Category Archives: It’s Not Your Mother’s Fault

Some business and personal practices require the individual to come up with stunningly stupid approaches. These aren’t genetic or hereditary. They are not your mother’s fault. She knew better, so get off the therapist’s couch and take accountability for your own mess.

One of the people in my mentoring program, a specialist in sales skills, informed me today that when she suggested to a client that salespeople take more effective notes in meetings with prospects, the legal beagles stepped in to determine “the legal risk in permitting note taking in meetings.” (No offense here intended for beagles, fine and intelligent dogs.)

There is no right to privacy in a public place where privacy is not a normal condition, e.g., standing in line at an airport. Yet two people took great offense at a picture I posted of a woman eating a sandwich (showing the lack of amenities in coach class travel), a woman they don’t know, merely eating a sandwich, and claimed I was engaged in “bullying.”

A woman approached me after a speech and told me that she was happy with my treatment of women, since she counted (she COUNTED), and determined that I used equal numbers of male and female pronouns. Another woman, minutes later, told me I was biased because I tended to laugh when answering women’s questions, but I didn’t laugh as much answering men’s questions. Both these women ought to have a sandwich while waiting for a plane.

A woman at the phone company, sounding like a zombie on Prozac, asked me in a monotone if the number I was calling her on was the number that was not working for outside calls. (I did NOT laugh at this question in responding to her.)

A publisher for whom I’ve written a recent book—bear in mind I’ve written 46—asked if I’d be willing to write an article for a magazine to promote the book. When I agreed, they had a ghostwriter contact me so that he could make sure the article was written well. (Now there’s a man I did laugh at as I told him to take a hike.)

There are people on the web ostensibly trying to become professional consultants and speakers who are both posting and downloading intellectual property that is protected by copyright so that it can be stolen. What kind of pea brain do you possess to believe you can be a responsible professional by stealing others’ works to save $16 on your way to a successful, ethical career?

Trust me, this idiocy is not their mother’s fault.

© Alan Weiss 2012. All rights reserved. (Ha, Ha!)

It’s Not Your Mother’s Fault: Vol. 1 Issue 3

We get a truckload of Christmas cards, which is wonderful. Many are sent by people from early in our marriage who stay in touch via an exchange of cards. Some people have a tradition of inserting a “family letter” detailing the past year, as if we should be catching up on episodes we’ve missed of Breaking Bad or Dexter. (The last time I printed such a sentiment, some people were incensed that I wouldn’t appreciate these exegeses. I expect the same backlash now!)

I find these epistles to be interesting only to the sender and usually merely read the card, but my wife insists that these are effective missives to “catch up” with acquaintances, though I’ve seen her eyes glaze over in the middle or reading of a fourth cousin’s marriage to a deputy assistant librarian in Raleigh who once met the hairdresser for one of Rihanna’s backup singers.

However, I have noticed something of interest in these Pauline letters (“The second letter of St. Paul to the Weisses,” if you follow the Gospels): Most are filled with accomplishments and pride, and occasionally the unfortunate loss of loved ones, or the status of those in the military. But some are unremitting in their unrelenting expostulation of misfortune, calamity, and setback. They make Job seem well off by comparison (and, in fact, one writer this year, ignoring hubris, cited Job as having nothing on him).

A single letter writer (often electronically, sort of the antithesis of the personal holiday greeting) will go on about lost opportunities, illnesses, natural disaster—everything short of locusts, though I don’t read all the letters carefully, so who knows? I’m reminded of Al Capp’s famous “Li’l Abner” character, Joe Btfsplk, who had a perpetual black cloud over his head, carrying the world’s worst jinx.

Why are you sending others your litany of miseries? Surely all of us have our stories, our losses, our grievous wounds. Some have suffered deaths and horrible illnesses. Why are you so special as to have to broadcast your every bad hair day, hiccup, and unfair traffic ticket to the rest of us?

I know this sounds harsh, but share tragedy, much less minor misfortune, with your family and those who are close friends. Share with others some happiness, some optimism, some uplift. Your fourth cousin’s wedding is preferable to my learning that someone vandalized your car.

Some issues are meant to share, some you have to bear. Your mother probably told you to “grow up” and “stop crying” and “you’ll have to accept it.” She was right. What happens to you isn’t her fault, much less mine. We all have to deal with adversity.

But as my mother said: “Better to spread some joy. Would it kill you?”

© Alan Weiss 2011. All rights reserved.

It’s Not Your Mother’s Fault

Vol. 1 Issue #2

I run across too many people obsessed with the “fact” (viz.: personal belief) that they can’t get a “break.” The theater ticket is too difficult to acquire; the traffic made them late for the start of the game; the tax assessment isn’t fair; the driver alongside them hit the door of their car.

Stuff happens. No matter what your beliefs, I know of no belief system that posits some guy in a green eye shade and sleeve protectors keeping a detailed ledger of everyone’s positive and negative “breaks” so as to ensure a fair distribution. We have “life coaches,” silly enough, but we don’t have “life accountants,” unless I’ve missed a fad du jour.

We can buy tickets far in advance, or pay extra for choice seats if they’re that important; we can leave earlier and plan our time better; we can appeal a tax assessment; we can park farther away where no one is likely to park next to us. In other words, we can reduce the probability of bad stuff happening to us, and attempt to mitigate the seriousness if bad stuff should happen anyway.

Gizillion dollar missions to Mars fail. Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner is so late you can’t even track it with a Mayan calendar. The wind blows a shopping cart across a parking lot right into your car door. You step in a place recently visited by a dog relieving itself. Stuff happens.

Stop complaining about the breaks. You make your own over the long haul. The harder you work, the more breaks arise. Unless, of course, you’re too busy complaining that you never get any breaks.

“Luck,” said Brooklyn Dodger legendary general manager Branch Rickey, who brought Jackie Robinson into the major leagues, “is the residue of design.” How are you designing  your future?

© Alan Weiss 2011. All rights reserved.

I’ve been getting two kinds of feedback to that first column.

The first is all about addiction and battering. The points being made are that mental illness is not the fault of the individual, and you need more than to simply change your discipline and accountability. I would think that would be self-evident. My point is that too many otherwise perfectly healthy people are claiming “it’s not their fault” and blaming their mother (as a metaphor) for their own lack of discipline and resolve. And, for that matter, I think issues such as Adult Attention Deficit Disorder are far over-diagnosed, and claimed by many without any diagnosis at all.

The other kind of feedback is encapsulated by the most recent email this morning, from a mother to her son who forwarded my column:

OMG!!!  I wish you could have sent it to all your siblings!  I’m going to forward it to a few of my friends.  Right now I’m going to print it out and put a copy on my refrigerator.  You should put a copy of it around, too.

MANY, MANY THANKS!!!

It’s Not Your Mother’s Fault

Vol. I Issue #1

This is the first is a series of columns that will appear on Alan’s Blog about the self-limiting beliefs we consciously and unconsciously allow to undermine our lives and success. I will reproduce this elsewhere, but the original columns will begin their lives here on contrarianconsulting.com.

Think of Cher in “Moonstruck” slapping Nicholas Cage twice, shouting, “Get over it!” or Bob Newhart in his famous skit as a therapist advising his patient, “Stop it!”

We spend inordinate amounts of money on problematic therapy sessions trying to eradicate “baggage” that we believe is affecting our ability to perform, to maintain relationships, to deal effectively with life’s vicissitudes. But we might as well hire an exorcist. (I asked the then-president of the American Psychological Association, who was on my advisory board at a former company, why there was such a high incidence of suicide among psychologists. “Because,” he replied without hesitation, “we attract many troubled people who are trying to work out their own issues.”)

In other words, their mothers were also wreaking havoc with them.

But it’s not your mother’s fault.

My observations of successful people and struggling people feature this omnipresent distinction: Successful people help themselves. They are not professional victims; they don’t present themselves as hopelessly entrapped by their nurturing; they create positive change for themselves.

Some people can stop smoking, some can’t. Some people can lose weight, some can’t. Some people comfortably address audiences, some can’t. Some people can control their nerves and fears, some can’t. The distinction isn’t in one’s DNA, or toilet training, or being part of a village to raise the child. (It takes loving parents or even a single parent to raise a child, not a village or other municipality.)

The distinction is in one’s self-discipline, organization, and resolve; in one’s self-accountability. Support systems are wonderful, as are loving families, but the primary support system is between your ears. To claim that you were scarred early, or can’t work in certain environments, or need special attention to get by, is usually just an excuse not to change, grow, or mature. You might as well say, “The devil makes me do it.”

Once you reach adulthood, with a basic education, an ability to examine the environment around you, and the advantage of witnessing what works for others (hard work, learning new skills, forging relationships, etc.), you should be able to “get over it” and “stop” whatever it is that’s impeding you. If others have, you can. If you don’t and won’t, then you have only yourself to blame.

It’s not your mother’s fault.

© Alan Weiss 2011. All rights reserved.