Guest Bloggers – Page 26 – Disney Leadership Keynote Speaker

Hung up on numbers, by Guest blogger Lorie Sheffer

Not one to skip on my wellness checkups, I headed out on Monday morning for The Verdict. For the past several years life has been chaotic, to say the least. Like many women, I tend to put my own wellbeing on the back burner while caring for others. At my last check-up, my numbers were starting to show that neglect. Still not in the red zone, they were nonetheless creeping into dangerous territory. Mid life is the time when we can no longer take things for granted; those fries and tuna boats hurriedly eaten at the end of a long, stressful day start to come back to haunt us.

It’s hard for women in middle age to exercise. We have issues. How can you manage to walk for an hour when you have to pee every five minutes? Working up a sweat is something that we regularly do while sleeping. Thankfully, I am blessed with a back yard pool. My friends and I can swim in peace, without having to deal with public swimsuit anxiety and the fear of spontaneously bursting into flames. We don’t even have to shave our legs if we don’t want to! I began to swim laps and to eat more healthily. My husband was feeling a bit insulted about my new habit of leaving the dinner table early to put my plate into the dishwasher, then heading off to another room. He’s fine now that I’ve explained it is my way of avoiding seconds. I was almost militant in my resolve to reclaim by health and well-being.

Monday was D-Day. Blood work done, I waited to hear the benefits of all that hard work. Blood Pressure? Down from “let’s keep an eye on this and if it stays this high you’re looking at meds” to “Great!”. Total Cholesterol? Not that bad before, but now? Excellent! LDL? lower. HDL? Up THIRTY points! I was beginning to feel giddy with excitement. And then the hammer fell. Hard. Weight? I GAINED ten pounds! I felt like someone had just punched me really hard in my increasingly doughy stomach. Both my doctor and one of my friends told me that in order to lose weight and keep it off, they have to commit to an hour of working out, at least five days a week. ARE. YOU. KIDDING?! Maybe I hadn’t heard them right, what with all that pool water still stuffing up my ears. I gave up tuna boats with melted provolone for 5 oz. grilled salmon portions and this is what I get? I’m not going to lie; I didn’t take this news well at all. In fact, I ran sobbing to my favorite spouse, a pint of Ben and Jerry’s Chubby Hubby. Once my tantrum ended, I grudgingly went back to my healthier habits, thankful that I look healthier on paper than I do in the mirror.

Now that I’ve (somewhat) regained my composure, I have done some thinking. My grandmothers were chubby. Both lived to be well into their eighties. My aunt is a vivacious ninety years old and is most likely meeting her new seventy nine year old boyfriend for lunch as I write this post. She has always had to struggle with a few extra pounds. My great aunt, she of the dreaded apple shape, is one hundred and one years old, and still goes out to dinner at least weekly. Maybe I should be thankful for the longevity in my genes and not focus so much on the extra jiggle in my jeans.

Open minds, by Lorie Sheffer Guest blogger

If we want to air out our home, we open a window. If we want to take a shower, we have to turn on the water. If we want to learn, we have to open our mind.

I have found that the best way to learn is to listen. If I want to learn the most, I listen to people who have different opinions from me. Sometimes I will leave the conversation being even surer of my original views, sometimes I am a tad more in their corner, and sometimes I actually change my original thoughts on the subject.

Always, I walk away having learned something new. It’s not about winning an argument; it’s about learning why the other person views something so differently.

If we always surround ourselves with Yes Men, we tend to lose sight of the larger picture. We become blind to every perspective but our own.

Our relationship with strangers, by Lorie Sheffer, guest blogger

“He would never do something like that!”

“That’s not the person I know!”

“I will always love him, no matter what! I don’t believe the FBI report!”

Those were statements I heard that were made about a public figure involved in a current, ongoing investigation. While I certainly can respect and understand loyalty, I don’t understand the concept of thinking that we know someone we have never even met. I suppose we have all done it at some time or another. We have become attached to a public figure, be it in the entertainment industry, sports or politics. When that person, the person we claim to “know” does something to fall from grace, we are stunned. We can’t believe it! And yet if we are honest, we have to admit that we never knew the real person. We may have known the public persona, but we didn’t know the actual person. We never met them face-to-face, we never had a conversation with them, never sat down to dinner with them. But we thought we knew them. And so we will defend them against all credible evidence that shows them as someone other than our ideal.

When we teach our kids what a stranger is, what do we tell them? Most dictionaries define the word as “someone with whom one has had no personal acquaintance.”

Do we somehow look to a public figure as an ideal of what we want and hope them to be? Do we really “love” this person, or do we love the image of them, which we have conjured in our imagination? Do we really know them any better than a stranger we see on the street?

Benched, by guest blogger Lorie Sheffer

I’ve noticed a brotherhood forming among boomers lately: the over-50-but-under-65-year-olds who have been hit by layoffs. These days applying for a job is a whole new game from the days of searching the Sunday paper for career listings. Now, more often than not, jobs are searched for through listings by agencies via the Internet. Most times we aren’t even sure what company is posting the job. There are standard forms asking at what salary we left our former jobs, but no place for us to say that we would work for less, as what we basically need is something to supplement savings or tide us over till we reach the age at which we originally intended to retire. We don’t often get to speak to a real person, our application going out into cyberspace, never to be heard from again.

Aside from the financial maneuvering that is required to reevaluate our future, we also have to deal with the emotional impact. Men and women alike are not only at an age where they begin to face their own mortality, but now they must also deal with what basically boils down to being told they are no longer wanted or needed. I’ve listened to friends whose identity was tied to their career, and who now find themselves looking for busywork to fill those long hours. Most of us were raised in an era when company loyalty meant something. Our fathers retired from the same place they began their careers. Now the days of the gold watch and retirement dinner are relics of days gone by.

One financial expert I spoke with said that corporations are doing well, but will likely not start hiring until the foreign markets are much more stable. In the meantime, they are piling more hours onto their already overburdened staff, while the “old timers” are sitting at home surfing the Internet for a glimmer of hope. What a crying shame that so much talent has been sidelined.

Seeing through the eyes of another, by Guest blogger Lorie Sheffer

compassion — Seeing through the eyes of another (photo: Lorie Sheffer)

Poor urban women have been drying out urine soaked diapers and reusing them. Diapers aren’t something you can buy with food stamps and many other assistance programs, and so these desperate moms are doing the only thing they can; they reuse diapers.

I had a discussion about this with a friend of mine. She couldn’t understand why these mothers didn’t just use cloth diapers. She had used cloth on her own children. Through the eyes of a suburban or rural mother, this option seems very simple. I told her that most moms in large urban areas are not fortunate enough to own a washer and dryer. She countered back that they could wash out the diapers in a washtub and line dry them. She hadn’t had a dryer, and she managed just fine. I reminded her that many of these women live in apartments that have no outdoor area in which they can line dry clothing. Well they surely must launder their clothing SOMEWHERE! So why can’t they take the cloth diapers to the public laundry facilities? After double-checking with my urban dwelling son and his wife, I informed her that if you are fortunate enough to be able to afford living in a building that has a laundry, most leases specify that you may NOT wash soiled diapers. The public Laundromats employ attendants that make customers adhere to strict rules about washing those items. If the mothers live in a home or building that does have a back yard or area to hang laundry, items such as cloth diapers are routinely stolen from the lines, either to be sold or used by other desperate families with babies. And so the diaper drives and donations by diaper manufacturers continue.

It is so incredibly easy for otherwise kind, reasonable people to judge others simply by viewing the problems of others through their own eyes. It is so easy to say that there should be mandatory drug testing for welfare recipients. Stereotyping aside, it sounds logical. But what happens if someone fails that test? Are they then left to die on the streets? What about the children who may be depending on them for food? Would there be accessible treatment available? Or do we just consider them to be human trash, their deaths a burden lifted from society?

I have always remembered a quote from To Kill a Mockingbird. In it, Atticus Finch tells his daughter; “If you just learn a single trick, Scout, you’ll get along better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view…. Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.”