to fly under the radar and praying that we won’t be tramped all over or singled out? Is it puffing our chests out, peeing all over every telephone pole, fire hydrant and shrub in our path to mark our territory and rush to define ourselves before anyone can do that for us? The colonized or the colonizer? I know now that what I want to do, what I feel absolutely compelled to do is to work with people to support them in striking a balance (i.e., you don’t have to be the imperialist or the conquered. Maybe a nice Canada or Switzerland instead?) and defining/designing that space for themselves  in a concrete, positive, practical way and without jargon, new age BS or patronizing affirmations. What does okay look like and what will it take to get you there? What do you need to feel at ease in the world and how can we work together to get you those resources? How can I help YOU? Working with people to answer these questions is what’s most important to me right now. It’s what I want to do, what I feel (oh God, do I have a heart after all?) I need to do.

And that realization was so worth wearing a silly name tag for a few hours.

*Okay, I lied. No hugs here. Yet.

List Served is a semi-regular feature wherein I present you with an ordered grouping of (at least tangentially) related points. I love lists and the internet loves ephemeral minutiae. It’s all good.

Photo by Darwin70

• Accept a compliment
• Ask for help without shame or anxiety
• Name their children
• Identify when to use lose vs. loose
• Say no without overapologizing or making long-winded excuses
• Tell a story without stepping all over the punchline
• Correctly identify roman numerals
• Budget, or even think about financial planning without breaking out into a sweat
• Answer the questions, “What kind of music do you like?” and “Where do you see yourself in five or ten years?” without becoming a stammering mess
• Tell time with a sundial
• Throw a split-finger fastball

Gen Y has no gut instinct. Or so I declared late last night (N.B. When  in the throes of insomnia, I sometimes throw out bold declarations and unfiltered non sequiturs on Twitter). On the whole, we’ve never made developing our intuition and using it as a guide in decision-making much of a priority. And why would we? Sources of information to check and double check our options against the “norm,” against the paths chosen by our peers, against the advice offered up by four out of five dentists is everywhere. When do we actually fly blind?

Photo by KayVee.INC

But even if we’re never faced with the prospect of being trapped in an avalanche and having to weigh the pros and cons of self-amputating a crushed arm as a means of facilitating an escape (pro: More mobility! con: Dying of sepsis!), it pays to have have the ability to take ownership of our decisions and to be able to put our faith in what our accumulated experience, intuition and overarching values tell us vs. allowing the majority to rule our lives.

The good news is that gut instinct can be developed, even for those of you born figuratively gutless. It’s a repetitive process of performing a post-mortem on decisions, noting how difficult or easy it was to come to the decision, the outcomes of the decision and how they did or didn’t match up with your expectations. Lather, rinse, repeat. File this information away. Dig it out the next time you have to make a decision and look for similarities between those circumstances and the present ones. Do you feel the same sense of dread about buying this condo that you felt about taking that I.T. job in New Haven? If the latter decision didn’t pan out and you can identify commonalities between it and your current conundrum, those red flags represent your gut trying to send you a message. Heed its warnings and proceed with caution.

Honing your gut instinct is a trial and error process. It involves exposing yourself to the possibility of failure and dealing with the consequences in a deliberate, measured way. Not going to pieces, not blaming yourself, not vowing to never take another risk so help you God as long as you shall live, but mining each disappointment, heartbreak or personal implosion for the information mentioned above and being willing to examine failure not as a reflection on your self-worth, but a rich capsule of useful experiential data – choices made and not made, input sought and feedback discounted and on and on.

Developing a gut instinct is one thing. With enough time and effort and willingness to make and implement decisions which may not work, we can all cultivate or tap into natural intuition, but relying on it is a whole ‘nother ballgame. We live crowdsourced lives. Google (or Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn stalk) your blind date, check Yelp for the 411 on that new restaurant or Rotten Tomatoes to see what the critics have to say about this week’s new releases, poll friends and family and when all else fails, there’s probably an app for that. We’re surrounded by so much information and opinion that we’ve deprioritized our own experience and feelings (sometimes entirely unconsciously), especially in the face of overwhelming evidence that we’re not on the same page as everyone else. Be a lonely outlier, or adjust your perspective to conform to the baseline and use the ready pipeline of public opinion data, product reviews, polemics, sales figures, celebrity endorsements, etc. as a proxy for a hard and fast ruling from the pit of your own stomach? Not much of a choice if you’ve never bothered to cultivate your own intuition to the point of trusting it over the wisdom of the crowd.  But if you do develop it, eventually, that gut instinct is gonna come in very, very handy. There will come a time when the crowd gets it wrong, when something looks good on paper, but just feels off to you, when you’ll be faced with a decision for which there is no precedent and which is so deeply personal that only you can be the one to decide it. Back against the wall and it’s nothin’ but gut.  And you’re going to be glad your instincts are  there for you when that time comes. I guarantee it.

The other day, I was trying to explain to a friend why a recent concert left me disappointed. The crowd was great (save for the tall girls standing directly in front me of me – the pains of being a short live music fan, I suppose), the performer in question actually sounded better live than recorded, I got to hear the song I was most looking forward to and yet… The best I could come up with was that the whole show seemed rote. She-who-shall-not-be-named seemed to be reading from a script, banter that had been delivered a thousand times before, an insistence on micro-managing the audience’s participation, a little too much preening over a carefully-cultivated “quirky” image. It all added up to a manufactured whole that left me cold. There was nothing organic about.

Photo by kumasawa

Ah yes, the O word. I’m organic all the way (well, not when it comes to produce, but still). I find something elegant, something literary, downright romantic (small r) about connections and opportunities emerging from serendipity and I’m reluctant to let go of the notion that your words and actions should speak for themselves, should reveal your skills and the content of your character and should be the grounds on which people evaluate you and your potential as a friend/employee/partner/human being vs. your ability to leverage, promote, monetize, and god forbid, brand yourself and your talents. I know, how terribly quaint of me. I’m sure this is why I don’t have a book deal yet (and maybe why I’m single. Heh). To put it in baseball terms, while a sac bunt might get the job done, I’m always gonna be a (swing from the heels) home run kinda girl.

Refusing to self-shill or to treat success as the product of five easy steps you learned from a book, webinar or from some dude who spoke at your convocation doesn’t mean that you don’t have to grind things out or hustle. It simply means that you hustle after and capitalize upon those opportunities and openings that have genuine appeal to you (the wanna over the shoulda) and you do so in a manner that feels natural (or organic if you prefer) to you. You stop  thinking in terms of adding value, connecting with, meaningfully engaging, etc. You start thinking, feeling and acting like a $#@%^ person and not a programmed successbot, ya dig?

It also means that you ditch the damn metrics.  Twitter followers, page views, LinkedIn connections, how many business cards you gave out this week, whatever arbitrary measure of getting ‘er done that you’ve been using as proof that you’re already on step six of the eight steps needed to reach entrepreneurial rockstardom. Instead, why not spend time figuring out what your values are and whether or not it’s actually possible to enact them and measure the outcomes of these actions according to an 11-part system developed by an internet famous “expert” who charges $159 a pop for repackaged advice that you could have picked up by thumbing through Gilbreth’s Cheaper by the Dozen?

Keeping the faith in the organic isn’t always easy, especially when you see the strategists and systems-lovers seemingly reaping rewards for their ability to stick to the game plan and when you hear the same refrain from every quarter exhorting you to get on board with the way things are done now, while subtly inculcating the fear that if you aren’t reaching out, linking in and pouring the prescribed amount of time and effort into creating Brand You, that you can expect to be eaten alive by those who got the memo. But it’s not about them. It’s not even about the culture of success architecture. It’s about the fact that you have to live your life in your shoes and that you deserve more credit for knowing how to engage with the rest of humanity on terms that reflect who you are and who you want to be than to have to rely on a vacuous, buzz-laden script just because it makes you feel as if you’re checking all the right boxes. And if you won’t give yourself that much credit, I certainly will.