In college I proudly worked as one of the most successful shoe salespeople at Williamsburg, Virginia’s only Birkenstock store. I worked there mainly because I wanted a discount on shoes (I was a pretty devoted hippie), but also because I liked that our boss referred to me as a terrier. Being compared to a dog doesn’t sound like a good thing, but what he constantly referenced was my tenacity, toughness and inability to let anything (like a sale) go.
As a petite southern woman, I find most people assume that I’m going to be as sweet as sugar. And to be fair, I think I was raised by a family that did a very good job instilling in me the value of manners, politeness and treating people the way you’d like to be treated. But one of the things I struggle with the most about myself is my inability to let things go. I think my diminutive stature has played a big part in my development of a fairly steely interior (I don’t think I look particularly menacing on the outside) that was part of my early attempt to show people I was louder, stronger and tougher than they thought. That interior unfortunately expresses itself all too often as a need to speak up or correct people when I think they’ve done something wrong, unfair or unkind. Sometimes that’s fine. But sometimes that does nothing but frustrate me when the best thing for me to do would have been to let it go and walk away. So for this month’s essay theme (each one of us is embarking on a personal challenge) I decided to work on letting go and being a nicer person.
This challenge might sound overly grandiose or conversely too simple of a challenge, but it’s one I’m glad I undertook because I learned a lot about myself and how much stress I add to my own plate by creating problems where there don’t need to be any. While this challenge taught me a lot about myself personally, it exposed one of my biggest professional flaws: avoiding difficult work by creating small fires that need to be put out elsewhere.
*Wave image above is Abigail Edwards’ Seascape Wallpaper
Click through to read the full article and the steps I took to learn to let go…
via Design*Sponge http://ift.tt/1lANIaC From Grace Bonney
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