……Continued from yesterday’s post, Meeting You Part One

On page 11 of the Introduction to “Quiet”, Cain writes a brief overview description of extroverts and introverts:

“Extroverts are the people who will add life to your dinner party and laugh generously at your jokes, They tend to be assertive, dominant, and in great need of company. Extroverts think out loud and on their feet; they prefer talking to listening, rarely find themselves at a loss for words, and occasionally blurt out things they never meant to say. They’re comfortable with conflict, but not with solitude.”

“Introverts, in contrast, may have strong social skills and enjoy parties and business meetings, but after a while they wish they were home in their pajamas. They prefer to devote their social energies to close friends, colleagues, and family. They listen more than they talk, think before they speak, and often feel as if they express themselves better in writing than in conversation. They tend to dislike conflict. Many have a horror of small talk, but enjoy deep discussions.”

Cain also makes the point that both extroverts and introverts can be very friendly and many are not shy (shyness is identified as a fear of social disapproval or rejection, which is a painful learned condition that is much different than introversion but can be developed in the presence of the “Extrovert Ideal” and other shame-based life experiences).

A little later on in the book, Cain offers a helpful informal quiz to readers so we can each see where we fall on the extrovert-introvert spectrum.

I have been traveling quite a bit to different campuses and organizations over the last few months (spring is always a busy time for me with National Eating Disorders Awareness Week falling in February or March annually).

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Taylor is in the middle. She is Bella’s owner.

This spring, as with every spring, I have met a lot of inspiring people. The standouts?

A young woman who raised her hand when I asked the participants if any one of them had nothing they wished to change about themselves (this has never happened during a “Beauty Undressed” event before), the young daughter of a campus event coordinator who told me all about her pet hedgehog named Bella, and the group of Tri-Sigmas who gave me a glimpse into what my Mom must have been like as a founding Tri-Sigma member in her college years.

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Me (left front row) with the Tri-Sigmas

Each time I head out on a trip, I bring along with me all the new information I’ve soaked in about how to best approach, meet, and make friends with ourselves.

Often when I am presenting at a college or organization, I spend a few minutes working with the participants in a guided exercise to demonstrate the power of our own minds when setting and achieving goals.

Our own attitude – which is approximately 50% genetic and 50% learned behavior – wields a powerful influence.

Our attitude is formed by a thought meeting a feeling, or vice versa. In other words, it is in the interplay between thought and emotion that our full power (for good or for ill) is discovered and unleashed (sort of like pulling the pin out of a hand grenade, or filling a balloon full of helium).

There are two typical pathways by which thought and emotion most frequently tend to meet:

Example A: The mind thinks a thought. That thought produces an emotion.
Example B: The body produces an emotion. The mind thinks a thought about that emotion.

In the intersection where thought meets feeling, or feeling meets thought, decision and action can then occur.

I feel very fortunate that over the last year or so (okay, maybe the last decade or so) I seem to be led to one book after another that perfectly encapsulates and explains something about my personality, character, preferences or self that I had long since given up hope of ever understanding.

Each time I find one of these books (or it finds me) I have the exact same reaction: “Wow! This one is IT! This is the one I have been waiting for! This is the most brilliant book EVER!”

And each time, I truly mean it – and I think that I truly mean it more than I have ever meant it before.

Of course, with my latest literary find, I literally DO mean it more than I ever have before. Of course.

Entitled, “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking”, just the title itself had me drawing a deep breath of relief – as in, “Oh thank god I’m not the only one who has noticed.”

Our world really does seem like it can’t stop talking sometimes, doesn’t it?

Furthermore, sometimes I get the impression that those of us who crave less verbal volubility in our lives are doomed to be forever misunderstood as lazy, unfriendly, stupid, bad tempered, or bad mannered.

In fact, as I turned each successive page of “Quiet”, I came face to face with one quality after another within myself that I had often previously attempted to “fix”, change, explain away, hide, or reverse….in other words, for most of my life, I have wanted to be somebody other than me.

How painful.

I am often asked to travel to colleges and share a program called “Beauty Undressed”. In this program, I speak about my experiences of eating disorders recovery.

Of course, whenever I am invited to speak, I automatically interpret that to mean that my audiences really want to learn about the power of mentoring in eating disorders recovery….because of course my personal recovery story is one of mentoring, and I credit the presence of a long line of mentors with helping me to choose recovery, do the hard work of recovery, and sustain my recovery over the long term.

While I believe it is very important for people to understand the specifics of what an eating disorder is, how it can develop (medically speaking), and the basic forms of treatment that are often necessary in order to facilitate healing, this is not what I speak about unless it is specifically requested.

A far greater barrier, in my personal experience, has been the inability to make the leap from “your issue” to “my issue”.

This is an interesting concept that I’ve been pondering more and more in recent months.

Nearly a year ago, I hired a life coach. I had a variety of reasons for making this decision.

Now, in looking back over the past several months, I have to say I really appreciate me for giving myself the opportunity to work with her, as it has been quite a fruitful and enlightening connection in a variety of ways.

Probably the most unexpected benefit (or side effect, depending on how you look at it) is an unfolding realization of how little I have really understood to date about who I actually am.

Not who I was – I understand that fairly well. Thank goodness – I’ve certainly spent enough time dissecting “past me” that I really have no good excuse not to.

I’m talking who I am today – right now – in each moment even as I type, type, type.

Not the me I was expected to be. The me I was told to be. The me I wanted to be. Or even the me I am.

But who AM I, actually?

While I’m on a spiritual roll, I wanted to share with you a snapshot of one of my most favorite small prints hanging on my wall right now.

Here it is:

The quote says, “Love is, above all, the gift of oneself.”

Several years ago, when I first moved into the place where I currently live today, I was fleeing the inevitable transition of a challenging relationship.

In those first days in my new apartment, I had bare walls, bare shelves – I didn’t even own a kitchen knife (thank goodness, given the mood I was in most days at that time).

Then one day I got tired of staring at an endless expanse of unbroken pale yellow walls, and I got in the car and drove myself to Michael’s.

There I found an assortment of cheap prints in cheerful colors that seemed to go with yellow. I didn’t pay much attention to what they said – hearts, flowers, bunnies, anything that looked the opposite of how I felt – that was what I was after.

So it took me some time to actually digest what this particular print was trying to tell me.

I keep a vision board hanging on my wall.

I will admit that I do not update it far often enough….in part because “crafty” is not a word I typically use to describe myself (and vision boards involve a lot of cutting and pasting words, images, etc), but also because the things I envision as fleshing out a truly amazing life are pretty big things, and they do not shift or change very often in my world.

The vision board experts suggest sectioning off your vision board into segments, such as “career”, “personal”, “hobbies”, “romance”, “spirituality”, etc.

So of course I did this with mine (see “not crafty” above).

One quote that has been on my vision board for years in the “spirituality” section states:

“Spiritual maturity is the capacity to live from your true nature in the midst of the everyday madness of the ordinary world.”

I really love this quote. I especially love how it doesn’t specify whether the “everyday madness” is coming from inside of me or from all around me. Or neither. Or both.

Whoo boy.

Never in all my innards did I ever see this post coming.

I travel a lot during the spring and fall when I am speaking at college campuses and conferences, and in addition to the opportunity to meet lots of fun new folks and see new places, my schedule also gives me access to an amenity I do not have at home.

Cable television.

I have lots of fun speaking and we definitely take a lighthearted and proactive approach to discussions about recovery, eating disorders, and the meaning of struggle and being human, but I suppose it is fair enough to say that after a few hours of this, I am ready for some lighter entertainment to close out my evening.

This last round of travels, I found myself glued to Jersey Shore. I had never really watched the show before, and the “gluing” part was a good 85 percent due to the fact that I just Could.Not.Believe. people actually used such crass and shallow terms for actions and choices that I regard as highly personal and private.

But there you have it. Several episodes later, clearly they do.

The other 15% of my fascination, however, I did not really decode until later on, during another speaking event, when I got to talking about the show with one of the students who hung around after my presentation to chat.

….can and often does hurt you.

It also hurts others, but mostly it hurts you.

We often spend so much time getting to know others – and the more we love them, the more time we spend.

We might be able to recite our pet’s top 5 favorite foods in perfect order, or our spouse’s exact morning routine from the time they stop hitting “snooze” to the moment their car backs down the driveway.

But how well will we do, and with what tone (on a scale from 1 to 10, with 1 being “adoration” and 10 being “disdain”) will we describe our own?

On average (just a question if you are up for it) how much time would you say you spend studying yourself versus studying others in your life?

On average (ditto above) how much curiosity (loving and open-minded, not judgmental curiosity) would you say you feel towards yourself versus towards someone else in your life whom you especially love or admire?