Dear Janine:

You did very well speaking up for yourself, it was the right thing for you to do and I hope you continue to do so. If an employer or a landlord punishes you for speaking up in illegal ways, such as withholding your $1700 illegally, you should take legal action against that person.

Thing is, when you speak up, it doesn’t mean that you get your way. It means that you have a much greater chance of getting your way in life if you do speak up for yourself than if you don’t. If the employer didn’t have under candidates willing to take on the 12 hours shifts, they would have accommodated you and reduced your shift let’s say to 6 hours, giving the other six hours to another person.

Speaking up for yourself, being assertive does work and it will work for you.

I am looking forward to you starting a thread regarding the core beliefs, what I brought up in my recent two posts to you. I will now leave this thread for you to hopefully continue to communicate here with other members.

(I will be back to the computer in about 12 hours).

anita

Hi Janine,

I act in some pretty strange ways sometimes that would give people reason to fire me and also block me.

Well, let me just say that after he made his “joke”, I don’t find the way you acted to be strange at all. I don’t care for that kind of joke either, and like you, I also would not want to be sexually intimate with someone who makes inappropriate jokes like that about his partners. So your reaction makes sense to me.

And he feels hurt and betrayed that you find his humor to be in bad taste? Well, his humor IS in bad taste! Maybe he will learn to keep those kinds of jokes to himself next time.

So when you say “I act in some pretty strange ways sometimes” please explain because I don’t see anything strange in your behavior in the above situation. Can you give me a couple examples of you acting strange in situations?

What I was saying earlier about making progress each day toward your goals, let’s say one of your goals is to completely organize your living space. Depending on the state of your apartment, this task may become totally overwhelming and you may not know where to even start. What I like to do is divide large overwhelming tasks into small, doable chunks, and complete one small chunk each day. So before I get out of bed in the morning I’ll decide exactly which chunk I’m going to accomplish that day. Maybe it’s to get through the mound of paperwork on my desk. So I’ll turn on some music while I’m sorting through my paperwork, and what usually happens is I become so pleased with my clean, organized desk that I’m suddenly inspired to make more progress in other areas on the following days. The more progress I make the more motivated I become to continue. But you need to be disciplined about it, committed to making a little progress day. It’s a great feeling to come home to a tidy, organized living space.

You can also use this type of practice to get to where you want to be in your career. Maybe you see yourself working as a seamstress. So you collect information on how to get there and you then make a plan. If your plan seems overwhelming you can break it into small chunks and complete one chunk each day. Some days don’t work out as expected, but that’s okay because the next day may be better so you accept that it was a bad day and then you get right back on track. Keep at it. Keep moving forward by completing small, doable chunks. It feels good to make progress toward a goal, even when the progress is slow. The more progress you make, the more motivated you’ll become.

B