Feedback
Feedback. Everyone needs some of it, some need more than others, and too much will shatter your eardrums. Every interaction we have with the world around us has some feedback - touch a desk and your hand feels it, say a word and your ears hear it, get two mics too close together and you get that truly awful feedback-loop whine that makes everyone cringe.
There are definitely days when I feel like everything I do is in a vacuum. I've even made jokes about it - being completely invisible, being the silent piper, whatever. Part of it is career-oriented - I do a job that people only notice when I screw up or something breaks. Part of it is me - I managed to get the impression growing up that talking about yourself is bad, and you should never look for praise, but I quite like it, and I seem to need it rather a lot more than I am getting it.
I quit doing competitions because I got either no or negative feedback. I quit going to court, too, unless I recommended that someone get an award (or I'm dragged there). I've been reading the Pearls list about recommendations and scope of knowledge and such, and I keep saying "If only someone had told ME that, years ago," or it could just be that I'm too thick to have noticed when people did say things like that to me.
In a world where it is both bad and expected that people be egotistical, how the heck am I supposed to behave? And how does anyone change how they feel, anyway?
There are definitely days when I feel like everything I do is in a vacuum. I've even made jokes about it - being completely invisible, being the silent piper, whatever. Part of it is career-oriented - I do a job that people only notice when I screw up or something breaks. Part of it is me - I managed to get the impression growing up that talking about yourself is bad, and you should never look for praise, but I quite like it, and I seem to need it rather a lot more than I am getting it.
I quit doing competitions because I got either no or negative feedback. I quit going to court, too, unless I recommended that someone get an award (or I'm dragged there). I've been reading the Pearls list about recommendations and scope of knowledge and such, and I keep saying "If only someone had told ME that, years ago," or it could just be that I'm too thick to have noticed when people did say things like that to me.
In a world where it is both bad and expected that people be egotistical, how the heck am I supposed to behave? And how does anyone change how they feel, anyway?