She was horrid when she was bad
Posted on December 13, 2006
Filed Under Asides, characters, poetry, Rant, relationships, stupidity, work | Comments Off
I’m a pretty confident person but I’m modest enough to be, err, modest about it! Instinctively, I genuinely believe I can do anything or be anything I want, even though I’m in my thirties and the grey hairs are starting to poke through my magnificant mane of hair more and more everyday. When I day-dream, I could be an astronaut but I spend enough time already in airplanes so that’s a non-starter. I could be a world-class chess player but I prefer doing other, more lively, things so I choose not to. I could be a male model but I’m really a private person so that’s not an option either.
It stems, of course, from my Irish mammy who always believed the best in me when I was a child/teenager. She refused to believe what other people were saying about me! Of course, they were usually always telling the truth about me but her irrational belief in me rubbed off and now I’m the successful business person who drives a Ford S-Max (sigh!).
The reason I mention this is because one of my staff has me stumped. He’s very good at his job and I can see the enormous potential in him to further excel at what he does. But only if he chooses to apply this potential. And sometimes it’s like drawing blood from a stone. When he’s good, he’s very good. But when he’s bad, he’s very bad*. I believe in him but I think the problem is he doesn’t believe in himself.
Maybe the Peter Principle applies but I don’t think so. But, at the same time, I also don’t want to spend too much time thinking about it. There’s only so much I can do because, as the saying goes, ‘you can bring the horse to water, but you can’t make it drink‘. There has to be a simple solution that’s staring me in the face but I can’t see it right now.
It’s a shame we don’t do Kris Kindle (aka Secret Santa) in our company. One of us could buy the other a self-help book!!
* This is actually from the oft-misquoted poem ‘There Was a Little Girl‘ by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:
There was a little girl,
Who had a little curl,
Right in the middle of her forehead.
When she was good,
She was very good indeed,
But when she was bad she was horrid.
Another version quotes:
There was a little girl who had a little curl
Right in the middle of her forehead’
When she was good she was very,very good
But when she was bad she was horrid.She stood on her head in her little trundle bed
With nobody by for to hinder
She screamed and she squalled and she yelled and she bawled
As she drummed her little feet against the “winder”(window).
