Validate Sign Presentation Myself

When I was still in school, I started reading Anandabazaar Patrika, a leading Bengali newspaper. Anandabazaar has always been a Congress sympathizer and has always staunchly opposed BJP. My ideas regarding Indian politics and who is good or who is bad were shaped by this newspaper. I started believing that the BJP was a hardcore Hindu party taking India to the medieval ages, and the Congress was a progressive secular party taking India forward. I believed Secularism means appeasing the minorities (read Muslims) and remain apologetic for being Hindu in a Hindu majority country, and I was also made to believe that Muslims are forever victims in free India.The newspaper made me feel that it is bad to declare yourself to be a Hindu. I preferred calling myself a secular Hindu (I am not sure what that actually means) and rather felt proud in presenting myself to be a pseudo atheist, so did my friends, so did countless other youths of Bengal. Basically, we were made to believe that Hindus have to be timid while declaring their religion because that is the sign of tolerance and that is how we can make Muslims feel safe in this country. We were also made to believe that there were no bad Muslims, only bad Hindus in our country. Basically, we had always been apologetic for being Hindu in a country with a predominantly Hindu population.Hindus have been maintaining a very timid existence since India got her Independence. The mainstream popular media houses also did their job of educating the youth that Secularism in India means giving preference to the minority religions over yours. It was due to this reason that many practicing Hindus prefer calling themselves secular/atheists(without realizing their meaning and even without practising them) and not simply Hindus, without realizing that you can still be secular besides being a Hindu.We never realized that Secularism actually means respecting all religions equally and that there is no harm in practicing your religion as you wish to.Now for the first time, the scenario has been changing and common Hindus are feeling proud of them being Hindus. For the first time they feel that there is no shame in calling themselves Hindus and that there is no reason for believing that the minorities (Muslims) are just victims in this Hindu dominant country.This new Hindu resurgence happened because of Modi's charismatic presence in Indian politics and the rising popularity of BJP. Muslims(not the educated ones) are disturbed because their role as king makers in Indian politics is losing its ground. Muslims are disturbed that timid Hindus are now coming out of their closets. They are disturbed because true Secularism is being practised(my comment here is matter of debate, I know).Please don't bring up the issues regarding beef ban because Hindus had to forget their religious sentiment to allow Muslims to eat beef for so long. Hindus have always thought whether our religious celebrations are hurting Muslim sentiment. Muslims took it for granted that they can openly cut and sell beef as it is their religious right(I don't know how), though it hurts Hindu sentiment. Can you show me an instance where pork is openly or readily sold and served in countries with predominantly Muslim population? If certain Hindu practices and rituals can be banned or limited(Jallikattu or Diwali celebrations or Durga idol immersion) in the name of maintaining dignity of our secular constitution or in the name of animal rights, why the same cannot be done regarding Muslim practices?(I need to tell you that I am against all kinds of animal sacrifices in the name of religious celebrations or rituals).So, basically Muslims are haters of Modi for mainly the following few reasons.He is the man who was portrayed as a mass murderer of Muslims in Gujarat without proper valid grounds by mainstream media houses across the country and it shaped Muslim people's ideas about Modi.He made a Hindu resurgence possible in India when Hindus are taking pride in their religion for the first time in centuries or even a millennium.Muslims are not enjoying the over attention and undue privileges of being Muslims, and their roles in Indian politics are demeaned. Even some so-called secular parties including Congress, TMC, who used to blatantly appease Muslims for vote, have started appeasing Hindus for the first time. For example, we can mention Rahul Gandhi's temple visits and his Kailash Mansarovar pilgrimage, TMC's Ram Navami and Hanuman Jayanti celebrations etc.My final words?Respect others' religions, but don't be an apologetic Hindu. Be a proud Hindu.

When Boyfriend gets me something I specifically told him I don't like, my feelings express dissatisfaction, discomfort and anger and my brain interrupts her with "Be nice Dushka! A gift is very thoughtful! It's not OK for you to be mad at him for getting you a gift".Then it hurts even more, because I feel I'm at war with myself.This is how I sort things out with myself:Dushka, feelings are always, always valid. I am trying to tell you something. Don't shut me down. In particular, don't judge me when what I am feeling seems petty, small, or rude. Give me space. Listen to me.This is in great part what it means to love yourself.Now, does my dissatisfaction come from Boyfriend's behavior or my own expectations? If it's my own expectations, I have to check that or this dissatisfaction will follow me everywhere, right into other relationships. This destines me to a life of unhappiness.I told him I didn't like this and he got it for me anyway. Does this gift represent other parts of my relationship where perhaps I feel unheard?Or maybe this flare of disappointment is a sign that I am not happy in the relationship?This experience teaches me two things.One, that I should never shut down what I am feeling even if my brain thinks my feelings are inappropriate. I should always listen to myself.I have to remind myself to never dismiss my own feelings.And two, that it's important that I explore what my feelings are really about so I can course-correct, communicate more clearly and set my life on a path designed for my happiness.

I remember moping over this the night before my first day as an intern. I should have been memorizing lab values, but was instead rehearsing how I’d present myself. Do I introduce myself as Dr. Asher or Dr. Nitin? Should I refer to the junior residents as my colleagues or my seniors? What do I say when one of my patients thanks God instead of thanking me?But for you to understand the strength of my dilemma, you’d need a frame of reference first.I’d grown up attending an Evangelical church, something like the one I occasionally attend now: Hope UC Hyderabad (formerly Pearl City Church Hyderabad).Take for instance, what a typical Easter Sunday service looks like. Like the one I missed in this answer (Asher Nitin's answer to What is the most hilarious example of hypocrisy you have personally experienced?).It begins a week earlier with reminders like this on their FB page.The actual service begins with a bang. Yep. Christian Pop bands pop and fizz. Here’s Pearl City’s band popping a bang (bang-bang!) and lots of dry ice (foosh-foosh!).And this is their audience. There’s a lot of Amen-ing and Praise-Jeebus-ing going on.Everything is hyper-chromatic and borderline psychedelic. Even the sermon.And this act, of throwing one’s hands up in the air to praise Jeebus and such is infectious. Here’s a classroom full of gullible schoolchildren we conned into doing the same thing. (My church searched around for a disconnected and remote school, then waltzed in and made a huge charitable donation, and told all the kids their school fees would be paid for the year if they all chanted, “Jeebus is my savior! Praise Jeebus!” Bam. Three hundred converts in a single day. Just like that. Yeah baby! That’s how Jeebus rocks and rolls! Whoo!)I’m kidding. You assumptive assh*l*s. That was the rural Teach-a-day program. Or something. (The day anyone tries influencing a gullible mind is the day I report them to law enforcement, publicly shame them all over social media and, for dessert, beat them black and blue -but mostly blue- in the Church parking lot, with a hardcover edition of the Bible.)No Amrikan-missnuries trying to pull that sort of s**t here.But to the point: most of the congregation comprises hard-working middle-class Indian families who simply happen to be very vocal about their perception of God’s presence in their lives.It just happens that they tend to express above sentiment in the same word. Over and over again, until overexposure to it induces physical nausea in me.Don’t get me wrong. I love them so much I don’t even have to pretend to like them. And they have a very good reason for praising God every third sentence of every fourth paragraph. But the validity of that reason doesn’t stop it from being obnoxious in practice.So I had a decent amount of experience with this type that fires off Amen(!) and Praise Jeebus(!) every two minutes. That sort of behavior had a lot to do with me falling out of Church and becoming an atheist when I was 17. It had nothing to do with me finding my faith and becoming a Christian 5 years later, so I avoided it when I could. I still don’t like public vocalizations of faith; as in public prayer, or Amens or Praise-Jeebus-es. I personally prefer to potentiate my faith on the incognito.So I did worry a lot over what I should say, and more importantly, what I’d end up saying if I were to be confronted by a grateful patient who thanked God instead of me.Internship began, and three months in, I found myself embedded in an excellent surgical unit. The unit chief was my long-time mentor, Dr. Bhagawan. He ran a full ward. We did a lot of laparoscopic cholecystectomies and chalked up a high rate of post-surgical patient satisfaction.So it’s another day in the out-patient, and one of our cases is wheeled in to be discharged. His family had come to take him home, so they file into my little cubicle in the same order they would have exited the sinking Titanic: toddler, younger sister, elder sister, mother, father, and an old man I presume is the father’s tennis partner.It’s lunch-time, everyone else is lunch-ing, while I have my instructions for this case, so I go through the forms, double-check his medications and tell them they can leave. As I shake our patient’s hand, his mother asks me for my name, I tell her, and her eyes light up (presumably when she realizes my first name is Hebrew).“Um, doctor, are you, uh… Christian?”“Yessum I am.”She looks around hopefully at the father’s tennis partner, then goes, “We’re Christian too. Can we… can we pray? A thanksgiving prayer?”I suppress an impulse to start listing the potential adverse events possible post-cholecystectomy, bare my teeth in a non-threatening fashion and say, “Why, definitely.”The brood-mother draws her sari to cover her head, and looks meaningfully at her spawn. The cabin-refugees all bow their heads. I don’t. I’m quite sure one of them will snitch my expensive stethoscope during Jeebus-time, while my eyes are closed.“Dear Esu Prabhu (Jisus Krist),” she begins, “we thank you for our Rajesh. Thank you for healing him. Thank you for saving his life. Prabhu (god), most of all, we thank you for this doctor. Thank you for choosing him as an instrument of your healing. Thank you for such a wonderful, kind, compassionate, knowledgeable, experienced…”Now, I am aware that I am easily the greatest doctor of my generation (and all generations before me, and after me as well, I’m sure) but even then, it is nice to be complimented, and so the tips of my ears tingle with justified pride in my knowledge and skill as I listen to the hag drone on.“…doctor. So thank you, Prabhu, for Dr. Bhagawan. And thank you for this intern, Dr…ah, your name was…?”“Asher, ma’am. Asher Nitin.”“…for Dr. Arshad Niddin, who signed these forms. Amen.”So, yes, I did feel a bit offended, because I don’t like to be reminded I am rather small and very stupid, and it’s bad enough to be reminded that I am not the smartest person in the room (and in the world of medicine, that happens in nearly every room) without having to be reminded that I am not, in fact, in control of everything. Or even anything at all, come to think of it.So I don’t like it to be reminded of that. But it’s good for me, and I think a lot of my fellow physicians need that same reminder from time to time, that they’re not the driver, and are only along for the ride; this wild, wild, achingly beautiful one-time free-of-charge ride.I should clarify, however, that I am the greatest form-signer of my generation (and all generations before me, and after me as well, I’m sure). I’m sure there is a Nobel Prize for Form-Signing in my future. In the distant future, I shall be awarded one, and then everyone laughing at me will be sorry, you hear?

Disclaimer :- 29 photos in a row and if you go through you will scroll down liking every pictureComment for the best funny picture you like - Hope you will not write down about 8th one1 - Father and son2 - Two brothers and their cousins in a tub3 - 10 years apart4 - Family 22 years apart5 - Two brothers and sister6 - Loving pasta then and now7 - Cecile 23 years apart (1987 & 2010, France)8 - Mother and son9 - Leanne 29 years apart (1982 & 2011, New York)10 - Together for 50 years (1961 & 2012)11 - Meeting Hulk Hogan12 - Father and son 28 years apart13 - Taylor & Josh 15 years apart14 - Christoph 21 years apart (1990 & 2011, Berlin Wall)15 - Pizza and burger 18 years later16- 20 years apart17 - Father and son 60 years apart (1949 – 2009)18 - Mechi 20 years apart (1990 & 2010, Buenos Aires)19 - Brother and sister still love playing in the sand20 - 15 years apart21 - The white T-shirt guy22 - Best friends 29 years apart23 - 17 years apart24 - Family portrait in a red van25 - Three brothers 29 years apart (1984 – 2013, Texas)26 - Still sitting on the toilet27 - Two brothers 20 years apart2 8 - Father and his kids 23 years apart2 9 -Johanes 17 years apart (1994 -2011, Hamburg)Thanks for watching !Edit 1 - thanks everyone for my first 100 upvotes

I crave love.More specifically, I crave being loved by someone I want to love me.That someone has to tick certain boxes, rock my boat, and have something ‘wow’ about them.For me, being attracted to someone always seems to be a sub-conscious, almost visceral, reaction. Yet I understand we borderliners need validation. So we go for someone who is so wow that, if someone like them likes me, I can't be quite the totally worthless piece of unlovable trash that my core belief usually tells me I am.So when I meet someone, and I have found out all I sensibly can about them, and I've decided they're a bit wow, I will do everything in my power to make them mine.I know from the feedback I've had over the years that I come on to people in a way that tends to make them feel really special; I don't mirror or create a false past or false reality (come-ons for which we boderliners are so often accused of), but I do seem to be able to create an irrisistible connection with prospective partners.So when I've got myself my ‘wow’ partner, I'm intoxicated with joy.But with the joy comes the fear of abandonment:Why would this wow person want to be with a worthless piece of trash like me?They may like me now but they'll go right off me when they get to know me betterThey don't really like me; they're just messing with me or using me to make an ex jealous so they can win them backAnd those insecurities gnaw away at me like a cancer from the early days of a relationship. And increase in intensity as time goes by.All the time I'm with my partner I'm being the best girlfriend I can be to them. It's partly because I love them like crazy just because they love me, partly because I really do think they're wow, partly because I need to be liked and instinctively present myself as likable or even lovable.But, at the same time, I'm perpetually hyper-vigilant for signs that their interest in me is either fading or insincere.Because those core insecurities are always gnawing away at me.When alone I have nightmares and sleepless nights…. my insecurities tormenting me with inescapable thoughts of being abandoned and left hurting.I self harm too sometimes.And this pain gets worse and worse. And the better things seem to be between us, the greater becomes my fear of losing you. And the greater will be the pain of your loss. And I'm already anticipating the most excruciating pain ever.So at some point I'll start lining up someone to move on to, not because there's anything wrong with you or us; it's simply to escape what I see as inevitable and unbearable pain.I don't think you'll see any sign of that. So the day I come and see you and tell you that it's over, that the relationship isn't working for me, will probably come as a bolt out of the blue to you.And I'm sorry.But, if it's any consolation, I would have come into the relationship believing - or at least hoping - that I could make it work this time. And the feelings I had for you from the outset were what would have given me that belief.Though I also have to admit that you were, almost certainly, someone I moved on to before bringing my existing relationship to a close.And, if it's any further consolation, you'd have probably had a brilliant time with me. Cos I've lost count of the number of times I've been told I'm the best girlfriend ever. (Not that I have ever believed that at the time.) And, cos I'm a quiet borderliner, I won't have kicked-off or argued with you at any time that we were together.

Validating your business idea is crucial before you shell out thousands of dollars into building a product, setting up the business and hiring people. I recently spoke to Sam Hysell, he's worked with the Lean Startup team and now works with new entrepreneurs to help them validate their ideas, you can find the interview here: http://apple.co/1LNPWnM. I'll go into brief detail about what we've covered below.The best thing about the time period that we're living in is that technology has enabled entrepreneurs to able to validate their idea at a nominal cost. It has never been cheaper to start an internet business.Here's how I would validate it:1) Set up a landing page. Before you go out and shell out thousands of dollars on hiring a developer, just see if people would even be into the idea by creating a very clear and concise landing page. The landing page should describe what the product is, how it works (3 clear steps) and a sign up button where someone can submit their name to be added to the wait list. Take a look at http://quickmvp.com you can literally set up a landing page in five minutes that contains a clear call to action. You can even test interest levels based on different price points to see if customers would be willing to pay for your service. This is a great tool to help validate your idea and you get great analytics to see how engaged people are with your idea.2) Find out who's interested and bring people towards your landing page to see if people would sign up. If you're getting a lot of signups your steps closer to validating your idea. With Quickvp you could spend $30 on Google ads. I also like this one tool called Http://flutter-app. I use this all the time to test out new features for LawTrades. You can follow accounts that contain your ideal customers very quickly with a few clicks. For instance, if I was opening up a new taco shop, I can use Flutter-app to follow people that follow Chipotle, or Taco bell since my ideal customers are probably following those accounts. Doing this manually would take forever, but you can do this with Flutter very quickly. Make sure your Twitter bio has a link to your landing page so people know what to click on. If a few days go by and your landing page is getting traffic but no signups then tweak the landing page.3) Make sure you're going to Meetup Events and meeting new people face to face to talk to them about the idea! If you're shy, then you MUST come out of your comfort zone. Just find out where your target customers are hanging out and what Meetup Events are they apart of and go there to ask for feedback on your idea. If they like it then have them sign up. Build up the hype! If they sign up, these are going to be the people that your in communication with as your building out your platform, leave an awesome impression so they come back when your platform/service is ready.4) After you have some signups, I would interview them and talk to them about the idea. See what they like about it and why they want to use it. Make sure you also ask them about their feedback about various price points that you have in mind. Interviewing is key because you'll get the feedback you need to build it out. Once you talk to potential users you can fine tune your elevator pitch and really be able to figure out the actual problems that your customers care about.All of these things can help you gauge user interest for what you're doing and I've seen some pretty successful entrepreneurs implement these strategies. You should also visit http://Leanstartupmachine.com they host awesome weekend workshops to help you validate your business idea.I'd love to hear about all the new ideas that are on this question. Feel free to message me! You can always check me out at LawTrades.

A great presentation consists of two important parts: well-structured content that empowers the idea that you're trying to convey and an eloquent style of delivery that keeps your audience's attention on your content.  Both parts aim to facilitate the communication of your idea to an audience.  Poor structure makes it more difficult for your audience to follow along and extract the salient points, and poor delivery detracts from the content.An effective and general paradigm for structuring content that's applicable to any presentation, essay, research paper, funding pitch, job application presentation, resume, or tech talk comes from what MIT Professor Patrick Winston -- an AI veteran with a lecture series on How to Speak -- calls VSNC. [1]  Based on this structure, any compelling presentation or paper builds upon the following four cornerstones:a clearly defined vision statement,an enumeration of concrete steps toward achieving the vision,an articulation of salient news and results with clarifying details, anda summary of contributions.Most presentations, surprisingly enough, can fit into this paradigm and become much more powerful when designed with it in mind; weak presentations usually omit one or more of these parts.Offering a succinct and clear vision (preferably on its own slide if slides are used) early in the presentation establishes the thematic goal of the talk.  It defines the boundaries of what's relevant in the ideas presented and provides the glue that ties various points together.  Succinctness and clarity in the vision ensure focus in the talk.  Overly detail-focused individuals, in particular, sometimes create presentations whose themes are only implicitly defined and whose points flail around haphazardly.Once the high-level vision is established, enumerating the concrete steps for attaining that vision gives the audience a mental path to follow and understand what's necessary to signNow the goal.  The steps review progress already made and highlight what still needs to be done.  Most presenters tend to get this part right since it's a straightforward summary of completed and future work.With the path enumerated, sharing news and details about recent accomplishments provides an excellent opportunity to enrapture the audience.  Numbers, statistics, graphs, analogies, demos, and stories that showcase results often work well.  Engineers tend to overvalue abstraction and to inadvertently neglect to include the details, but the details and stories are often what make the talk compelling.Wrapping up the talk should be a summary of contributions.  A common mistake is to end a well-organized presentation merely with a rehash of major points rather than crystallizing the unique contributions that the presenter or the presenter's team actually accomplished.  The contributions may be completed work that moves a field, product, or company forward or they may simply the be the refinements of ideas that offer a completely new perspective.To make the VSNC concepts of vision, steps, news, and contributions more concrete, let's take a look at how they apply to a real-life presentation and how they help convey ideas more clearly.  Mac and technology fans look forward to Steve Jobs's Apple keynote presentations, partly because they're dying to know the next visionary Apple product and partly because Jobs's presentations are extremely well-executed.  His commanding stage presence definitely helps, but a decomposition of his recent March 2nd keynote [2, 3] on the iPad 2 reveals that the VSNC paradigm provides a powerful framework for understanding how his presentations are typically organized.Jobs starts his presentation by summarizing the vision for the iPad 2 in a single, crisp slide: "Our most advanced technology in a magical and revolutionary device at an unbelievable price."What were the concrete steps involved in building this magical and revolutionary device?  Jobs outlines the steps in these two slides, reviewing upgrades to faster dual-core processors and graphics while maintaining low power usage and the efforts to make the device even more lightweight and 33% thinner:Having established the vision and the steps to getting there, Jobs pitches the new iPad 2 by going over salient news and results to get the audience excited.  He chooses to do this by showcasing demos on the iPad 2 of FaceTime, PhotoBooth, iMovie, and GarageBand:At other keynote presentations where Jobs also reviews the momentum of existing products, Jobs will often augment the news portion by sharing and marveling at numbers and details on how many iPhones or iPads were sold in the past year.Jobs concludes with a summary of new engineering, product, and pricing contributions to convince the audience that 2011 will be the year of the iPad 2.  Some of the points were previously covered in other slides; others like the statistic on 65,000 iPad apps reminds the audience that contributions made to the original iPad still apply to the iPad 2.The application of the VSNC paradigm to Jobs's keynotes illustrates that VSNC  is a surprisingly versatile and powerful framework for both crafting and critiquing the organizational structure of presentations.Once the content is solid, the other foundation of a great presentation is delivery and style, for which here are a few useful pointers:Enunciate and speak slowly.  Unbridled enthusiasm for your work or your idea and nervousness to finish the presentation as fast as possible can easily lead to an overly quick delivery and slurred words.  If you feel that you're speaking at a slow and comfortable pace, slow down further to about 50% of that pace.  Speaking slowly provides a variety of benefits beyond the obvious of ensuring that your audience can understand what you're saying; it gives you more time to choose your next words, helps slow down the pace to keep you relaxed and in control, and provides more of an opportunity for you to watch the audience's expressions and re-adjust your presentation strategy (for example, by rewording an explanation upon detection of blank faces) as necessary.Train yourself to avoid sprinkling your speech with "ums" and "likes," and replace them instead with pauses.  Either have a friend count your "ums" or "likes" or record your own presentation and count them yourself later.  While initially uncomfortable, pauses actually sound more professional and help accentuate key points that you're trying to communicate.  Colin Firth's Oscar-winning performance and delivery in the The King's Speech exemplifies how a carefully enunciated and pause-filled speech can motivate and move an audience.Maintain eye contact with the audience.  In particular, pick a few friendly faces from the audience that appear to be reacting to your presentation.  Their nods of approval and understanding give positive feedback and bolster your confidence during the presentation, and any confused expressions act as an indicator that you might need to slow down and re-explain a possibly tricky point.Don't read directly from your slides.  Time spent on reading slides is time not spent maintaining eye contact with the audience.  Moreover, reading long sentence-like bullet points on slides conveys a lack of preparation and  reduces the incentive for the audience to actually listen to you since they can just read the text faster themselves.  A better approach is to list key, succinct points on the slides and to connect them together with your own words.  This incentivizes you to better rehearse to have fluid transitions between points and forces the audience to pay attention in order to understand the presentation.Move deliberately in time with your points, so that transitions in your physical stage presence correspond to transitions in your presentation.  This helps to both reduce the amount of haphazard pacing while accentuating important transitions in your presentations.  If your presentation has three points, one simple way of doing this to walk in the shape of squished baseball diamond so that you walk to a new base as you transition to each point and then walk back to home plate as you conclude.If your presentation involves writing on a whiteboard, make sure to write with an open body that's perpendicular to the board rather than facing the board.  Facing the board while you write occludes the text or diagrams and increases the lag between when you're writing (and likely speaking) and when the audience can actually read what you wrote.If there is Q&A at the end of the presentation, always repeat the question, possibly rephrasing in your own words.  Repeating the question ensures both a) that the audience is able to hear the question, and b) that you've actually heard the question correctly and don't waste time or look silly while answering an incorrect interpretation of the quesiton.Skills in structuring effective presentations and delivering them clearly come with practice.  Keeping vision, steps, news, and contributions in mind for any talk or presentation will make it stronger, and dissecting strong presentations and critiquing weak ones to understand how the speaker handled or mishandled each cornerstone will make your own talks better.----------[1] http://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.8...[2] http://events.apple.com.edgesuit...[3] http://www.geeksugar.com/Apple-i...

I was working on a major divestiture valued at over $300M and despite my age and gender I was the one who knew all the facts, did all the research and the decks and put together all the information for the potential buyers.  Serious buyers were invited in to review the materials and would come in for a meeting.  Our offices were behind two security doors - one at one end of the hall near the main secretary and receptionist, and the other for the rest of us.The team of 7 lawyers, bankers, and consultants  - all men - went to the wrong door and so I went to open it for them.  I said hello and then led them to the conference room, which was empty.  As soon as they got there one of them says, "Sweetheart could you get me some black coffee with sugar?"  I stood there for a second not knowing what to do.  then I said, "Sure. Anything else?" I got another three coffee orders and left.When I came back, with the secretary carrying two of the four coffees, my boss and the head of the department were there and were wrapping up pleasantries.  When my boss saw me with the coffee, he just assumed I had helped the secretary since I saw she had her hands full. The moment my boss said, "Okay well, Laura is really leading this so um, I'll hand it over to her."  I started to review the presentation on the projector  and explain all the details.The men were obviously embarrassed, and in fairness I was very young, had opened the door for them and so I get they wouldn't know I was the one who did the financial model and valuation of the assets rather than an expert at how much cream you put in someone else's coffee, but I KNOW they would never have made that mistake if I had been a man.

I use a metaphor to picture the way that I witness people’s stories and traumas over the day. These experiences move through me, like water through water maze, or air through sails, or vibrations through the strings of a musical instrument. Never a bucket and never a sponge. The clients’ lives move me deeply, and the compassion that I feel is genuine, but I don’t hold it for them or take it home.To take on a client’s pain is a disrespectful crossing of boundaries. It is theirs, not mine. Together our job is to transform pain into gold, or wisdom, or self-respect, or something else. But it’s still theirs, not mine.There are also a few CBT strategies that I learned in my internship that help me to keep from getting rocked too badly by things I hear. I think of these as the three things to keep perspective. Forgive me that I can’t recall their original source.This story I am witnessing is theirs, not mine. It’s not happening to my family, either. If I start to imagine “what if this happened to me? to my child?” I stop myself and repeat—”it’s theirs, not yours.”This is one event among millions of events that happened at the same time in the world. Just one. Some were wonderful, some were horrible, many were in-between. But it didn’t happen everywhere—just in that one place. For example, a war veteran tells me about an experience in Croatia—I remember that while that was happening many other things were going on as well.This event was one moment of the person’s life. Even a huge tragedy like war is a particular time in history. People tell me about the worst days of their long lives. There were better things that happened before that, and there will be better things that happen again. It’s like one chapter from a long book. The bonus to this one is that I usually get to witness some of those better chapters to come.Some people refer to these as “don’t over-personalize” and “don’t over-generalize across space or time.”Finally, sometimes I need a quick little ritual that represents clensing myself of somebody else’s energy, or my own frustration (usually about the systems I work within, not the clients that I work with.) Some people that I know smudge—but I tend to be allergic to burning herbs and averse to smoke alarms. Some people actually sprinkle themselves with salt water, perhaps kept in a little jar or bowl on their desk. I like that idea. Myself, I kind of “swish” my hands over my skin without touching, from head to toe. It’s quick—just a couple of seconds between clients can be enough. And I open a window or door and bring in fresh air. These small rituals that involve the senses and some movement are very powerful tools for staying healthy while working with hard things.