Not Corporate Material

Dear Dotsie
I've just written down your words Dotsie...what a wonderful help...that message hit me...it contains the seeds of miracles...to think that what we speak, think and pray...can have such a profound effect... and to remember that. That's the key I think...constantly being aware of the effect of how and what we say. I'll keep these words by me daily to remember.

Thank you Dotsie. That was greatly appreciated!


Dear Dianne

That's fabulous! I think you'd do a fantastic job Dianne...not just in helping corporate wives with respect to hierarchy...you could also help them to see who they are and that their lives mean more than just being the wife of a corporate executive...Just follow your heart Dianne...it will help you decide it that is part of your path.

With love
Leigha

Thanks ladies. It's nice to know that others understand. Some would ask me what I was complaining about because of the other benefits. Well, walk in my shoes for a while.

I might start working on an outline during my upcoming trip. Will miss you! (See Travel Thread)

Though I am not a corporate wife, I would be willing to give you any input to being a woman in corporate America if you need it.

Oh trust me...I already had you in mind to interview! If any of you other ladies would like to be interviewed, when the time comes, just let me know.

Dianne, I'm impressed by your complete lack of BS -- either taking or giving it. Brava, woman! The reason you don't understand the snobbery and artifice is that you never bought into that whole deceitful game.

Be thankful that you CAN'T understand it!

***************

One nice thing about being a full-time crafter is that there's little snobbery. We're all just two bad craft fairs in front of the bill-collectors. The few snobs in this business are angry wannabees.

*****************

I'm reminded of an incident from my childhood. In the late 1950's, my father brought home a co-worker to have dinner with us and later speak to the children and Mom about the civil rights movement. There were no black people in our neighborhood, and my father thought it was important for us to meet someone who had lived through segregation and knew the issues first-hand.

Decades later, after my father died, I was talking to Mom about my father's work. My father was the first Jew to break through the company's glass ceiling, and he still was discriminated against a lot on a daily basis. There were no non-Caucasians working there, except in menial cleaning positions.

It was only then that I realized my father's co-worker -- whom he introduced as "a friend from work" -- must've been a janitor.

I'm glad I was raised with a good value system.

Dear Meredithbead

Sounds like you had a great dad Meredith...strong of heart and noble.

I saw your jewelry on your site and it's dazzling!

With love
Leigha

Meredith, what a blessing to have such an open minded example through youth. WOW!

Jersey Girl,

I just quit my "big time' job. I, too, was the only female department head of a large male corporation. I did this for 20 years and fought the system the entire way.

Now that I am raisng a son to be a gentleman, I found my day life and evening life in total conflict. Not to mention my health and my realtionship with my husband.

With benefits, I was also six figures and am a bit anxious about finding another job, benefits etc but with faith I will be better off.

I could not play the game either. I had these male counterparts tell me they could not stand to walk on a certain side of the building because all "the women were over there". I should have told him maybe he would learn a thing or two if he did. GRRR>

Would love to contribute to a book. It is up to us to raise yound men that will not succumb to this type of gamesmanship.

Lynn

There is another side to that as well. Once a woman "makes it" in a corporate world, there are some women who will turn against her. Its almost like they consider her "the enemy" once her new role is announced. I know...been there, done that. I was made a manager and suddenly I was dropped from lunches, parties, etc. that was given or thrown by "the girls." I was left out in the cold when they gathered to chit chat, and once I LEFT the managerial role (my own choice), I was immediately welcomed back into the folds of their sisterhood. Trust me, I found new sistahs after that experience. I never could figure that one out. So it is not just the men who discriminate.

JJ

Dianne - it doesn't sound to me like being corporate material is something to want...this coming from someone who walked away from corporate jobs and now shovels manure for a living...grin.

My heart goes out to anyone who is real and you sound *Very Real*. This is a tough old world for *Very Real* people...right, Boomer Sibs? We all know, don't we?

A person would think this "corporate" mind set wouldn't be a problem down on the farm...right?
WRONG! There are people in this county who won't visit me because I "live in a big house". ---Heck, if they feel that bad about it, why don't they come over and help me clean this "big house"!?--- There are women of color in this county who won't visit me because "it's just not done" --- because "the power structure, white of course --- will cast a jaundiced eye to poor old not understanding white Sandra.

Sorry folks need to get over themselves. There's not gonna be segregation in Heaven; that comes beforehand and it has *nothing* to do with color!

Dianne - come visit me and we'll laugh out loud together at those silly people!

Not knowing or visiting you Sandra is definitely THEIR LOSS....This world of ours would be a very dull and ugly place without different colors, can't they see that???

Have you ever played this game: Sit in a crowded place and watch the people walk by and try to guess what they do for a living? Or, see a homeless person and dress them in expensive clothes and fix their hair and think about how different they would come across to people? I do this all the time. We judge unfairly and often because of a job someone holds. The movie Crash is a good example of prejudice and racism.

Sandra, when I first met my editor, I remarked about never being invited to anyone's home. She told me it was because we were like royalty in that small town (because of my husband's job) and I almost choked I laughed so hard. Sadly, it turned out that way because I had to have my own party if I wanted to go to one. But then, my silver lining was the alone time to sit down and write my book.

JJ, you're so right. Women are the first to shoot their wounded. I just don't get it and never will. It's almost like we want to see our own gender fail so we'll feel better about ourselves and that sounds like an entire chapter in a book!!!!!

I had an experience a while back where the snobby difficult person was the husband and the compassionate, albeit mistaken, person, was the wife. We were up at my mother-in-law's farm and conditions were very primitive at the time - no hot water, no bath or bathroom, etc. A couple had been lied to and ended up turning in our turnaround with their Corvette in a trailer, because no one higher up wanted their yard ruined with the tire marks. Their vehicle got stuck in our mud and the husband was furious. His wife, I could tell, thought we were like people from Appalachia because of our appearance, despite the fact that all of us were college educated or more, and she wanted to pay us to reseed the lawn. My mother-in-law asked her instead to make a donation to her deceased husband's scholarship fund, which she did. I like the memory, because I try to remember the assumptions that were made about us in that situation, but I also appreciated that the lady was gracious despite who she thought we were. It is a weird feeling, however, having people look at you and assume you are poorly educated and materially poor before we had uttered a word.

We do that, don't we? Judge for unknown reasons. Is it our conditioning or how we were raised or what? And, how do we make sure we don't ever do it again? It's a fascinating subject, isn't it?

We probably developed it originally to learn how to notice things and protect ourselves, but we do not need that so much anymore. I try to train myself to think counterintuitively with positive assumptions from apparently negative data, e.g., assuming a speeding car cutting me off and passing me is carrying a heart transplant instead of just speeding. I also try to ask a question that is not judgmental or does not reveal a particular bias and have been relieved many a time that I did not articulate my assumption. This leads to another issue sort of, which is why people ascribe the sex or race of a person as the reason why they do what they do, e.g., drive poorly. I hear it more than I would like when I am a passenger or bystander and I always wonder why those are the attributes they select for why someone does what they do, when they do not seem to have any logical relation to the conduct in question. I almost think that has to be learned behavior over time, although I have sometimes asked the "offender" if they heard it at home (when I can ask without offending myself) and they almost invariably deny that their parents said the same sort of thing.

My husband is Jewish and it hurts and offends me when people make jokes regarding his faith, like they are all tight with money, etc. Ironically, as a young boy, he attended religious school and they taught tolerance and understanding of other's faith. Maybe we should all do that.

My parents were racist. I think that's why I'm not. It was so ridiculous and uncalled for. I could never understand their reasoning, if that's what you want to call it. Beyond reason to me.

I don't understand Racism at all. I got a heaping dose when I moved to Alabama. No not from everyone, but a few. A few too many just the same. Usually the ones who were acting this way, were negative on many things. The government, the neighbors, the company, etc etc.
These are generally people who are not happy with themselves. I did see a positive change in one Mother whose son became friends with a neighbor boy. No more racial slurs from her.
Funny...huh?

chick

Racial slurs. Hate them. Just hate them. It really shows the inner workings of someone. Shows a clear lack of intelligence. Needless and useless behavior. Makes me so sad.

It's funny you ladies mention the negativism and how it really is more a reflection of what is going on with the people themselves than anything about the people they are criticizing. Haven't you noticed that people usually reveal their bigotry within a few minutes of speaking with them? I used to guess it took about 10 minutes for them to reveal their true colors.

Uvagolfmom in many cases people do reveal their bigotry in a few minutes. What disappoints me most? When people say they are not racist...but. It's the "but" that gets me.
chick

I wanted to tell all of you that I've been in touch with the woman about us writing this book on corporate wives. We want to explain why corporate rules are set up, what happens when they aren't followed but more importantly, how a woman can keep from losing herself in the middle of it. I'm excited.

Chickadee, you are so right, I had to laugh rather than cry. It is sort of like how I tease my husband how he says "Maybe it's me" only when he does not really think so. The "but" can be a big one. It makes me think I need to be more thoughtful about my use of the word "but" myself, and make sure it really is a fair "but".

Dianne,
If you want a good place to talk with corporate wives. Go up to Wayzata, MN, where your husband is and visit the Newcomers' Club. It is literally filled with corporate wives!

On the other topic: I have a distaste for intolerance for those who are different from oneself or have different ideas. Being from the South, I have heard judgments made all my life about the educational and intellectual status of Southerners as well as the attitude that if you are a Southerner, you are by default a racist.

That is absolute B.S. People from the South are not stupid and are not racist to any greater degree than the people that I have met since I have been living in the North. The biggest difference I can find is that Northerners don't have a Southern accent. People are just people, and you are going to find examples of every possible expression no matter where you go.

Bigotry is the tool people use when they need to put someone else down so that they can feel better about themselves. Like someone said earlier, they just need to get over themselves!

Dannye, are they young corporate wives or ones who have been in the corporate world for a while? Thank you for that info.

I've noticed that people consider a woman who has a Southern accent to be gentle, sweet, kind and the original Georgia Peach. But a man with the same accent is automatically lowered in IQ because of it. Isn't that strange? Here I am, living in TN and trying to get an accent!

I am confused by this topic, but I think I might have been in this situation without really thinking about it.
I was married to a man who was CEO of a good sized company at the same time my own company grew as large as the one he headed.
Strangely, people from his company treated me as if I had a nice little hobby. In fact, my own family treated me the same way. I would be in the middle of a multi-millin dollar negotiation and my sister would call and be upset if I didn't drop everything and go shopping.
I mostly just ignored the whole thing. And when I was with my husband's company, I just played the little wife.
If the people who worked for me were intimidated, they certainly never showed it. And there were times when I wanted to be more intimidating.
Sometimes especially the doctors seemed to resent that I owned the company and made more money than they did. A couple tried unsuccessfully to get my contracts, but over all everyone ignored everyone else and did their job. I rarely socialized with anyone who worked for me though I had a lot of parties, etc. for my husband's co-workers.
It was a weird time I guess.
smile

I think the problem is that people create a hierarchal standard, grouping or trying to group people into different boxes to make it acceptable for their minds to deal with because that is how people's minds have been trained since kindergarten.

Due to this boxing and categorizing people in relationship to their education or jobs, we have all become more insulated from our own thought processes en masse.

Most people lack a feeling of self-acceptance and need to be accepted by others based on some standard they have been taught since birth, whether through culture, ideology, education, or the business world, ie their parent's viewpoints and things have always been done.

To buck the standard of society's norm is out of the question in many people's minds because they do not have enough self-acceptance to see a new way of being.. They are forever searching for their own worth in other's eyes, which opens the path for self-judgement, or that of judging others.

To be free of this ladies only requires that you live a path of truth within...and understand that the energy that you live within supercedes the lower vibrations of other people's fear which is the ultimate cause of self-judgment or judging others.

with care
Leigha

Well, that does it, Leigha. I'll be interviewing you for the book, along with some others here. You are soooo right on, as usual.

Wow Smile. You had both worlds. You were married to a corporate officer and you were one yourself. Geesh Louise.

Dianne, I guess it was another of the weird times in my life when I was doing a lot of very different things all at the same time.
Seems like I either do everything at once or nothing at all. Lately I'm doing the latter. -- And I'm good at it too.
smile

leigha, you have such a nice way of expressing yourself with words. So talented and beautiful.

Smiles, are you feeling any better in regards to energy? I hope you do.

Dianne,I bet this book will benefit many women in the corporate situation. I wish you the best of luck with it.

Dannye, I was born and grew up in Newfoundland, Canada. Everyone in town was caucasion, but there was always someone who found a way to be against another. Religion. Catholics vs Protestants.

When I moved up North (Ontario age 17)I got to learn about racism of color. I couldn't believe how some people think so bad of others because of their skin color. I also found out that many of them thought Newfoundlanders were backward and stupid.

When I visited my new found family in Alabama,(I was 40+) they were so different in their thinking and mine. They made no bones about it. Almost proud of it. It disappointed me to no end. This was MY family and how could they think this way. I love them just the same.

It seems that no matter where we go, there will be people against people.

My Mom taught us to "be good." That meant not being rude or mean and not say bad things to or about ANYONE. She meant business and would not have it any other way. She was the most positive woman I have ever known in my whole entire lifetime.

Sorry for the ramble. Funny how we go from one topic to another isn't it.

chick

I was so turned off by my parent's racism and judgements, I think it caused me to go the other way. It was so ugly. Strangely, if a ethnic family came to their church, they were suddenly okay. Just too weird.

I started working on an intro to this book yesterday. Wrote about 350 words and something I'm noticing is...I'm sarcastic. I can't help but joke about my induction into the Corporate World and The Rules and how many of them I broke without even knowing. How stubborn I was when my husband would try to explain things to me and what a nonconformist I was or still am and something has to make sense to me for me to believe in it.

So, I read it to my husband over the phone last night and he stopped me in the middle and said, "Dianne, this is really good." You have to realize that he doesn't usually express himself in this way and especially about my writing. I asked him if it seemed more interesting because I was writing about him and he said no, it flowed smoothly and he really liked it.

Something funny: In writing this with my friend, we're both breaking a Corporate Rule. So, I'm writing about them and breaking them at the same time.

Dianne,

At the time I was up there, a lot of the women in the group were seasoned corporate wives who had followed their husbands from one assignment to another. There are a huge number of corporate headquarters in the Twin Cities, which probably explains it. The majority of these women were wives of highly placed executives. For them, going to lunch meant forking out $100 before the meal was over. Once or twice was OK, but as a regular expenditure, it was a little over my budget.
I found that some of them were down-to-earth and others were caught up in their "position" (?)


When I lived in MN, the moment I opened my mouth and the Southern accent emerged, you could actually see the disdain on a person's face. I asked for the location of an item in the grocery store in Wayzata, and the clerk started talking to me very slowly and enunciating his words carefully as if he thought I was an idiot.

Where I live now, I have had some interesting experiences. One woman that I didn't know except to greet when I saw her was eavesdropping on my conversation with my mother who was visiting. I told her that I had just been selected for the Marquis' Who's Who in American Women.
The woman interrupted our conversation without thinking and said, "They chose you?"
I looked at her and said, "And why not?" Since she didn't know anything about me, I thought her answer would be interesting.
She said, "Well, I thought that was for well-educated professional women."
Not wanting to make it easy at the time, I said, "And so....?"
She said, "Ummmm...Well, I can tell you're from the South. So I just thought...."
I just said, "Maybe you need to rethink your prejudices" and walked away.

I'm not nursing anger about the way people act. It just saddens me whenever I am faced with such prejudice, no matter who it is directed toward. Being from the South just gives me many opportunities to dis-identify from the negative emotions that can accompany such interactions. I should probably count my blessings!

Here's a story for you. At one time I worked with my husband in his optometric office.

One of the local weathermen arrived for his appointment. He had to wait. Imagine that!

He treated me like dirt when he inquired about not having been seen. I was my sweet self, apologized, and explained the delay. He hemmed and hawed, giving the women employees dirty looks of exasperation and disgust.

Hubby comes out while the guy was stammering around the opticianry. Hubby introduces me as his wife...and he changed his tune immediately! He was full of smiles and pleasantries. Oh, now that he knows I'm the doctor's wife he's going to treat me differently.

Who cares if he's a weatherman, and who cares if my husband is an eye doctor. Sometimes people make me crazy!

FYI: I won't say who it was for the locals, but I will say it wasn't Bob Turk. I love Channel 13!

Dianne, while researching for you book you may want to read, "Powerful Mate Syndrome"

Angela Wilder sent me a copy, or her publicist did, but I haven't gotten around to reading it yet.

If you order it through Amazon on my site I might make two cents. HA!

Never heard of it but I would love to read it. Thanks.

Dotsie,
Marty Bass I bet. My daughter said he won't give you the time of day . He is rude .

It is funny, isn't it? I remember how people treated me back when I was a lifeguard at a country club before and after they found out, either that my parents also belonged to a country club or that I was going to go to a college that had snob appeal. I ended up working in a law firm years later for one of the members who treated me with dignity before he ever knew if it would do him any good, but never forgot the valuable lessons I learned from that experience. P.S. It's terrible, but Marty Bass ran through my mind as well.

Isn't it interesting what impresses people? When I was published, my IQ increased a lot! People were suddenly interested in what I did or had to say. Until that time, I was just the wife of...