MIT OpenCourseWare http://ocw.mit.edu PE.550 Designing Your Life January (IAP) 2007 For information about citing these materials or our Terms of Use, visit: http://ocw.mit.edu/terms.Designing Your Life (IAP 2007) Lauren Zander and Gabriella Jordan Lecture/Discussion 3: Acting on Your Plan and What's Next• Don’t wait until you “get” yourself before you enter into a relationship o “Getting” yourself is a life-long journey. Do it while you investigate relationships. o You learn a lot about yourself by being in a relationship. o Unless you are someone who needs to learn how to be alone. Feedback on homework o Person 1: It’s overwhelming to think about changing 19 things tomorrow.  Lauren’s response: Take yourself off automatic and on to manual. • The 19 areas of your life are always happening, whether you attend to them or not. • Choose which ones you want to work on first. o Person 2: This has been amazing. I am getting up early now and getting my exercise in. I never knew I could write so much. I remember so much in my life, and it makes me look forward to turning 50 with such a better outlook on things. I share this with my son, and it’s really been valuable for him.  Lauren’s response: The less you are an authoritarian figure, and the more you are a regular human being the more your children don’t have to lie to you.  Person 2: I asked my son to tell me the things I do that he doesn’t like. He said yelling. So now I’m paying him $5 every time I yell. o Person 3: It was great to tell my secret.  Lauren’s response: Hiding is harder than telling the truth.  Bliss is bravery and conquering fears. o Person 4: I was afraid of skiing, and learned how to ski this year. It felt so great. o Person 5: I experienced awkwardness when telling my confession to my friends. They didn’t seem to care, and it was overall a bad experience.  Lauren’s response: Two things: • Are you telling right people? o E.g. Telling your boss about your sex life. • Are you picking the right friends? o You don’t want to always dwell on the mediocrity of your friends. o You want to LIVE with your friends, and BE with your friends. o Find friends that make it easier to be the latter with. What she just did was turn the participant’s experience from negative to positive, from shallow to deep. • She was dwelling in the hurt and the awkwardness, and the lesson she would take from this episode is: don’t REALLY talk to your friends! o This only leads to unhappiness. • Instead, use this experience to work toward happiness and fulfilling relationships. o We are in an elite position that we can spend time worrying about happiness. Like telling someone from Sudan that you are a vegan.o Person 6: My family has a heritable disease. My siblings and I have a 50% chance if getting it. I know that I don’t have it, and look at my two siblings, waiting for them to drop.  Lauren’s response: Work toward them not having it.  Person 6: There was a time where I promised God that I would give up all sorts of things if only he would spare my siblings.  Lauren’s response: Example of a veteran who saw his friends die. He made a promise with God that if he survived, we would do XYZ. And yet when he met with Lauren, he hadn’t done it. • Her response: DO IT! Make good on your promises. • Do you really want your life to dwell in mediocrity? • You don’t know how everything works, so don’t assume that it doesn’t matter. o Person 7: Didn’t tell the confession, because he was worried how it would hurt the receiver.  Lauren’s response: You need to ask the receiver if they want to receive. They may not, and you need to respect that. o Person 8: Told his fraternity brothers that he had lied to them about his sexual escapades. The people were inspired and wondered what they were lying about in their lives.  Lauren’s response: It gets easier to tell the more you do it and the less you are hiding. o Person 9: Told someone who was like “that’s no big deal. Have you really been holding on to that for all this time?”  Lauren’s response: Telling the truth is an amazing confidence-booster.  The longer you hide something, the more substantial it becomes.  Everyone has a bag of secrets as big as yours. • We just need to pop the bubble and start talking about it. o Person 10: Confessing porn, and masturbating to fiancé. It opened up our relationship so much.  Lauren’s response: It all starts with how willing you are to be yourself.  There are some things that Lauren confessed that left people outraged, and at night Lauren would lay in bed and think “oh my gosh, will anyone ever speak to me again?” And some didn’t, and Lauren was fine. You are honoring the people you wronged by giving them the chance to know the truth and respond.  You already screwed up the relationship with what you did before. Might as well be honest about it.  Sometimes, the only good feeling that you can expect to come of a confession is that you feel good about having gotten stuff off your chest.  Take your hits if you deserve them. o Person 11: I cheated with my friend’s girlfriend.  Lauren’s response: You should tell him because you should honor your friend’s right to the truth. He would want to know, and your friendship is just a façade now anyways. So if you’re not going to tell him, get out of the friendship.  Question from the audience: Should you tell the girlfriend or not? • Lauren’s response: That is not important. The guy is deciding how much he wants to clean up the sliminess in his relationship. The sliminess results from his lying to himself and being disloyal to his friend. Not about the girl at all. Designing Your Life (IAP 2007) Lecture/Discussion 3 Lauren Zander and Gabriella Jordan Page 2 of 5 Question from the audience: So are you saying that this guy’s friend needs to learn a lesson, and that him being truthful allows the friend to learn the lesson? • Lauren’s response: Lessons keep repeating themselves until we are ready to learn them.  Question from the audience: But shouldn’t you consult the other person who did the cheating? Because that is going to get her in trouble, too? • Lauren’s response: Do you really want to protect a liar? The chips will fall, and the world is a better place when they do. If you protect a lie, you can’t BE with