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Branding.
With the rise of social media, personal branding has become a thing. For awhile, I fell into this branding trap. In promoting agriculture, I became “Lacy Litten – Female Farmer.” It was a brand I was happy to have and promote. But I am not a brand, I am a human being who is constantly changing. Maintaining this Female Farmer brand started to become hard. The mold I created for myself began to crack. But branding is really nothing new. During adolescence, I went through all the phases: country, surfer, punk – you name it. As I look back, I don’t see these phases as “trying them on for size.”…
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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…
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Any Good.
Circumstances have arisen over the past several months that have caused me to re-evaluate certain relationships. As a result, I’ve created new boundaries with people who I didn’t feel recognized my full worth. These decisions did not come lightly, and I’m still having a hard time coping with the changes. In only one of these circumstances was there a pretty clear cut of ties. The others have been pretty much just my decision with no discussion about the state of the relationship. In talking these changes out with a friend, she asked, “Why don’t you talk to them about it?” And I responded, “It won’t do me any good.” Then she asked, “Why do you think it won’t…
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Intuition.
Did you know that there is a lot of chatter in the medical community about our gut being our second brain? So when you “go with your gut” or have a “gut feeling”, there really is something to say for that. Scientists call this second brain our enteric nervous system (ENS), and it is made up of more than 100 million nerve cells 😳 that line our gastrointestinal tract from our esophagus to our rectum. The ENS isn’t capable of thoughts as we know them coming from our brain, but it does communicate back and forth with our brain. Researchers and doctors thought that depression and anxiety contributed to the…
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Adversity.
The definition of adversity is “a state or instance of serious or continued difficulty or misfortune.” State or instance – which means that it can be constant or a one-time difficulty or misfortune. Nothing in the definition refers to the intensity or severity of this difficulty or misfortune, yet it seems to me that many people tend to associate adversity with tragedy or sacrifice. Even I do this! (Yes, it says “serious”, but that is subjective and irrelevant for where I’m going with this. 😒) In the Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, Manson says, “For many of us, our proudest achievements come in the face of the greatest…
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Sharing is Caring.
A colleague recently recommended I listen to an episode of a podcast called The Happiness Lab by Dr. Laurie Santos, but I accidentally listened to the wrong one. It was called “Caring What You’re Sharing.” I can’t really say it was an accident though, because the message actually helped solidify some thoughts I had swirling around. I’m inclined to believe there was a reason I listened the “wrong” episode. Have you ever watched a movie with someone, and that person falls asleep? Or maybe when two of you go to dinner, but the other is on their phone? Think about how those circumstances make you feel. A little ignored? A…