At the same time my lower back is hurting more and next Monday I see the anesthesiologist and I expect I'm going to be in for another epidural.
You know that children's song "heads and shoulders, knees and toes, knees and toes..."? Well, that pretty well describes how my body is a mess. I just keep plugging along the best I can though.
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I got a letter from my youngest brother, the one in New England, and I'm sort of dreading opening it. He's undoubtedly responding to my being candid to what I was thinking and doing the last few years mom was alive. I'm sure he doesn't like it and he'd like to castigate me, but my other brother might be even worse. It's hard to tell sometimes though. I could be surprised. I do know that mom kept saying that I was the one that always understood the people best, like that brother and his ex-wife. I can make mistakes and misjudge characters, but I think I generally have a pretty keen sense of character. I hope that comes through in this blog. Some people might not like it though.
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This next article is:Pascarella, Perry. (1993, Feb. 1). 15 ways to win people's trust. Industry Week. 242(3), 47-48, 50.
Don't worry - I'm not going to give you all 50.
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"1 Demonstrate that you are working for others' interests as well as our own....... They will observe whether you build and enable others to excel or treat them as competitors.
If you're not demonstrating respect for others, you have to expect them to conclude, 'If you don't respect me, then I can't trust you to look out for my interests.'" (p. 48)
During the middle of my two-year term with the Vienna mission I began to experience this kind of competitiveness that seemed like it really didn't belong in a mission (...or a church ...or among Christians). What is this competing against each other? It's stupid! The two main people were my boss' wife and a gal from the layout and art department. It was almost like we were pitted against each other or something but I wasn't sure if it was for real or if it was a set up (there were so many games going on, you understand, that I was leery of things half the time wasn't sure what to believe). I'm not the competitive type to begin with and then to add such an ambiguous situation even detracted all the further from it. Still, it was rather in your face and because these were people I had to relate to every day it was hard to avoid.
My boss didn't show respect for me because he didn't give me work to do that showed he respected me. How is reading software manuals for weeks on end supposed to be respecting me? It isn't. Clearly it isn't. I was much more qualified than that! Just because I wasn't an executive secretary didn't mean that I didn't have any background as a secretary. That's ridiculous. So my boss definitely did not respect me. Then he just sat by with the others and agreed with the going to America garbage for counseling. I didn't need to go to America. That's stupid. There's no way I could trust him or the management to look out for my interests after that.
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"2 Listen in ways that show you respect others and that you value their ideas.
Anyone around you is likely to have information and viewpoints that are of value to you and the organization. Be a magnet for facts. Listen especially for the frame of reference, the vision, the new ways of looking at a situation that others bring." (p. 48)
When I first arrived in Vienna I especially did this. I didn't really plan on taking that approach, but when I realized that the mission was different than I expected and not in a good way especially, that's when I went pretty much full gear into doing this. I was very attentive, I think and really tried to understand what was going on. I thought I had a pretty good background in East European mission that should help me understand them, but my background failed me there and I had to create a new understanding and I ended out comparing them more to a spy agency or even to the Communists (in how they treat believers and how the mission treated me as a kind of dissident).
I found it very difficult to find very many facts about the mission, other than the ones we feed folks back home for fund raising, but then I don't think that facts are what would really have explained the mission, unless it would have been the real heart of the mission and how it operated.
It was difficult to be too open to new ways of looking at situations, because in that group, if you weren't a bona fide accepted insider, they could feed you all kinds of ways to look at a situation and pretty soon you'd be so confused you wouldn't know which end is up. So with that group it was better to not be too open to new ways to looking at situations. Smiling and nodding with and occasional "interesting" or "mm-hmmm" thrown in might satisfy them you've been adequately duped.
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"7 Show consistency in the basic values that guide your decision-making.Mistrust comes from no knowing what to expect - not seeing any boundaries to or purpose for what you're doing. Don't put people in the positiong of saying. 'You're honest, but you're liable to make a decision that I don't expect - and possibly don't even understand.'" (p. 48, 50)
I definitely felt this way about the Vienna leadership. I didn't agree with their reasoning for doing things (that affected me) and then they'd make decisions that to me didn't seem consistent with earlier decisions. For example:
They sent me to the States for counselling only 5 months into my stay in Vienna. Then I stayed on and worked in the U.S. office. They determined that I could come back to the Vienna office and return to my old office. So I pretty much returned to where I was and they thought that I was reformed, I think. So they had me go with the Secretaries on the ESL trip and then I went on a women's ministry trip. After that my parents came and shortly thereafter I was demoted to receptionist.
Why was I demoted to receptionist? What had I done? No one had ever told me that I'd done anything wrong or anything. So this was a HUGE inconsistency.
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I'm going to have dinner now and think about some other things for the rest of the evening... like portioning out my meds for the week. My g.i. doctor prescribed nexxium for me and I just found out a bit ago (before I started on this post) that my pharmacy is holding it up because it has erythromycin in it which causes heart palpitations in me, and since I recently had the heart arhithmia problem we'd better not mess with that, so they're trying to get him to prescribe something else. I'll call him in the morning to explain more why I shouldn't take it.