by : lacylit10 Life Lessons

Just a Beginner.

I don’t know if I heard this from Mel Robbins or Brendan Burchard. Actually, I might have heard it from both of them in their own ways, but essentially they said, “Never feel ashamed of being ‘Just a beginner.’ We all start somewhere.”

As I navigate through this transitional phase and consider what I truly want to do next, I keep coming back to how scary it is to put myself out there. Generally, I know what I need to do, but, in some ways, fear is holding me back from implementation. It’s not the fear of failure. It’s not even the fear of success. It’s a fear of being vulnerable. A fear of being my authentic self in a world that is alarmingly cruel.

But this statement, “Just a beginner” keeps popping back up in my head. I am just. a. beginner.

What I’m realizing, though, is that I also have an underlying fear of not being a beginner. Perhaps, to the point of self-destruction. I do not want to be seen as an expert. In life (and in farming), we have to be adaptable and flexible with all of the unexpected things that get thrown at us. It has to be acceptable to grow and change.

I got to a point in my food safety career, where people considered me an expert. And it kind of terrified me.

Expert is defined as someone having comprehensive and authoritative knowledge in a specific area. By that definition, I was an expert. But I felt like I couldn’t be wrong. I couldn’t change my mind. I put so much pressure on myself to know and be right. Always. I burned myself out and kind of resented that I was supposed to be this end-all-be-all decision-maker.

But the pressure wasn’t entirely just me putting it on myself. There was an expectation that I was supposed to take the fault for a team of people who all contributed to the decisions made. I could be held personally accountable for natural environmental conditions where causes were nearly impossible to identify. This mindset was/is entirely unfair.

And the expectation was industrywide. Since the food safety representative held the certifications that qualified them as the expert decision-maker, they were the responsible party. Seemingly, it didn’t matter that the guy signing my checks could override my recommendation. And really, that’s all it was, because I wasn’t the final decision-maker of the business.

In this regard, food safety burned me. It made me feel like having comprehensive and authoritative knowledge was a bad thing. We live in such a litigious society that people need to hold someone accountable. That most likely person was me. And as things in food safety became increasingly complex and regulated, the more scary it became to be the responsible person. So much so that it drove me to leave the field altogether.

This was my experience with being an expert. I doubt that being an expert in different areas comes with these expectations and responsibilities, but it has made me fearful of gaining too much knowledge that people don’t give me the grace to continue learning and growing and changing. Of course, I know that I cannot control other peoples perceptions and emotions, but when people are so quick to make judgments and assumptions, it’s hard to not feel fearful of being vulnerable, especially without context. And people do not consider context.

For now, I’m just going to replay the “Just a beginner” mantra and remind myself that we all start somewhere. But realistically, I’ve been expressing vulnerability in this blog for years. Apparently, it doesn’t get easier. So I will just continue to feel the fear, and do it anyway.

by : lacylit10 Leadership, Life Lessons

The (Wo)Man in the Arena.

In the opening of one of Brene Brown’s books, Daring Greatly, she references a quote by Theodore Roosevelt. I recently came across this quote again. It’s full of powerful words that I feel should really be taken to heart.

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

It sure does paint a picture, doesn’t it? I just imagine some guy in the middle of an arena, fighting for his life, with an audience looking down on him, full of critics, skeptics, and supporters alike. People criticizing moves he should have made when he is tired, weak, bloody, bruised, and broken. People laughing at his inability to fight stronger and longer, and the hurtful things they would likely say. “He can’t even fight. He’s good for nothing. He deserves this.” And the supporters, tears streaming down their faces, cringing with every blow, comforting one another as they watch the defeat of a loved one occur slowly and mercilessly in front of them.

Long ago, these moments were relatively only observed by the people in the arena, and while the stories may spread throughout the land, it is often only the survivors that get remembered as heroes and regarded as great fighters of their time. As if one person’s life means more than another, because his abilities were different. Yet both had the courage to walk into the arena knowing full-well where their individual strengths lie. The man who loses is deemed a fool, yet he walked into the arena knowing his fate and did. it. anyway.

I can’t help but wonder, what does the arena look like today? And is the person in the arena a willing or unwilling participant?

The arena is obviously a metaphor for life and the observers are all the people we may encounter in it. While we may be able to control what we do in the arena under watchful eyes, we cannot control the stories the audience takes home and tells to others. This is just as true today as it would have been back in, say, the Roman Empire. 

I would just hope, for myself and for others, that we don’t just get remembered for how good or bad we fight, but that we are respected whether we win or lose because we had the courage to step into the arena in the first place.

Our lives cannot and should not be narrowed down to a single fight, because it’s all the events that led up to that point that build the character of the person who chooses whether or not to enter the arena, and fight the fight, knowing his or her odds. It’s not always the outcome that matters most, but the effort you put into it.

by : lacylit10 Life Lessons

Growth.

I am all for holding people accountable, and I am skeptical of people who change their minds. But we don’t know what we don’t know, until we know. Quite frankly, I live in fear over the things I post online. When and how will it come back to haunt me? Nothing is safe anymore.

It seems that people neglect context. They jump to conclusions. They make immediate judgments and assumptions. And that’s fine, it is natural human behavior. It takes practice to be aware of when we are making judgments and assumptions, then overcome our initial reactive feelings. But it is the second step that is critical in how we interact with each other and form conclusions.

Take the short food safety videos I do on Instagram, as an example. You cannot and should not come to a conclusion on the safety of your food in one 2-3 minute video. Not even a series of 2-3 minute videos can begin to cover the complexity of efforts taken amongst our food supply chain.

But this is exactly what we do. We see a short video or quote or paraphrase, and we base our entire belief on something with just a fragment of information. We take so many things at face value.

But it goes beyond that. If we’re not changing, we’re not learning, and we’re not growing.

I recently saw something online that said “Trying to hurt me by bringing up my past is like trying to rob my old house. I don’t live there anymore.” I am an entirely different person today than I was 10 years ago, and definitely different than the 16 year old I was 20 years ago. So. much. life. has been lived between then and now. Unless I have done something ethically wrong, should I be held accountable for personal decisions made in the past?

We all take our own specific journey, and that includes making our own mistakes and learning our own lessons. We do not know the mental state of a person that led them to make their decisions. We do not know their past and their trauma. (And everyone has trauma no matter how small it may seem to someone who has suffered more severely.)

Today, we pick up our cell phones and record complete strangers for actions without their knowledge and post it on the internet without their permission. What if that person had been abused by their spouse before the angry outburst? We drudge up information from people’s pasts and try to hold them accountable to today’s societal standards, when the environment is completely different. Then when we can’t hold them accountable, we humiliate them and shame them.

This behavior is being normalized and promoted as acceptable. It. is. terrifying. People learn from their mistakes, but we aren’t letting nature take it’s course. Instead, we are taking it into our own hands to ensure that individual is punished by a means that we see fit. We aren’t letting the past that people have learned from stay in the past. We are forcing them to relive what might be painful experiences.

We tell children not to bully each other online or offline, yet, we, as grown ass adults, do exactly what we tell them not to. We ruin people’s lives without context. We ruin people’s lives based on fragments of information. We ruin people’s lives based on past decisions they may be trying to move on from.

I try to be honest with what I post here. I do not know everything. As I say in my intro, some people may consider me an expert in food safety. Yes, I may know a lot more than most people, but I know a hell of a lot less than others. And everyday, I am learning more.

How I handle a food safety crisis today may be different than how I would have handled it 5 years ago. But that doesn’t make how I handled it 5 years ago wrong. Since then I’ve gained knowledge and experience, regulation has changed, and the environment has changed. We all start somewhere. Can I be punished for something today that I did 5 years ago when I acted to the best of my ability given the knowledge and experience I had at that time?

The ability to learn from our mistakes and build upon our experiences is how we grow. Genuinely good people who act poorly without malicious intent should not be so publicly humiliated and shamed for errors in judgement. It’s cruel. And if they are genuinely good people, they’re actions will not go without personal punishment.

You have to be vulnerable enough to share things about yourself to connect with people. We should not attack those with whom we do not relate, because we are not going to connect with everyone. When we do attack those with whom we do not relate, we push them into silence and create our own echo chambers. And we wonder why our society has become so polarized…🤨🤷🏻‍♀️

by : lacylit10 Leadership, Life Lessons

Judgments & Assumptions.

I should have majored in Psychology.  Every time I ponder a subject for a post, I think about how the topic relates back to so many different emotions.  It takes me for.ev.er. to write a post because my thoughts are going a million different directions, and it’s hard to simplify into something you’d want to read.  (This is with the assumption that you actually find what I write interesting…)

For this post, I started thinking about assumptions.  I read somewhere, some place, that our brain compartmentalizes new information with like known information in order to help us process.  (That’s the gist of what I remember.  I read this a long time ago.)  But then I got to thinking about judgments, and why we tend to judge people.

Because I love analyzing and defining: (that’s totally not sarcastic btw):

judg·ment
/ˈjəjmənt/

1. the ability to make considered decisions or come to sensible conclusions.

as·sump·tion
/əˈsəm(p)SH(ə)n/

1. a thing that is accepted as true or as certain to happen, without proof.

If I had to guess, and I truly mean guess, because I am not educated on the human brain, I would say that we judge someone based on compartmentalized previous information, then we assume that it’s accurate based on that compartmentalized previous information.  You follow?

Then this creates norms.  Norms are social expectations that guide behavior.

For example:

If we see someone with an oversized white t-shirt, sagging baggy jeans, tattoos, and a shaved head with a bandana, I’m going to judge that guy as a gangster and assume this is correct based on prior knowledge.  Then I’m going to alter my behavior based on my fear that gangsters are dangerous.

This is a societal norm because of how gangsters are typically portrayed in media, and in a lot of cases, IRL.  It is not racism; it is not discrimination. However, it is stereotyping which is an entirely different post.  (See, this is what I mean, one thing leads to another!)  This is just how our brains work – to the best of my knowledge.  Again, not formally educated on the subject.

You always hear that people are quick to judge others.  But maybe that’s not necessarily a bad thing.  The bad thing is assuming that judgment is correct.  Judgment is just helping us process what we see.  But just because we perceive it as we judge, that doesn’t mean we should assume it to be true.

Don’t get me wrong, I am t o t a l l y guilty of this. We can make judgments and assumptions based on what we see, but when 90% of the iceberg is below the water line, you have to be open-minded enough to possibly change what you assumed to be true – even if it goes against the norm.