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The ChoiceCoach Blog

By Diana Gardner Robinson Leave a Comment

Welcome to my Blog!

This blog is about choice, how to make the best use of the choices available to us, and how to become aware of options that we may not have realized were available to us in the past. It is intended to serve you, to support you in making wise and regret-free choices, and to help all of us to see that at times there are often more available options to consider than we had dreamed of. (This can be hugely freeing, or it can complicate matters and make our choices more difficult than we had thought.) Choices matter, for we must accept their consequences.

Past changes:

I have gone through several variations in my blogging history. At one time I used the title “Work in Progress,” but that is now the name of my (free) newsletter, which goes to all who choose to subscribe (see top right-hand side of any page on this website). For a while after that it was “Stumbling Blocks & Stepping Stones,” but as I have now decided to return to my original website name them – “ChoiceCoach.” I therefore decided to things simple. As you can see, the new title follows my mission in serving my readers and clients. It is “Making Your Best Choices.”

What do YOU want from this blog?

Your questions, thoughts, and feedback are always welcome here. I very much want to be writing about topics that interest you, and particularly when they relate to the sometimes tricky topic of making regret-free choices. Remember, ‘you are free to choose, but you are not free from the consequences of your choice.’ (I believe that Ziad K. Abdelnour is generally accepted as the author of that wisdom, although it is sometimes attributed to Dr. Laura.)

Adventures in the Smog

By Diana Gardner Robinson Leave a Comment

I was walking through my home village, on a route I had followed for years, at least three times a week. Yet I was feeling my way along, with my hands on someone’s fence. I knew where I was only by the texture and form of the fence, and even then I was uncertain…

There’s not much difference between fog and a low-flying cloud. Normally one can see some feet ahead, at least one’s hand in front of one’s face. When it comes to smog, though, everything is different. Smog is fog combined with air pollutants. It can incapacitate those with lung problems, and cause lung problems for those who previously did not.

Three smokestack spewing dirty smoke, silhouetted against the sky. — Smokestack pollution

It can also get one very, very lost. Although not in London, I was having my first experience of a London pea-souper.

Efforts along “clean air” lines have, in much of the world, ended what in London were called “pea soupers” – smog so thick that you can see through it about as well as you can see through pea soup. However, recent attempts to limit or overturn the clean air laws concern me. Let me explain some of my experience with London pea soupers, which, occasionally, would spread 50 to 60 miles beyond the city.

The first paragraph, above, involved a time when I was trying to get to choir practice one evening. (I was a teenager, and choir practice at least got me out of the house one evening a week.) The walk usually took less than ten minutes, and I knew the road like the back of my hand… or so I thought. Yet that evening the smog was so thick that I became totally disoriented. Yes, I really did have to feel my way along the fences and hedges that fronted each of my neighbors’ homes. Usually, in the dark of night I could just see where my hand was if it was in front of my face. In this case, in the early evening, I could not.

I got to the church – and back – but the experience certainly did not prepare me for what I encountered when I moved to London (one of several cities sometimes referred to as “the big smoke”) a few years later.

It happened that I counted among my London friends a number of people for whom cycling was the normal form of transportation and a way of life. I soon learned that, when needed, some of them also served as guides when the London smog was so bad that the drivers of the tall, double-decked London buses could not see the curbs, the road surface lines, or the street signs that usually guided them. As thousands of commuters depended on the buses this was serious business.

Enter the cyclists.
Male bicyclist pedalling.

Because they were nearer the ground than the bus drivers, and did not have reflections from the bus windows to distract their vision, they could just make out the street signs, the road surface signs, and the curbs in even the worst of smogs. they would gather at London Bridge, and each would negotiate with a bus driver for a fee to guide him to his destination. Youngsters who had lived all their lives in the city, they knew the twists and turns, and each would ride ahead following the intended route, pausing occasionally to check with the bus driver to be sure that they were the driver thought they should be. Away from the smogs, cyclists and bus drivers were hardly the best of friends, but in times of need they cooperated so that the buses and their impatient passengers got to their destinations, usually more than a little late, but they got there. Meanwhile the cyclists, most of them chronically short of cash, benefited in that way.

It sounds ridiculous now, but it happened.

Even more surreal was an incident involving the fire engine (as they are known in the U.K.). I was, very cautiously, walking from the Underground (subway) station to my nearby home after work. I heard the fire-siren behind me, approaching unusually slowly. A few moments later I saw a glow approaching. It turned out to surround a flaming torch held aloft by a man running along the white line in the middle of the road. Behind it, guided by the glow, was a fire engine on its way to a fire emergency, travelling only as fast as the man could run. As I wondered where the fire was, the vehicle stopped. The runner mounted the steps to a house to peer at the street number on the door. Having discovered how far along the road they were, and so how far they had yet to go, he returned to the white line and continued his journey, cautiously followed by the fire engine. I never did discover whether they got to the fire in time to save the house, or any lives.

Of course that happened many years ago. Today, our GPS systems would let us know how far along our journey we were, how far remained, and where to turn, should smogs occur again. We would not have to rely on a running man with a flaming torch. What, though, would warn us of that other vehicle approaching from the other direction as each of us tried to rely on the hardly visible street signs, curb sides and surface signs? Let us hope that the “clean air” laws will survive efforts to dilute them, so that we will never again have to put that thought to the test.

(“Adventures with Smog” is part of a new series, “That was Then and This is Now” which will appear intermittently in addition to my regular (or irregular when life intrudes) blog. To sign up for my newsletter “Work in Progress” see the form ti the right of the pages of this website.)

Top Ten Steps to Obtaining Forgiveness

By Diana Gardner Robinson Leave a Comment

Because forgiveness is generally regarded as beneficial for both parties, there is often an implication that a perpetrator *should* be forgiven, that anyone who is an okay person should offer forgiveness if it is sought. Certainly, to be able to forgive is beneficial to the forgiver. However, within most religions there is a clear requirement for repentance on the part of the perpetrator as a precursor to forgiveness. Repentance does NOT just mean saying you are sorry. (And, unfortunately the *sorry* is often more about being caught than about regretting the original act.) Repentance also means communicating sincere regret and taking steps to be sure that you never repeat the action. If you feel you need forgiveness from another person, consider the following steps:

1. Take responsibility for the choices that led you to cause the pain (or harm).
Accept that, regardless of your reasons for doing whatever you did, it was your actions or words that caused pain for someone else. No excuses.

2. Search your heart to be sure that it is the pain or harm caused to the other person that you regret, not just your experience of your own consequences for causing it.

3. Understand that, however much you want to explain, and however much the other person wants to know why, once they know, the hurt will not change.
Their feelings towards you may change, but don’t count on it. The hurt will still be the hurt. *Why* is very rarely a useful question, and explanations often sound painfully like self-serving rationalizations.

4. Decide what you need to do, how you need to change, to ensure that you do not ever again make that kind of choice, and so cause others more pain.
Make those changes in yourself. Until you have learned the lesson and sincerely attempted to make the changes it is unreasonable to expect that the human heart will truly be able to forgive you, and it is questionable as to whether it should.

5. Plan how you will communicate with the person(s) you have hurt.
Do you need to prepare them with a letter or a third-party communication? You need to let them know that they need no longer fear hurt from you. You also need to be absolutely sure that this is true. Do not just turn up on someone’s doorstep or confront them unexpectedly.

6. Be clear in your mind that, IF an apology is best for the person, you will make it without excuses and rationalizations.

7. Decide what could or should be done to make amends to the person(s) that you hurt.
This will be in addition to the apology, if one should be made.

8. Examine carefully whether making amends will indeed be helpful to the other person.
We are not considering your comfort here. To make amends might make you feel better but at the same time may re-open yet again the other person’s old wounds. You would do well to consult with another person, someone of wisdom, on this.

9. Make the apology, offer the amends, with no strings attached.
Forgiving you is NOT the same thing as returning to old situations and/or making it possible for you to repeat the behavior. Do not count on a return to a previous relationship as a part of the forgiveness.

10. If the individual wants no part of your apology or your making of amends, be prepared to accept this too.
If that hurts, do not turn the pain into anger against them. They may need more time to heal. Know then that you have done the best you can do, and plan on how you can use the process you have gone through for your own growth and the lessening of pain among other people.

Pigeon Holes & Stereotypes: They Hurt… Everyone!

By Diana Gardner Robinson Leave a Comment

Have you ever felt yourself pigeon-holed by someone else?

“Oh, you’re an introvert, you wouldn’t like that.” Or “That’s not the kind of thing you’d want to do.”

Have you ever worked really, really hard to change an aspect of yourself, and then found yourself at a family reunion, or a meeting with someone who has known you from way back when, where their memory of you as you used to be is so strong that it overwhelms any awareness of what you have worked long and hard to become?

“You forget that I remember the real you.”

“You’ve always been that way, might as well accept it.”

Years of self-discipline and determination to change are ignored because of a memory from years ago.

Have you found yourself pigeon-holing others, just because? Pigeon-holing, by the way, is often, though not always, a more politically correct work-around-term to avoid admitting that what is really happening is stereotyping. As a person from England living in the US I find that folks often pigeon-hole (or stereotype) me according to what their perception of an English woman might be, even though I’ve lived in the US for more than half my life.

I know many people who feel that being pigeon-holed by others keeps them stuck, even though they have worked hard, often for years, to change whatever might have led to that perception. Others of course cannot change, nor would they want to, the basis for their being pigeon-holed. We cannot change our race, our age, our height, yet all can lead to pigeon-holing.

“He is tall, so he must have been on the basketball team in high school, must be a good athlete.”

“She is young, so she must not know much.”

“She is old, so she must not know much.”

And so on. When we pigeon-hole people we put them, in our thinking, into a box. Think of the derivation of the word. A pigeon-hole was once a small recess in which pigeons might nest. But then (and this is where our current meaning comes from), it came to mean one of those small slots in a desk into which people sorted paper or envelopes. This paper belongs here, that one there, and so on. Each piece of paper belongs in one specific slot and nowhere else. No matter that one paper might have references to the topic of half a dozen different slots – it belongs in one place only.

Diana is a coach so she belongs in the coach slot. Or she taught addiction counseling so she works with addiction. No matter that I am also a college instructor, a Toastmaster, a writer, a mother, an “off the boat” immigrant, or that I volunteer in support groups for the formerly incarcerated…. you get the drift.

We are all multi-dimensional, and pigeon-holing denies us that, just as it denies us the right to grow and change.

We are Hard-Wired

It is true that we are hard-wired to use information that we have learned in the past, and that hard-wiring does encourage stereotyping. Sadly, though, some stereotypes are not only based on what we have learned, either from parents, from personal experience, or from societal attitudes. They are also based on generalizations. Suzy was once bitten by a dog. Instead of fearing that dog, or perhaps dogs that look like the one that bit her, she is terrified of all dogs. She has generalized from one dog to all dogs. We may do the same in regard to people.

That may be based on personal experience, but other forms of generalization have no basis other than a general ambience in the society in which we grew up. Sexism, racism, age-ism (don’t get me started on any of those three), ability-ism are huge, and extremely harmful generalizations. Not only do they hurt those on the receiving end, but the person making generalizations may be harmed as well. The best candidate for the position that you urgently need to fill may be… fill in with any generalization as to what pigeon-hole does NOT fit your picture of the perfect candidate.

Setting the Right Tone

On that note, one of the most impressive television commercials I have seen in years involved a young African-American woman candidate for a job. She has just been interviewed by a white businessman in a most conservative business background. As I remember it, this is approximately how it ends…

“Well,” he says, “you are not what I have been looking for.” Long pause and her face falls, “But,” he adds with a smile, “you are exactly what we need.”

In acknowledging the stereotype (“not what I have been looking for”) he also tosses it aside, apparently seeing qualities in her that over-ride the superficial “job description” requirements and, instead fit the real needs of his organization.

If only there were more employers like that.

An “un-stereotyping” suggestion

Sometime back a log-time correspondent, Cathy, made a suggestion about un-pigeon-holing. She was referring to an incident where one of her friends (A), in distress over a current situation, had tried to talk with friend B, but had heard back only the feedback about what friend B had pigeon-holed her as having been early on in their twenty-year friendship. Having turned to a friend for support, as we are all told to do in times of stress, she felt totally unheard. Instead of being comforted, she felt worse than before. Fortunately, she turned to Cathy.

Cathy, thoughtful as ever, made a suggestion that I thought should be shared far beyond the confines of that email list, and with her permission I share it with you. She wrote:

“They have known each other for 20 years. That seems like such a long time to be kept in the pigeon hole of someone else’s memory. So, wanting to comfort my friend, I said,

”Well, I decree that tomorrow is ‘Pigeon to butterfly’ day. I decree that every third 18th of the month is Pigeon to Butterfly day. It is the day given us to let go all the ‘definitions’ we have built of people in our lives. We have kept them for so long that we have forgotten the whys and remember only the hole we keep another human being in, in our own minds.”

‘So, if my math is correct, that means that four times a year, if we think of it, we can revise our list of names of people in our mental pigeon hole gallery, and set them free of our preconceptions.

‘So, I guess my goal is to empty my gallery.’

“The butterfly has long been a symbol of transformation. Just as the caterpillar goes through a metamorphosis and eventually emerges from its chrysalis, so we often change our selves and become something very different from what or who we were “back in the day.” We know who we have become, and want to be seen as that. We would not dream of categorizing a butterfly, light and beautiful, as a caterpillar just because that is what it used to be. Why, then, do we turn a blind eye to the progress that the people around us make as they struggle to change and grow?”

Cathy designated the 18th of every third month as Pigeon to Butterfly day – a day when we can resolutely discard the remnants of the pigeon-holes into which we used to try to squeeze those around us. On that day we and they can take on – and henceforth be seen as owning – the attributes of the brilliant and beautiful butterfly.

My only suggestion is that, although we might focus on it on those special “Pigeon to Butterfly days,” we might even endeavor to avoid pigeon-holing our friends and colleagues more frequently than just four time a year. Each of them has butterfly potential. Let us focus on that, and on the progress that they and we are making toward it. Let us do that each and every day!

Be well, be happy, look ahead but never forget to find joy in today,

DianaR

PLEASE! Any re-use of this material should include the words

Reduce Drug Overdose Deaths with this Conversation

By Diana Gardner Robinson 1 Comment

Not long ago a friend lost a family member to a drug overdose. The tragedy, which happens way too often these days, reminded me of something that I wrote a while back. I decided to create it at the length called for on the Op-Ed section of my local newspaper, and to submit it. My title was “A conversation that could reduce the number of opioid overdose deaths…” which of course was far too long. They shortened it to “Opioid conversation can prevent deaths.”

Some people familiar with the issue have suggested that I should publish it as a blog. As I’m not too sure of where the copyright lies, I am instead posting a link to the piece. It concerns a conversation that is very rarely to be heard in addiction treatment facilities (and I explain why). I must add that another reason to the reason mentioned in the piece is that most people assume that knowledge about drug tolerance and its place in the world of overdoses is common sense. The truth is, though, that in the horror of drug craving, common sense rarely gets a chance to speak.

If you know anyone involved in drug use, and most importantly if you know anyone in recovery, please read this article that I wrote for the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle. Just click on the link below.

(Sorry about the ads, I have no control over the newspaper website.)

Opioid conversation can prevent deaths