Saturday, February 21, 2015

When in Doubt, Be Human


We read a line in a post by Seth Godin, quite a few months ago, that I wrote down on my war room wall: When in doubt, be human.  I don't even remember the exact story he told to explain what he meant by that, but he spoke of how we often try to deal with work related things in ways that might be deemed 'professional' but might lack empathy or compassion or simply 'human-ness'.

 We were laughing today at how different mine and Julie's personalities are.  I tell EVERYTHING.  I am an open book and I ramble, complain, rejoice and inform.  Julie is more private.  She shares, but discretely and only what she wants to share.  The thing is, each of us are 'real' in own way and to force ourselves to be different would be somehow false.  I am learning to shut up and she is learning to speak up as we get to experience more and more business successes.  Best of all though (through this baby business and our relationship with all of you) we are learning what it means to be human.  We thought we would be so much more professional at this point.  We thought we would 'learn how to be successful'... It's funny to us that one of the biggest things that we are learning is, when in doubt, (simply) be human!

-Epp

4 comments:

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    1. Sigh. Isn't it? Seth Godin doesn't know how much we 'hear' him! :) Don't you sometimes feel like being human would just make you look stupid? I was a little leery of this advice, in case my human was incredibly abnormal compared to other peoples' human... It almost always turns out to be the best course for us though!

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  2. A long time ago I tried to stop just blurting out my feeling and trusting everyone because I pissed some people off. I was miserable with the change so I decided it is better to be happy even if I do get a few folks POed. Take that Coudersport! Err at least a few of you.

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    1. People that get pissed off at you say a hell of a lot more about themselves than you. :) If you were not funny and cool and unique but were, instead, out to get people, I might not say that with such conviction... I, for one, am glad that you made the decision to be you!

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