Dining Room Etiquette, Little Heinies and Illusional Careers

Telling me never to assume never works, because I will always forget.

via Brian Smithson
(and not our dining room)

Recently, we turned the dining room into my office.  This meant, of course, that we'd not have a dining room in which to eat.  (Logic works that way.)  At first I was fine with that notion, but it became increasingly apparent that eating in the kitchen on our island was not working.  First of all, it felt too crowded, and I noticed that the kids were quickly losing their sense of decorum and propriety while eating.  (Oh wait, that would mean they had some to begin with....  Well, whatever.  That's for another post.)  So this weekend we boldly made our sitting room into our dining room.

We live on the wild side around here...

Norman Rockwell
and not our turkey either

Now for my assumption. I'd naively assumed that once the children were seated at the dining room table for dinner, they'd feel as if they should behave a bit more formally and properly since they were in a more formal and proper setting.  It really made sense to me, as I've been told logic works that way. After all, studies have shown that if you change a person's environment, you may be able to change his or her behavior as well.

Thus Saturday night we all sat down to a wonderfully prepared meal, courtesy of me, of course.  It was all very exciting!  But before we even picked up our forks my three year-old decided to chuck a couple of carrots across the room to the dog.  Which is when I uttered that insanely over-used term, "Really?!"

I was almost too stunned to admonish this absurd behavior. He didn't even do that when we ate in the kitchen! But then the thought occurred to me, why would I be surprised?

After all, this is the same little man that almost- and I repeat, almost- used our newly gifted, crisp white hand towel to wipe his heinie. Thank heavens I stepped in just in the nick of time. ("But we're out of toilet paper, Mama!" was his reasoning.  I then discovered that the toilet paper was all- and I mean all- in the toilet.)

Which is why I now understand the phrase, "Don't eat the daisies;" sometimes you have to anticipate poor judgement no matter what logic dictates. And why we now have a "reasonable amount of toilet paper in the toilet" rule.  And a hand towel-on-heinie prohibition.

Yes I Do Have a Career Point to Make...

I had some serious pie-in-the-sky assumptions in college too.  For example, I imagined certain careers to be the ultimate in life.  Anything in the international arena, diplomacy, law and the like, seemed as if they were my dream jobs.  And why would I assume otherwise?  I'd always heard my family talking about my great grandfather's fascinating career as an Ambassador from Mexico to countries all over the world.  He also founded the Organization of American States, housed in a beautiful and prominent building on Independence Avenue. Moreover my grandfather had a revered international career as well. To a young person, nothing could be more glamorous.

The OAS by Gerry Dincher

And currently, as I work here in the Washington, DC area, I am always amazed at how many "exciting" careers exist here.  Attaches, foreign service officers, politicians, lobbyists on Capitol Hill, diplomats, scholars, policy wonks, FBI, Secret Service, CIA agents, journalists and global leaders alike call Washington, DC their home. (Just to name a few.) For a Political Science and French Major, it could seem a sumptuous feast of vocational paths.

However, I look at those careers completely differently now that I'm older and in the career specialty field.  While those vocations certainly hold a lot of cache and may even make a lot of people extremely satisfied, I realize that, for me, they merely represent once-revered images from my childhood and early adulthood.  When I think of the daily functions that these people perform, I now know that it's not for me.

Oh Paris

That being said, would it be cool to say that I was the Cultural Attache for the French Embassy?  Or perhaps that I was a Foreign Correspondant?  Of course!  But on closer observation it's not really the great match I thought it would be when I was in high school and college.  I'd prefer not to fill my days with those particular functions or the subject area of foreign policy.   I still find the field pretty fascinating, as I did in college, but not to delve into on a daily basis.

For example, when I read many of the journals and blogs of those with Embassy careers I can tell these individuals love their subjects.  In fact, they may love it as much as I love my field of career design.  But I don't regret not going the route I dreamed of in college because sometimes dreams are not as pleasurable in reality as they are in ones mind. Furthermore, there are often careers out there that could be more fulfilling to you than the ones you've fantasized about since you were five.  Sometimes you actually need to get to the essence of why you had that dream in the first place.

Camdiluv ♥

The difference between an image of a career (the respect it garners, the way you think you'd feel in a certain role, and how you've imagined yourself looking in that role) versus a real, living breathing career is this:  the genuine one embraces who you are as a whole, including your strengths and weaknesses.

Of course, sometimes peoples' dream careers and their actual careers are practically one and the same.  We are all too familiar with people who dream of a career as a child of three, find that it's a great fit when they are ten and amass fortune and fame from that career for the rest of their life.  The media loves to splash these individuals' lives in our faces, making the self-directed-amazing-lifetime-career phenomenon seem far more prevalent than it really is.

Obviously, if that perfect dream-it-and-live-happily-ever-after career path happened all the time I would certainly not be in business!  Nor would there be so many people-as much as 70% of the working population- who feel unsatisfied with their work.

So what is the difference between an image and reality?  Well, in the first example we have the idealistic, formal dining room behavior image versus the living, breathing, carrot-chucking behavior.  In terms of career ideation, here's a specific example: I can casually pick up a book about foreign policy, and find it very interesting as a subject, but I lose track of time in a book about human potential.  In fact, I find myself reading psychology-centered and career books for work and for fun.  And I love to talk to people about their potential more than I love to talk to people about foreign policy issues.

Yes, I fill my life with interesting things that don't necessarily relate to my career coaching practice, like singing, painting, theatre, reading fiction, interior design, planning events and taking photographs.  However, I do find that I'm always thinking about peoples' talents and personalities and interests no matter what I am doing.  I suppose that's how I know that discovering new ways to help people is just woven into the fabric of my being.

I must finish with this, however.  My daughter told her dad the other day that when she grows up she wants to help people with their careers.  (That was a first from my seven year-old.  Previously she'd wanted to be a farmer.)  Then she added, "Luckily I have a mom who can tell me if I have the right personality for it."

I have to admit that is pretty cool.