Worse Than Comments Are Interventions

I told myself that I wasn't going to write a post about this topic but for some reason, the only way I can really get things off my chest is through writing about it. Talking through things helps me reason but writing helps me purge. And I don't think I have been that busy lately with only having two classes left in my last semester (a lot of my classes were block classes that finished halfway through the semester) but I certainly haven't written on this blog in a while. So because that is the case, let me catch up a bit on what has happened lately.

First off, I have been having struggles finding a job. Johnson & Johnson is just one shining example of how I don't have enough experience to do what I want to do. I went through three rounds of interviews with them and HR cut me off because I didn't meet their post-graduate work experience metric. This is the story of my life currently. MBA doesn't mean advancement... At least not yet anyways. I guess I have to bank on it meaning something later in my career because the only jobs I can get interviews with it in the business world are entry level. Good thing I didn't rack up any college debt... Oh wait... Grad school... Riiiight.

Second headache as of late, girls don't really work right now. I have tried dating. I have tried dating for a long time. This blog is full of great stories of success and failure and quite a few more funny dating failures but failures nonetheless. Right now, I am about to graduate in a month and so I decided to put dating on the back burner so I can spend time with my friends that I made during my MBA program before we all head out to our various careers around the country and around the world. And here enters my third issue. Friends... What really classifies as a friend?

Are friends people that are brutally honest with you? Are they the people who see your flaws and accept you for who you are anyways? Are they the people who you can be yourself with? These are all assumptions that I made on what classified someone as a friend but a perspective is only one person's version of reality from their narrow point of view. And after my spring break in Moab, my friends whom I went with decided to share with my their point of view of me in what felt like an intervention of sorts.

Don't get me wrong. I ask for feedback a lot more than the average person. And I tend to listen and ask questions so I can understand why and where someone came to the conclusions that they did so I can determine how I can improve. I want to improve. That is the reason I asked for the feedback in the first place. Taking that into account, the feedback I got stung more than usual. It hurt actually and it has been hard to shake it. It wasn't like it was funny or that what they said could have become funny. They questioned my character and the relationships I thought I had with them.

They said that I couldn't be trusted. They said that I was a liar and a slimely salesman. They said that because of those things, they kept me at arm's length because they didn't know what was real and genuine or if I was not being authentic. They said I didn't own things or take responsibility. They said that they couldn't believe that I was happy for them because of their success when I was trying to be. They said a few other things as well but these were people that I thought I was close to. These were the people that I spent most of my free time with. They are the guys I live with, go climbing with, go hot tubbing with, etc. I appreciate candor probably even more than the next guy but this felt more like a brother stabbing you in the side and twisting it than someone telling you that you have food in your teeth.

I am not the best person by any stretch of the imagination. And it is true that I stretch the truth time and again. It is also true that any person's perspective is their viewpoint of reality and everyone is different in that regard. So I decided to see if this was only the viewpoint of a select few individuals or if this was common. I asked a few other people to try and get a 360-degree perspective. I was grateful to find that their belief was fortunately not commonly held however, it did make me begin to doubt more and more my self image and my relationships. Was everyone as honest with me as these few people? What were people really saying with their body language versus what they told me?

I guess one of the reasons this was such a hard pill to swallow was because it lacked the Sandwich Effect when it comes to delivering bad news... sandwiching the meat of your discussion with some positive feedback to soften the blow just a bit. It was like getting a sucker punch followed by right hooks and left jabs. I honestly felt and continue to feel beat up just being around them now because I can feel the sting of their comments even a week or two after the fact. I know I need to work on those things because I don't want this to happen again and I will try it but at the same point in time I don't know how to directly improve our relationship or their perspectives. I feel whether or not this is true that this is kind of out of my control.