How to tell a tidy story of an untidy life

We flew first class to Seattle so we could get the cello on board without a fight for overhead space. So imagine the come down when my son walked into the dorm room at cello camp. “Oh,” he said. “A dorm room is like a one-star hotel.”

I thought to myself: Who am I? Am I a person who flies first class, or am I a person who shares a bathroom with ten strangers?

There are cello lessons all day and we run around Seattle Pacific University with me marveling at the dahlias (are they perennials here?) and my son doing too-risky parkour (“Mom. I think my penis broke.”)

My son tells me I have to sleep in the top bunk because he doesn’t want to fall out. I climb up there and remember the kid down the hall who rolled out my freshman year, so I sleep on the floor.

Am I a person who has a garden that covers an acre? Am I a person who has no bed? Read more

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How to pick a wife if you want to have kids

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Nathan Sawaya

 

Recently I wrote a post about how to pick a husband if you want to have kids. A lot of people asked that I write the male corollary to that post. So, here it is.

This post is about identity. How to see yourself. How to figure out if you can remake yourself. How to make a life that is true to yourself. And, put more bluntly, how to get the best deal in a wife given who you are.

For men, there are three choices: breadwinner, and stay-at-home dad, and  shared responsibilities.  Read more

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Fast track your career with Myers Briggs: Four-day webinar with Penelope Trunk

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This webinar is to show you how to leverage your strengths with Myers Briggs. It includes four days of of video sessions and email-based course materials. You can purchase this workshop for anytime, on-demand access. The cost is $195.

Get access now.

I have too much to say about Myers Briggs to be contained in just my blog posts. So I’m doing a webinar. Also, Melissa and I have so much fun with you guys in these webinars, and we want to do another. During the last two, people kept saying we should do a Myers Briggs one.

So here it is, with a special guest: the guy who taught me about Myers Briggs, Rob Toomey. It started out that I interviewed him, in the olden days, when I was a columnist at the Boston Globe and actually did interviews. Then I would call him just to ask him things:

Q: Why do I hate my INTJ co-worker?
A: Everyone hates INTJs but INTJs don’t care. They just want the work done.

Okay. To be fair, Rob doesn’t talk like that. He’s very diplomatic. I am summarizing his wisdom. But in the webinar, it will be a lot of Rob talking. (And he will be fun, because he’s an ENTP, and ENTPs are fun.)

The biggest reason to understand Myers Briggs is that just about every company in the Fortune 500 uses it as part of training for senior management. If you understand the meaning of your own score you will immediately become more effective at meeting your goals, and if you understand other people’s scores you’ll be way better at communicating with them.

Naturally, when I heard that top leaders in the Fortune 500 get this training, I had to have it too. And my path to expertise was the typical journalist path: I bugged my source incessantly til Rob was not a source but a friend.

Then when I was running Brazen Careerist, I would not shut up about Myers Briggs. I told everyone in the company that they had to take the test, and when they refused, I said, “Forget it, I’m so good at it I know your score anyway.”

Just to prove me wrong, they took the test.

And I was right. Which I tell you only to show how smart you can be about everyone if you understand Myers Briggs.

So this is the last thing I’m gonna tell you about the webinar. Everyone should sign up. I’m not kidding. Having a solid understanding of Myers Briggs has changed every aspect of my life. And it’s going to be really fun because I love Rob and I love Melissa, and this is my dream-come-true Myers Briggs party.

Here’s the official announcement of what we’ll do: Read more

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How to get a better sense of who you are

I’m great at remaking myself. I’ve been a pro-volleyball player, a serial entrepreneur, a stay-at-home mom. I’ve modeled nude and I’ve stood as a spokesperson for education reform.

The hardest part about being able to remake myself so often is that I’m never sure who I am.

The other day my son said, “Mom, what’s your name right now?”

I said “Penelope”. I knew that was the right answer, because everyone in my life calls me Penelope. But it’s not my legal name. Adrienne is still my legal name. So sometimes, I get into trouble, and he sees it. Like the time we checked into a hotel and I had no ID for the name Penelope so I told the hotel clerk to look me up on Wikipedia. My son stood next to me the whole time, ostensibly eating free snacks in the lobby, but clearly the scene made an impression. (At airport  check-in he said, “Mom! Let’s use your Wikipedia page to go to the front of the line!”) Read more

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Inside the mind of a workaholic

I am sleeping in the downstairs bedroom. Alone. Or sometimes with the dog.

I hate writing this story because I want to be a person you admire, but I also hate not writing it. Because I want to be a person I admire. I want to be a person known for honesty.

Which means I need to tell you that I wish I cared more that I’m not talking to the Farmer.

I hate that I have stories I don’t want to tell. Because I have found that almost always, the secrets we keep matter a lot to us, but they don’t matter to other people.

For example, I emailed to Melissa one day. “I have a secret: I drank wine at breakfast today and I haven’t stopped.”

I thought Melissa would email back that I’m an idiot and I’ll be in rehab.

But she emailed back, “I forgot to get a refill for Lexapro and today is the first time in a year that I’ve initiated sex.” Read more

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How to find inspiration at work

The research about inspiration is, generally, that it improves our wellbeing but we cannot control when it comes to us. That said, opening ourselves to new experiences makes inspiration more likely. And surrounding ourselves with inspired people makes us more likely to feel inspired ourselves.

We constantly look for work that inspires us, but I have found in my career that often the jobs that were most inspiring to me were not necessarily at companies doing inspiring work. One example of this is a job I had at CyberMedia. Read more

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How to take ownership of what you really want

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The novel Fifty Shades of Grey is selling faster than a Harry Potter book right now. The book is about sexual domination in a contemporary setting, including the career woman who has everything, including a hot, successful boyfriend.

The big news is that we have enough data to show that the majority of women buying Fifty Shades of Gray are in their 20s and 30s living in urban areas, according to the publisher’s data, and the Atlantic. To be clear, these women are incredibly powerful. In urban areas, more women than men graduate college, women out earn men in their 20s, and we are almost to the point where women in their 30s are outnumbering men as breadwinners. Which means that it is the women who have tons of power who are also having tons of rape fantasies. Read more

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Divorce is immature and selfish. Don’t do it.

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Divorce is always on my mind because I got a divorce four years ago. Not that I wanted to. In fact, when I thought we were going to a couples therapist we were actually going to a divorce mediator. And then, when it was clear that we were going to have to get a divorce, and I had all the money to fund it, my lawyer finally said to me, “If you drag your feet any longer, you’re going to have to get a new lawyer because I’m retiring.”

So we got a divorce. I hated it. (And of course, I blogged about it the whole time.) Subsequently I have become a vocal critic of divorce. I think it’s an incredibly lame and selfish route to take. Here are five reasons why:

1. Divorce is a cliche among people in denial. 
I see divorce in every story. For example, as soon as I heard about the school shootings in Chardon, OH, I got stuck on the fact that the kid’s parents had just gotten a divorce and left him with his grandparents. I blame the parents.

Heather Armstrong is a great blogger who I have followed for years. But I’m really stuck on the news that she just announced a separation from her husband.

Armstrong supports her family with her blog, dooce.com, which is about herself, so of course, I watch her really closely. In her post announcing that she had asked her husband to leave, she said the two common, and delusional things we hear from divorced parents all the time:

“I can’t be a good parent if I’m not happy and I’ll never be happy in this marriage.”

and

“The kids are doing so well. Kids are really resilient.”

I’ve heard those things so many times. From parents who are getting a divorce who are full of shit. Read more

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7 Big relocation mistakes

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Last fall I took my kids to Hermosa Beach. It was a big moment for me because the whole time I was playing professional volleyball, in my 20s, I dreamed I would have a family and live in Hermosa.

It’s a great beach town with top-notch volleyball. There’s proximity to good career opportunities in the LA area, and a culture of kids growing up with sand in their hair.

The day we arrived I realized that it might be really hard to leave. I worried that maybe I’d never go back to the farm. And the more the kids loved the water, the more closely I looked at For Rent signs. I thought maybe I could split my time between the beach and the farm.

But then something happened. We didn’t miss only The Farmer (who doesn’t like to leave the Farm). We missed the animals, and the feeling of being in a cozy warm house surrounded by snow.

Which made me realize that when we think about relocation, we think about the wrong stuff. Read more

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Things I wish I had written

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In therapy lately I am learning to identify my feelings. Maybe you’re thinking this is elementary, but did you know that envy is about wanting something you don’t have, but jealousy is the fear of losing something you already have?

I am thinking about those two things. I am almost never envious, but I am often jealous. Most of my emotions, in fact, are rooted in fear.

I am thinking a lot lately about where my joy comes from, and one thing I love is writing well. When I have a blog post that people love I am happy for weeks. And the excitement of doing good creative work gives me energy to do more. Read more

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