Recall some of the best guidance you've ever been given!

[always_searching]

I thought we could all share some of the best advice (I used "guidance" in the title, because "advice" is against the guidelines) we've ever been given with the other LS members.

 

The first piece of advice that comes to my mind is from a guy I use to work with when I was younger and use to wear more revealing and scandalous clothing. He is a minister now...

 

Anyway, he came up to me one day and said, "Always_Searching, why do you feel the need to dress that way?"

 

Being the feminist I was at the time, I was livid. I replied, "What the hell do you mean by that? I like the way I dress, and if you have a problem with it, I suggest you look elsewhere!"

 

He smiled at me in what I considered patronizing at the time and said, "You are a beautiful girl on the inside and out, but if you continue to dress that way, the only thing men are ever going to see when they look at you is 'sexual object'. You will never be respected as a 'person' who is her own 'subject,' because you are presenting yourself as 'object'."

 

Again, I was floored at the time and quite offended. Looking back on it now, and after having changed my wardrobe and analyzed the attention I receive now as opposed to the attention that I recieved then: he was right.

 

Definitely the best piece of advice that I didn't take at the time, but wish I would have.

[Ody]

This story might sound silly at first but hear me out.

 

When I was about 6 or 7 my Dad and my Uncle took me to the diner.

 

I really wanted a hamburger. I still love hamburgers and at the time I had a little kid reaction, "oh boy we're going out to eat and I get to order whatever I want!!" Eating out was rare in my household.

 

For whatever reason they decide to order me steak. I probably meekly suggested a burger, but didn't want to contradict my Dad *and* my Uncle! "Nahh Ody, you're a big boy now, order the steak!" I'm sure it wasn't teasing or anything, perhaps we were celebrating Pre-K graduation and they thought a little boy with a big steak would be cute or make me feel special.

 

So a few minutes after the waitress takes the order I burst out crying. Just bawling, hardcore. Totally out of character - I rarely cried as a child. Dad and Uncle are shocked and confused. Finally they get it out of me how badly I wanted a hamburger, and that I was crying because we ordered steak.

 

They calm me down and change the order to a burger deluxe. More importantly my dad says something like "Ody, you've got to speak up when you feel like that! You can't just let other people walk over you!" Uncle agrees completely, I get a big talk from these two role models on the importance of speaking up, and it's all cemented in my mind with the hamburger reward. Fortunately I took away the lesson of speaking up to get what I want, not crying to get what I want.

 

Maybe it seems silly, but I apply that advice regularly to this day, and it's one of only a few things I remember from that age. It's even relevant here I think - it was the earliest lesson I learned on acting with confidence which is certainly bullet point numero uno for men trying to date women.

[boogieboy]

 

This is the solution to at least half of mens problems right here. I now live by this. Thank you Lu.

[Thornton]

Pretty much all of the best advice I've had in my life has been from my mother; she's one smart cookie and I'm very lucky to have her. When I feel down, she always tells me that the further you get down, the further you have to drag yourself back up again, so you might as well start dragging yourself back up as soon as possible in order to minimise the effort

 

She has this funny saying: "With the facts at the time as you understood, you made the best decision you possibly could", which basically means you shouldn't regret anything because even if you were in that situation again, with the same information, you'd make the same decision.

 

She's divorced from my father, and when I ask her if she regrets marrying him she says no... she says she lived her life and made what she thought were the correct choices, and although things turned out badly she still acknowledges that if she had her chance to relive it she'd only make exactly the same decisions based on the same information all over again. She says that by wiping out bad things you'd also be wiping out good things too, and what you think would have been better might actually have been worse, there's no way of knowing. She says if she walked away from the church instead of walking inside and marrying my father, she could have been hit and killed by a bus on her way home... so obviously she's better off having married him and survived, no matter how badly things turned out. I guess what she's talking about is unpredictability... you can't know where the path you didn't take would have ended up, and fantasies usually involve a better outcome when in fact that path may have led to a much worse one. She has a great deal of common sense, my mother

[LucreziaBorgia]

My grandparents both gave me advice that didn't sink in until much later in my life after they had both passed on.

 

My grandfather: It isn't what you know, its who you know.

 

I fought against that one for years, convinced that knowledge would overcome connections. I've learned in my life that quite the opposite is true, whether I like it or not. Sometimes knowledge wins out, but not too often.

 

My grandmother: (after telling her how depressed and terrible things were for me): Just stop being that way.

 

I was so mad when she said this, thinking... but, I need therapy, I need medication, I am really depressed, I can't function, you can't just 'stop being that way', etc. It seemed so flippant at the time. Now, I see that I was that way because I was choosing to stay that way and not making any real effort to NOT be that way with my life. I still have my problems, and things still happen that get me down, but every day I make a conscious decision to put negativity aside and focus on the positives. I wish she were still alive so that I could tell her how wise that one thing she said to me was. I know what she meant now, but I surely didn't then.

 

I honestly do think I was dumber coming out of college than I am now twenty years later. I thought I was so smart. My grandparents were likely looking at me wondering how someone so smart could be so 'dumb'.

[Devil Inside]

I have fought many demon sin my life. At one particular point in my young adulthood I was truly standing at a crossroads. I had found my life in the throes of addiction and irresponsibility.

 

I knew that I needed some help to get things back on track so I started going to some support group meetings. At these meeting they laid out some things you should do in order to recover.

 

One of my mentors in this group was an older gentleman that was a judge, until he hijacked his career with substance abuse. I was telling him that I knew what I needed to do to get things back on track but it was hard for me to admit to myself and others what was really going on.

 

He looked at me dead in the eyes and said "You can't always save your face and your a$$ at the same time." To this day I till use that with my clients in their therapy...and most importantly I use it in my life.

[josie54]

I recently took an architectural drawing course, and had the absolute best teacher I've ever had in my life--he was a retired architect, probably around 65 or so, and he really knew his stuff.

 

Anyway, we were all trying to create our renderings to try to make the spaces we were drawing look realistic. And many of us (including me) were terrible at it.

 

He told us several times, "Don't draw what you THINK it looks like. Draw what you actually SEE."

 

It took me a while to absorb that....but all of a sudden I realized that a brick wall doesn't look like a bunch of rectangular squares (which was what I was trying to draw), but like a field of textured lines with a mottled finish. All of a sudden, it clicked, and I could draw spaces that looked much better and realistic than before.

 

A few months later, his advice came back to me when I was depressed about other aspects of my life. It really applies in so many ways. I was THINKING my life was horrible, but what did I actually SEE? Nice home, good friends, etc., etc. Sometimes we get so much in the thick of what we think is wrong, we don't see what's right.

 

I know that this particular piece of advice will stick with me for a long time.

[threebyfate]

Outside of LS, one of my old mentors used to always say "If you want to run with the big dogs, you have to learn to pee a little higher". To this day, it still cracks me up and is THE singular, most useful advice, within my career.

 

As for advice on LS, I've forgotten who stated this but it's paraphrased as such, "You want a relationship, not a project". It's another quote that never fails to bring an ironic smile to my face and is the utter truth, in a nutshell.

[quankanne]

from my high school algebra/trig teacher, that has been applied to other facets of my life the past 25 years: Don't use up all your time getting caught up in the problems that are too hard to solve, but first do the ones you can get out of the way because you know how to work them. *Then* come back to the hard ones.

 

from my college roommate and best friend, who hated that I bashed myself over failed romances: Don't sell yourself short.

 

he was right, too. There are a lot of neat things about me that the right guy saw and appreciated and loved when we met.

[darknightie]

-you cannot control others, so never try to do X in order to get someone else to do Y. Do what you do for yourself.

 

- in rerlationships: you either get all of me, or none of me.

 

- you attract more bees with honey

 

- Enthusiasm (and attitude) is EVERYTHING in life!