Showing posts with label Entitlement. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Entitlement. Show all posts

Monday, October 11, 2010

Entitlement update

I can't quite seem to muster up a proper blog entry today, so I thought I'd update you on how my Entitlement is going. (If you're just tuning in, here's what I mean by Entitlement with a capital E in the context of this blog, and here's why it's so important.)

The most interesting thing is the extent to which being aware of Entitlement - what it is, why it's important, how it helps, being able to recognize it in others - makes it easier to do. I'd say in this case knowing is about 80% of the battle. My Entitlement behaviour increased sharply the moment I realized this was a thing I needed to start doing. It's quite surprising. Usually changing my own behaviour is an epic struggle against my very nature, and changing my own thought patterns is completely outside my control. But with Entitlement, just reading an explanation with examples that I was able to independently relate to real-life examples of behaviours and characteristics I admire in others was enough to make me...just start doing it, to a certain extent. I think I owe Malcolm Gladwell huge.

As an added bonus, the concept of Entitlement came into my life around the same time as I started facing some increased responsibilities at work. So I'm in a situation where I have to act with Entitlement, because otherwise stuff isn't going to get done. This has made me less deferential and more casual in my dealings with external people, which, oddly, gets better results.

One weird thing is whenever I try to explain the concept of Entitlement to someone verbally, they always confuse it with the generic - and this despite the fact that I always start my explanation with "not entitlement in the normal general sense of the word, but it's rather this very specific concept meaning..." I did manage to explain to my boss what I was doing by describing it as an attempt to be more pro-active because I'm naturally disinclined to be pro-active, and that was effective and has helped smooth out any rough edges resulting from the fact that I'm doing what should be basic social skills on an experimental basis. I think that's how I'm going to explain it to other people in the future if it becomes necessary.

I also just realized something awesome. In my awful making-an-ass-of-myself-in-front-of-Eddie moment (for which I'm still kicking myself), I was looking him in the eye and talking to him!! Yes, I was talking stupidly, doing far worse than someone my age should be able to do, reflecting poorly on our whole group and perhaps our whole city, but eye contact and reasonably articulate speech! I was literally incapable of that 18 months ago. I could not have maintained (and perhaps not even made) eye contact, and I would have been showing anxiety rather than fangirl giddiness. But now, not only have I done eye contact and talking, but I'm 100% certain I could do it again and better (even if not yet objectively well) in the future, even though I'm now carrying this having-made-an-ass-of-myself baggage. And it wouldn't be a massive effort. There would be nerves, of course, but the eye contact and talking would just be part of the natural way things turn out. Take THAT, middle-school bullies!

Of course, it's not going perfectly. I still fail to show Entitlement an average of twice a day - it's still extremely easy to just not do it in areas of life that are invisible to others. (If I don't email that client about that one thing, people at work will notice. If I don't make an appointment for a beauty treatment, it's inconsequential.) I'm still getting stupidly nervous about stupid things at stupid times. I'm still not 100% sure of the doctor situation. (I could handle it if I had some genuine illness, but I'm not there yet for something as elective and emotionally loaded as sterilization.) But, so far, my baseline for Entitlement behaviour seems to have very easily risen significantly higher. We'll see what happens next.

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

My Entitlement threshold is defective

(If you're just tuning in, here's what I mean by Entitlement with a capital E, and here's why it's important.)

I have been exercising Entitlement more, with a major help from increased job responsibilities that make it far more necessary, because I'm currently the only one in a position to do the stuff I have to do, and if I don't do it then the end product to client suffers. I still fail at it about half a dozen times a day, but it's starting to become something of a reflex.

The problem is that a few times recently I've overdone it, and I can't tell why. The only reason I can tell that I've overdone it is my interlocutor has been kind of WTFish and rather trying to discourage me from pursuing my line of inquiry or my request for adaptation. But I have literally no clue what makes these particular inquiries get a negative reaction. As far as I can tell, they are perfectly equivalent to my other, acceptable inquiries.

I know it's very common to overshoot when learning a new skill. In translation training, we call it the pendulum - you swing too far one way, then you swing too far the other way, and eventually you find equilibrium. But in this case the problem is my Entitlement threshold hasn't evolved along with my Entitlement reflex. On a scale of 1-100, the level of Entitlement that triggers my "Shh, you're overdoing it!" feelings has always been and continues to be down around a 25. The ideal level of Entitlement for functioning in the world is in the 40-60 range, and I seem to have on occasion roamed closer to 65 or 70. But my sensors are still calibrated for 25, so I really can't tell where I am at all, and I don't know how to recalibrate.

I think another part of the problem is this is a skill I should already have, and people expect someone my age to have a fully-formed set of interpersonal skills (especially since I tend to travel in contexts that skew somewhat older). So a misfire isn't seen by my interlocutors as a simple misfire in part of a broader learning arc, it's seen as poor interpersonal skills in a person who should know better. But it's not like I can exactly go around telling everyone what I'm working on here - even if nothing else, it's self-absorbed and boring!* So I've also got the disadvantage that I'm not predictable to other people. People are probably expecting a constant level of Entitlement, not one that wildly swings back and forth.

Just today in Judith Timson's column, I read:

As a friend who often gives advice to grads says, “I tell my own son that when you’re in your 20s you can ask anyone anything and they will answer. Not so much if you’re 30. So he’s got the better part of a decade to find out what he needs to know.”


I think that's what I'm running up against here. I'm nearly 30, and the roles in which I'm exercising Entitlement tend to be older than that. But I only just learned a few months ago that you actually can and probably should ask anyone anything, so now I'm frantically trying to catch up.

*Eddie Izzard always comes up with quick and clever ways to tell people in one or two soundbites what he's trying to do and get them onside. (e.g.: "total clothing rights") What would Eddie do?

Tuesday, December 29, 2009

The Ugly Glasses Chronicles

I suppose, objectively speaking, I can't quite call them ugly. They were bold. They were rectangular. They were trendy, in both the positive and negative senses of the word. They were chosen by a friend whose objective fashion sense I (still do) trust implicitly, and any halfway competent person could fully justify them as a fashion choice. They were also a wise purchase. The day I tried them on was the last day that they were on sale for 50% off (bringing their price BELOW the limit covered by my insurance!!), and three separate Lenscrafters employees assured me that I could return them for a full refund (which I ended up doing), so I decided to give myself time to see if I'd grow into them.

But the more I wore them, the more they made me feel hideous.

Their rectangular shape emphasized the squareness of my jaw and the lines on my forehead (which I detest not because they're lines, but because they are exactly the same as my father's). The thicker frame completely boxed in and emphasized the dark skin around my eyes when I wasn't wearing makeup, making me hesitant to even run to the grocery store without full makeup. Wearing my hair up was no longer an option, which is problematic at hip-length. Red lipstick no longer worked (and what's the point of life if you can't enjoy red lipstick?) I felt butch. I felt like a laughingstock. I felt like a fashion victim. I felt 13 years old again. I cried myself to sleep. I avoided making eye contact with my reflection in mirrors. I couldn't imagine wearing them with a sexy dress. If I had run into a client with whom I've only corresponded by email, or someone from high school whom I haven't seen in 10 years, I would have been embarrassed to be seen in these glasses.

So I went back and got the glasses I'd had my eye on in the first place, the pair I was, despite my best efforts to be open-minded, daydreaming about wearing. The pair that I fully expected would cause my fashion-savvy friend to say "We can stop shopping right now, this is perfect!" (In reality, they were relegated to about 4th place.) They're less fashion-forward, but I feel like myself in them.

I felt better now. I could breathe. I could stop crying, knowing that glasses that made me happy were on their way. But it would still be 10 days until they could be made. During that time, I had to navigate the city, meet with clients and convince them of my competence, get beauty treatments from people who are cooler than me, buy things and return things, deal with relatives over xmas, and generally perform as a competent adult despite the fact that my every instinct wanted to vanish into shame and shoegazing like my 13-year-old self.

So I had to very quickly learn a new skill. I had to fake being confident in these humiliating glasses. I had to aggressively externalize my energy, pushing the green of my eyes beyond these thick plastic rectangles that were boxing me in, convincing the world that I'm a confident hipster and this look is totally on purpose and of course I can totally pull it off. It was exhausting, but it was effective. I think I managed to carry myself as though this were a deliberate fashion choice, and somehow I managed to develop an effective "quelling glare" (as Miss Manners puts it) on the way. And, in the process, I fulfilled one of my birthday horoscopes from last year.

Overall, it was very much a learning experience. I went in not trusting my fashion instincts because my previous pair of glasses (which I love) were counter to most of my fashion instincts at the time of purchase. But from wearing the ugly glasses and then going back to the ones my instincts first wanted me to wear, I learned a lot about which of my fashion instincts I should trust and where I should and shouldn't follow trends (which is something I consider an essential adult life skill, but I haven't yet perfected it for glasses as much as I have for clothes). The energy and body language skills I developed trying to appear confident in the ugly glasses will serve me well as I work on Entitlement. I've developed a much better sense of where I'm comfortably willing to spend money on glasses, and I've gotten better at working with opticians to find something that suits me. Lots learned, good life experience. All of which is very easy to say now that I'm not stuck with the ugly ones for a whole year.

Friday, August 14, 2009

My 2010 New Year's Resolution

For 2008 and 2009, I made anti-resolutions, which worked well. However, my resolution for 2010 is serious. I could flippantly spin it as another anti-resolution, but the fact of the matter is it's difficult and real and necessary. That's why I'm posting it now instead of waiting for New Year's, because it came to me now and I'd be doing myself (and perhaps others) a disservice if I put it off for months.

By the end of 2010, I need to cultivate Entitlement.

It's the missing link. It goes against the most ingrained hard-wired aspects of my nature, and it has to get done.

Everything for the past several years has been converging on this. In 2007, thanks to Heather Mallick's quirky choice of a book title, I discovered Eddie Izzard (and am still kicking myself for not listening to Poodle and looking him up years earlier). Suddenly, unexpectedly, at the age of 26, I had acquired my very first role model. In the past I was always able to give some appropriate names and reasons when asked who my role model is, but Eddie is the first time I actually felt it - the role model equivalent of being in love for real after thinking you were in love 47 times as a teenager. The thing that inspires me most about Eddie (apart from his moments of truly excessive awesomeness) is the way he's charmingly and disarmingly unapologetic. He messes up on stage, he says "Messed that up," laughs along with the audience, and just keeps going - no blushing, stammering, trying to hide the fact. He wants to buy a dress, he walks into the store and asks to try it on in his size - no abashedly asking if it wouldn’t be too much of a problem if he tried it on. I've been able to use that in my own life, and my social and professional skills have benefited.

My December 2008 birthday horoscope said questions would be answered in six weeks. They were, but, as these things usually go, it's not something I would have expected: I read Naked in Death by J. D. Robb. It's a bit trashy, but so much fun! The characters are interesting and compelling and witty and grow and evolve as the series progresses, the love scenes are sexy and inspiring, the mysteries are sufficiently suspenseful, and I just enjoy spending time in that universe. I promptly read all 34 books in the series, more often than I should staying up until 3 in the morning to finish a book. And it was in this series' protagonist, Eve Dallas, I found my second-ever role model. Eve inspires me in a number of different ways, but the most significant is that she doesn't get nervous - not even one bit - about talking to people. She was 30 when the series started - just a couple of years older than me. In the first book she spends a lot of time talking to people, interviewing suspects and witnesses and sources, and she's never ever the slightest bit nervous or hesitant. Until I know a person well, I always have to work up a little bit of nerve to talk to them. It might not show, but it's there, and a good part of the reason why it's there is because of my bullies. But Eve, who survived horrific abuse, doesn't even have a glimmer of hesitation (and we're inside her head, it would show), she just knocks on a door, flashes her badge, and talks to people. That blew my mind!

My 2009 New Year's anti-resolution was "Shut up and buy it!" (It's going well, by the way - a number of things bought that make me very happy, only one misfire so far. I just think it's in poor taste to blog about it in the current economic climate.) One thing I discovered that I didn't even know was there was that it isn't just the financial "Oh, I shouldn't!" factor stopping me from buying stuff. It's also the fact that I don't feel cool enough to buy the things that I want to buy. The products are out of my league, the retailers are way cooler than I'll ever be. For example, I covet Fluevog shoes. Despite the fact that I have bought some (and they are truly awesome) and got exceptional customer service every time I went in there, I'm still nervous to go into their store because they're so much cooler than me. I'm here, with money, ready to make a purchase, they're there, selling stuff, with 100% of empirical evidence suggesting that I'll get excellent service, and I'm still nervous. This is a problem, and creates more self-loathing than anything else since catholicism.

I had some angst about turning 28. I thought I'd be cooler by the time I turn 28, and I had, despite the fact that I know better, developed some age-specific goals that were not met. But after doing Shut Up and Buy It for a bit and enjoying the results, it occurred to me that even though I'm not cool enough to be 28, I might be able to become cool enough to be 30 by the time I turn 30.

Then I read Outliers, was introduced to the concept of Entitlement, and saw that it's what I'm missing. Eddie Izzard is so cool because he feels like he's totally allowed to be on that stage, and he's totally allowed to be buying that dress. Eve Dallas is so competent because she feels like she's totally allowed to be walking up to people and interrupting their day and interviewing them. My Shut Up and Buy It fails have been because I don't feel like I'm actually allowed to be shopping at those places or for those things. Entitlement is the characteristic I admire in my role models, and lack of Entitlement is the thing that causes me to self-sabotage my own goals. (No, Shut Up and Buy It isn't my only goal, but it's the most suitable example for this post.)

So I have to develop Entitlement. I'm never going to actually feel it, but I need to eventually be able to slip into it when necessary, like how I can easily slip into Perky Customer Service. At the end of 2010, I turn 30. If I can act with Entitlement on demand by then, I'll be cool enough to be 30. Then, as an added bonus, I can use my Entitlement to convince my doctor to sterilize me.

It's going to be hard. The introversion is an obstacle, the residual effects of the bullying are an obstacle, my poor social skills are an obstacle, my need for my betters to know better than me is an obstacle. I'll have to work against all these natural tendencies. Plus, this is one the one aspect of life, more than anything else, where I find it very hard to shrug off negative feedback. If one person to whom I'm practising my Entitlement reacts negatively, that will set me way back. But it has to be done.

I might find myself having to blog about it along the way, it will get self-indulgent (moreso than usual), it might get angsty, and it might get boring. But it's my blog, I'm totally allowed.

Sunday, August 09, 2009

More thoughts from Outliers

1. Why is rice a staple food? Gladwell describes at length how a rice paddy requires daily diligent work, unlike, say, a wheat field where there are stages in the cultivation process where all you have to do is leave it alone and let it grow. So how did something that requires such painstaking cultivation end up being a staple food for so many people? Isn't there something else in that part of the world that grows more easily?

2. How much cultural bias is there in IQ tests? Gladwell mentions in passing a very advanced IQ test analogy question: “Teeth is to Hen as Nest is to ?” The general consensus of the internet is that the answer is mare. Hen's teeth and a mare's nest are both idioms whose literal meanings refer to non-existent things.

However, I would never have gotten that question right because I have never in my life, not once, heard the expression "mare's nest."

This ignorance is not entirely a function of my intelligence or lack thereof. It also means that the expression is absent from the active vocabulary of the people around me and the word choices of the writers whose work I consume. Now it's true I haven't read everything (although there have only been two books that I started and was unable to finish and a third that I neglected to start because they were too hard, and all of those I could have read if I'd had to for a school assignment or something), but no one can be expected to have read everything. And having read everything isn't entirely a sign of intelligence - it's also a sign of free time and hobby preferences. In any case, I don't know if I would have gotten the question right even if I had heard of a mare's nest, but my not having heard of it was at least partly a failure of my cultural environment. And I spent my entire life in an English-speaking community where the vast majority of the grownups were university educated. This makes me wonder how well these tests can assess people from other source cultures.

3. Why do the KIPP programs seem to rule out the possibility of going to college from public high school? Gladwell describes a USian middle-school program called KIPP, which gives motivated but economically disadvantaged public school students significantly more instructional hours so they can get scholarships to good private high schools and from there go on to college. But why are the school boards working on the assumption that the way into college is a private high school? Why aren't they also doing anything to help motivated by economically disadvantaged high school students go to college? Have these school boards written off all their high school students?

4. What are the Entitlement expectations of working-class authority figures? The book discusses Entitlement from the point of view of parents' expectations of their children and parents' and children's expectations of their authority figures. But what about the authority figures' expectations of people. In my own life, my friendly neighbourhood authority figures seem to expect that I'll have Entitlement, and I think it makes their jobs easier if people express their needs rather than being quietly complacent. Do working-class authority figures feel the same way, or do they expect their charges to be quietly complacent? If they do expect complacency, are they under them impression that they know their charges' needs as well as or better than their charges, or do they just not care?

Saturday, August 08, 2009

Why don't I have Entitlement?

In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell describes a concept (originally from Annette Lareau's research) called Entitlement. (Both Gladwell and Lareau lowercase it, but I'm capitalizing it to differentiate from the generic.)

Entitlement, in this context, is a sense that you're totally allowed to ask people in authority stuff. If you have a question, you can totally ask. If you need some accommodation, you can totally ask for it. If an authority figure is miss informed, you're totally allowed to set them straight. This concept is brought up in the context of child-rearing. According to Lareau's research, middle-class families tend to raise their children to have Entitlement, whereas working-class families tend not to and the parents themselves are more likely to quietly defer to authority. (I'm normally not comfortable talking about "class" like it's a Great Big Thing, but it's an essential part of this concept and relevant to my personal observations about my own experience.)

I've been thinking very hard about this, because I had a solidly middle-class upbringing (my own room, an allowance, chores and responsibilities on principle rather than out of necessity, family vacations, music lessons, extracurriculars, going to university was a given), but I don't have Entitlement. I don't feel like I'm allowed to ask, I feel like I'm imposing and breaking from What's Done when I ask. I feel like the people in authority know exactly what they're doing and are doing it for a very good reason (and, as I've blogged about several times before, it both scares me and pisses me off when they don't know exactly what they're doing and don't have a very good reason).

So I'm trying to figure out why this is.

My first thought is that my parents didn't raise their children to have Entitlement because they themselves weren't raised that way. Their upbringing was most definitely working class, and I can't imagine my grandparents had any time to do concerted cultivation. But here's where it gets bizarre: I think my sister (just under three years younger than me) has Entitlement. I wanted to be a musician, I signed up for music class in high school and only joined the more advanced school bands when specifically asked to do so by a teacher. My sister wanted to be a musician, she joined a band and later helped start another couple of bands, playing actual gigs and even making a CD. Could it be because I'm Gen Xish and my sister is pure Gen Y? Could it be that my parents had become familiar with more middle-class parenting techniques by the time my sister came along? Or could it simply be a difference in personalities?

My second thought was that my Entitlement had been bullied out of me, but upon further reflection I realized that I had less Entitlement than I was expected to long before the bullying started. My first pertinent memory is from when I was 3 or 4 years old, in Montessori school, in what would now be described as junior kindergarten. I wanted to play with these beads, and I was told that I wasn't allowed to play with them because you have to be able to count to 10. (The counting was relevant to how one played with the toy, but I forget how exactly.) This confused and frightened and baffled me, because I could totally count to 100 at the time. But it never occurred to me to tell the teacher that I knew how to count to 100, I just assumed they had some big grownup reason I didn't understand and slunk off to metaphorically (and perhaps literally) curl up and cry. Years later, while going through some papers at my parents' house, I came upon my old Montessori school report card. One of the comments was something to the effect that I didn't show the teachers what I could do and what I had learned, worded in a way that made it clear they expected me to take the initiative. Reading this, I was flabbergasted. I had had literally no idea whatsoever that the teachers might have wanted me to show them what I could do. The thought never occurred to me. I would never - not even with the benefit of adult retrospect - have come up with the idea myself that the teacher wanted me to take the initiative of showing her that I could count to 10. I always assumed that if grownups wanted something from me, they'd ask. So it seems I never had Entitlement in the first place.

I'm not sure if my parents tried to instill Entitlement or not. (They did specifically try to prevent any sense of small-e entitlement.) If they did try to instill capital-E Entitlement, it wasn't nearly to the same extent as the parents described by Lareau. In the example cited by Gladwell, parents taking their nine-year-old son to the doctor told him "You should be thinking of questions you might want to ask the doctor." Not just that he can ask, that he's allowed to ask, but that he should. As though it's something he has to do to Be Good. My parents might have told me that I was allowed to ask questions, or they might have assumed that I knew I was allowed because no one told me I wasn't, but they never would have made a point of telling me that I should think of questions to ask. On the other hand, when I did find myself in a situation where an adult or authority figure unexpectedly tried to get me to express my thoughts or opinion or preferences, I'd become frightened. The first time I ever got a hamburger at Harvey's and they asked me what I wanted on it, I thought it was a trick. Throughout childhood and adolescence and even early adulthood, whenever authority figures unexpectedly asked me for an opinion or feedback or what I wanted, I'd panic (figuratively) and not be able to come up with a satisfactory answer. Part of this is introvert brain - I don't always instantly have words for things that I'm not expecting to have to articulate or that I've never given a moment's thought to - but there was also an underlying fear that even though they were asking what I thought, they didn't genuinely mean it. I thought asking for what I really wanted was Not Allowed, and they actually wanted me to just quietly and passively go along with what they intended (as Lareau describes the working-class children and parents as doing.) The panic would be because I wasn't able to guess at what the authority figure intended, and I thought I'd get in trouble for giving a wrong answer.

Of course, there's also the possibility this whole thing is so generational it doesn't apply to me at all. I've noticed that in general pure Gen Y people are better at Entitlement than I am. I've talked to a few other people who are X/Y cusp and they don't think they were parented into Entitlement either (although there wasn't a large enough sample size to rule out the possibility of working-class influence). But Lareau's book was published in 2003, so the research was done probably shortly before then. The kids she studied are 15-20 years younger than me, so maybe the parenting techniques used on them are completely inapplicable to me. But the fact remains that I do see Entitlement in people of all ages around me - and in my own sister - and I don't have it. There must be something somewhere in there.

I'm not completely lacking in the ability to do Entitlement. I've been able to do it when it's really truly important. For example, when I applied for translation school, I wasn't informed of the date of the entrance exam and didn't find out I'd missed it until two weeks after the fact. I took the initiative of contacting them and asking if there was anything that could be done, and was granted permission to write the exam independently. I got it done because it had to be done and I had to be the one to do it. But if it can get away without being done, I can't work up the nerve. I clearly remember being terrified to ask my high school music teacher if I might possibly swap the size XL band shirt I had somehow ended up with for a size small and would totally have spent four years passively wearing an unflatteringly large shirt if I hadn't heard that one of the guys really needed a bigger shirt.

I'm only recently starting to see how acting with Entitlement is helpful not only to me but to the people I'm dealing with. I'm learning this mostly from observing my Gen Y colleagues. They walk in with Entitlement and look competent and professional, where I looked like a shy, nervous child. There have been a few cases where I was given more responsibility than usual and had to act with Entitlement or other people's work or the product delivered the client would have suffered, and my Entitlement ended up having a positive effect for everyone. When I do act with Entitlement, it always ends up getting mentioned positively on my performance reviews. And when I was recently responsible for training one of our summer students (Why, hello Impostor Syndrome! I haven't seen you in a while!) I couldn't have done it properly without her Entitlement. So it does seem to be something I need to be a proper grown-up. But it doesn't come naturally, and I'm not sure exactly why.