Week 97: The Coney Island Dip AKA Jumping in with 2 Feet – #AlphaFemaleFriday

Week 97: The Coney Island Dip AKA Jumping in with 2 Feet – #AlphaFemaleFriday

“ WEEK 97 / 133 – 133 WEEKS TO SUCCESS “

 The Coney Island Polar Bear Club’s claim to fame, besides being the oldest winter bathing club in the U.S., are their members’ regular polar bear plunges in the winter. They, quite literally, plunge into the Atlantic Ocean at Coney Island. When you want to get acclimated to the temperature, be it fifty-five degrees or five degrees in the water, you don’t just dip a toe and hope that the rest of your body will adjust. You just go on in and leave your worries on the shore.

It’s the same idea with making decisions. Don’t do the Coney Island Dip. Be confident in the decisions you make as long as you do your research and can back them up as needed. When we’re ambivalent, we become wishy-washy, and no one likes a flake. People become ambivalent when they lack data or believe that others know more than they do. It’s perfectly fine to feel like you don’t have all the answers, and why should you? You’re not a one-person show—ask questions.

We may become ambivalent because we’ve been harshly criticized in the past for decisions we’ve made. That’s OKAY—it means we tried something, it may not have worked for clear, objective reasons, or maybe the person just didn’t trust your judgement. At any rate, it’s in the past and all we can do is chalk it up to experience: we won’t always get it right and people won’t always like us.

Sometimes we get overwhelmed with so many choices and so many decisions. We fear we’ll make the wrong choice and it will spiral us downward into an awful hole we can’t escape. There’s no guarantee that anything we will ever do will be the perfect decision—we are humans, not Swiss-made clocks, and even those fail from time-to-time.

Decisions are adjustable. Even if you’ve mapped out a course or made a decision, life will always through you for a loop. Have you ever planned an event? Whether it was your cousin’s wedding, a company outing, or last night’s dinner party at your house, you can have the whole agenda laid out to a to a tee and something or someone will throw a wrench it your plans. How you react and decide what to do next is the difference between people who think about success and those who can make it happen.

Cheers,

Kelly

@AlphaFemSociety tweets by @KellyRGonzales

About:

Each week, I take a tip from Lois P. Frankel’s book, Nice Girls Still Don’t Get the Corner Office, and explore how each of these tips affect myself and other women in similar positions on the road to becoming the women we want to be. There are far and few between who are a few steps behind me, and many more who are far advanced. I found that Lois P. Frankel’s advice applied to novice, intermediates, and experts alike. It helped me see that I was already doing right, served as a reminder to keep on doing what I was doing and how to keep that momentum going. The book also showed me areas where I could improve, and gave realistic tips to jump on board. There are a total of 133 tips, and explore one tip per week in a program I call: 133 Weeks to Success.

Join the movement using the hashtag #133WeeksToSuccess with posts which are posted every #AlphaFemaleFriday.