Sorry for firing off posts in close succession but I just had top share the following gem. I’ve been laughing so hard I knocked a pile of papers from my desk. It’s totally the best:
“Girly thoughts tell women that they still have to be the ‘good girl’. This is a major trap at work and specifically for entrepreneurs,” explained Dr. O’Gorman. A common girly thought, she explained, is the one that tells women not to try because of the fear of failure, which can be particularly damaging for entrepreneurs.
“The fear of failure is so much more loaded (for women.) Women need to learn to roll with the professional ups and downs that are common at work and not to take failure personally,” she said.
So while men may engage in self-talk as well, they don’t necessarily have the same negative impact.
“Men have an inner dialogue but it very different,” explained Dr. O’Gorman.
I’ve been to Albany and I have no idea how “Dr. Patricia O’Gorman, an Albany, New-York based psychologist” managed to go through life without meeting a single man, but apparently she did. Of course, she defines her own job as “resiliency coach,” and if you see the word “coach” in the job description of anybody who doesn’t train athletes, you need to turn around and run away as fast as you can.
The advice “Resiliency Coach O’Gorman” offers you is bizarrely bad and actually dangerous. The only way in which it can be helpful is if people do the exact opposite of what she suggests. But the very last piece of advice this quack offers is just something special:
Never be afraid to voice your opinion or disagree with your colleagues.
Wow, what a great piece of wisdom! It must be so totally easy to solve any problem once you have access to this crucial insight. For instance, you can tell alcoholics, “Never drink alcohol!” And they will respond, “Gosh, thank you! We never considered this possibility but now we are cured!”
Now let me use Coach O’Gorman’s method and cure her of being stupid: “O’Gorman, don’t say and write stupid things! Read books and educate yourself.”
Let’s see if the method works.
Clarissa's Blog 
“if you see the word “coach” in the job description of anybody who doesn’t train athletes, you need to turn around and run away as fast as you can.” Yes, yes, yes.
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Alternate advice: turn your phone into a sports anthem playlist during your commute. It’s easier to do and less exhausting than constantly arguing with yourself. :p
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Never be afraid to voice your opinion or disagree with your colleagues.
This is, sadly, not silly at all. Many people are conditioned from childhood to keep quiet and listen, never voicing any opinions at all. It is difficult to overcome. I was less prone to this than many of my peers in school, but it still took me twenty years after high school to overcome it to the extent that I had internalized it.
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What’s silly is not the problem but the idea that you can solve it by telling people not to have it. Of course, people would love to lose this fear. But they don’t know how to do that! The reason why the fear is there is not that there hasn’t been anything around to tell people to stop being afraid. You say yourself that it might take decades to work through it. Would it have helped if somebody told you, “You are afraid to voice opinions? Just stop being afraid. Ta-da! Problem solved!”
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I’m not sure it’s just childhood conditioning.
If you are a thinky person (that is the proper technical term, right?), it is likely that you don’t consider any opinions all that valuable. What’s valuable in them is their consistency, precision, verity and perhaps originality. Certainly not merely their voicing. This, of course, extends to yourself as well – you won’t voice your opinion unless you judge it consistent, precise, and true, or at the very least more so than others. This, however, means that you are also open to considering opinions different to your own, even if just to make your own stronger.
However, conversations apparently don’t run on consistency and etc. alone. There is the small issue of timing – by the time you are done considering the pros and cons of the opposing viewpoint, the conversation has moved on, perhaps by days, or even months, but sometimes even half a minute will do… And you’re stuck with a superior opinion and no rhetorically effective way of delivering it.
So yes, it’s not just childhood conditioning, it’s also the side-effect of a personal trait that I would bet good money that you like about yourself. A way to deal with this is to kind of run ahead in terms of opinions, and be aware of the opinions of people before a conversation happens. This is doable mostly because a personal opinion on any issue of note is most often is some amalgamation of points from publicly available sources.
Then there’s the issue of the, uh, ‘power’ dimension of language. When someone calls you “a loser who won’t amount to anything”, and inside yourself you go “Well, I happen to think otherwise, but for the sake of argument, lets consider you are right. I am afraid I will not be capable of performing an experimental study at this point, but it should certainly be possible to go through the archives and construct a critical historical synthesis on the issue. While more research will be needed (ha-ha, like there’s ever enough!), my team and I are very excited about the study and, with a small grant, could produce a definitive preliminary inquiry into the plausibility of the hypothesis of me being a loser within a year.”
As well as you should, if this was a proposition that needed analysis. But it’s not, it’s an insult that’s intended to put you down, and the old “I’m rubber and you’re glue, what you say bounces off me and sticks to you” bit works better. But since we’re grownups now, we can go for “You’re clearly projecting” instead.
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The shamanic response is no response. This is absolutely the most articulate response one can render when somebody has underestimated your character or intellect or anything, even if that person happens to be yourself at times. Let the facts speak for themselves without a struggle.
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As a woman entrepreneur I have a little cute pink glossy girly thought to share with Dr. Patricia. I incredibly hate female empowerment counsellors, advisors, coaches, etc., because they try to ruin my self-confidence in a very sneaky way. They make their living by constantly sending the message to women that they are less than men, then they want to convince these discouraged women to pay for their books, counselling, “documentary” films that will “help” them. I bully you, then I sell you the cure. Haha, no. I won’t pay for you greedy idiots. If you want money, you go to work or start a business that produces real value. Neither will I join patronizing female entrepreneur organizations, that only want to persuade me to make business with other women just because they are women. No. I want to make business with the best possible partners. I have my own methods to evaluate them that have nothing to do with their gender (or age, or race, or nationality, or anything else that is professionally irrelevant).
“if you see the word “coach” in the job description of anybody who doesn’t train athletes, you need to turn around and run away as fast as you can.”
The other word that makes me run as fast as I can is EMPOWERMENT. Power situations are always given from the outside. If you have less power than the other person/business/anything, you can only develop strategies to protect your own interests, you can’t give power to yourself. This stupid “empowerment” theory is why there are so many depressed women.
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I know!!! I was recently asked to answer a questionnaire on how TV manufacturers can create empowering products. This word is sneaking into every area of human existence.
Everything else you said will go into my collection of brilliant quotes from the blog ‘ s readers.
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Oh thanks. That’s a quite nice girly thought. It really empowers me 🙂
“how TV manufacturers can create empowering products”
I haven’t had a TV set in my apartment since 1999 when I moved out of my parents’ house after graduating from high school. That is the most empowering experience I have ever had in relation to the TV manufacturing business. It’s a pity that I couldn’t answer this questionnaire.
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Oh, poor you, you are totally missing the hugely empowering experience of using the remote control every day. That’s like, totally, girl power, you know?
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😀
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“… how TV manufacturers can create empowering products …”
I dunno — how ’bout a mains plug? 🙂
What’s empowering about television? It’s the parable of the cave combined with Bradbury’s talking walls of “Fahrenheit 451”, but with chirpy, twerpy presenters …
I’m reminded of something I think PJ O’Rourke said nearly two decades ago: grabbing a gun is empowerment. Not that empowerment does you much good when everyone else is grabbing a gun and pointing some of them at you, of course …
Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to relieve a need to abandon my empowerment paradigm in a synergistic, non-obstructive way, for which I’ll need a porcelain, floor-mounted appliance with a water inlet and a waste outlet … 🙂
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generally these people will blame their teachers”
They are right. It’s usually the fault of the parents and the educational system.
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They may be perfectly right, but blaming the generic category of “teacher” will only mean they will not be taught. Consider just this small example for instance. I don’t comment on feminism in many places a much as I used to, because I consider people have made up their minds that they are against feminism. My attitude is that they have certainly made a bed for themselves, and should not be ashamed to lie in it. I let them go their own merry ways.
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The important thing to ask about failure is this. In whose eyes are you failing? Women have tended to be closer to religiosity than men, in many, perhaps most cultures. Therefore when they fail, they imagine they are failing in the eyes of God. That kind of failure would be pretty heavy. A less religious mindset means that failure is just part of the fabric of existence. After all there is no reassurance that whatever one does is bound to succeed. From this perspective even being very good will not provide that assurance. Falure is just a chance to get raw materials and start again.
But there are some men who will not tolerate women failing either. They have a religious mindset and tie the notion of success with having had a good morality. Failure is a sign of bad morality. This creates shame.
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I don’t know, I see people who accept failure and are even kind of proud of it. If the very first attempt doesn’t bring complete success, they happily and proudly announce it. It’s like somebody promised them overwhelming success as payment for the tiniest effort.
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That’s the consumer mentality, and generally these people will blame their teachers.
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“I see people who accept failure and are even kind of proud of it.”
I think people only seem to be proud of failure, because that’s how they deal with shame. Pseudopride is the only coping method for failure many people have, including myself. I wasn’t taught how to deal emotionally with failure, and I still can’t figure out the right coping methods by myself. Constant success was expected in the authoritarian background where I grew up (just like it’s expected in western consumerism). Back in my childhood even the smallest, most unsignificant failure was seen as a tragedy, and children were punished for it. In the western cultures ‘losers’ have to face with an incredibly patronizing attitude and fake “help”. It’s still better than being physically abused, but on the long term this subtler way of bullying can lead to similar behavioral choices.
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“generally these people will blame their teachers”
They are right. It’s usually the fault of the parents and the educational system. People needs to be taught during their childhood to cope with basic life events that happens to everyone (like failure). If you learn coping methods as a small child, you’ll recover fast from failure as an adult. If you have to figure out the whole thing by yourself at an older age after you practiced the wrong attitudes for decades, most likely you will suffer a lot for overriding the bad habits. Behavioural patterns are like languages. You can only speak a language natively, if you learned it before the age of 7. Most people can’t face with failure natively. Neither with success, as it’s the other side of the same coin. I’m afraid I’m one of these sad souls.
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Chirpy, twerpy faux positivism …
It’s the single greatest thing I hate about American culture: you can’t be left alone to be miserable when that’s actually what you need to want to become better.
Take failure personally. It’s your way out of continuing to give it big toothy grins and bear hugs when you’d rather stab failure in the back.
Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a book about this sort of thing, but the book’s title is considerably better in the UK — it’s called “Smile or Die” …
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It seems part of the fundamentalist Christian morality, too, as it has impacted on Zimbabwe through American missionaries. You can’t be left alone with your thoughts, lest they take an evil turn, so everything must be divulged to the smiling and concerned faces of those who ask.
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By the way, here are my reviews of that book: https://clarissasblog.com/2009/10/31/another-disappointment-from-barbara-ehrenreich-a-review-of-bright-sided-part-i/
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