February 2019 Pointers from Papa

“Guilty Trip”

Years ago, one of my Japanese friends was teaching a class and was giving a lot of positive examples. He was doing this in English, his second language. At some point in the lesson, he realized that hearing so many good examples might be discouraging to the people in the classroom, who were obviously imperfect, like all of us. He caught himself and said “I’m not telling you these things to send you on a ‘guilty trip.’” It was so cute—a “guilty trip.” Non-native speaker language mistakes can be so charming and endearing.

Sometimes when I see all the good ideas or examples on goodgrandma.com, I hope that it’s not sending any of our readers on a “guilty trip.” That is not the purpose of goodgrandma.

On another occasion, I went to a leadership meeting. The speaker said “I hate these leadership meetings, because I always go home feeling worse about myself than when I came.” He went on to say “I’m going to give you 20 ideas during this meeting. If you don’t like any of them, don’t adopt any of them. But, if one or two of these ideas strike you as something that might improve your leadership, then I would ask you to consider them. Only one or two, though. Not all 20!” He totally took the pressure off!

Goodgrandma.com is intended to be full of good ideas. But it is not intended to make you feel overwhelmed. It is NOT intended to send you “on a guilty trip.”If, now and then, a GG IDEA strikes your fancy, then try it out. If some GG ideas don’t fit your personality or life situation, then discard them without further thought. Certainly don’t feel badly at all. The pressure is off. Find IDEAS, share IDEAS, and enjoy GoodGrandma.com.