It’s ok to laugh at yourself, and how blogs are self-therapy

Categories: RuminationsPosted on October 19th, 2007

When I do stupid things, one of the best ways to self-heal is to blog it and tell the whole world. Silly and ironic, it just feels right, besides, everyone makes mistakes.

Yesterday, some of my new colleagues and I were sharing embarrassing stories so I sent them these links, it’s a Friday and I’m finally going home to the bay area, it’s been a long trip, I logged a lot of miles (SF > Boston > Chicago > SF > Boston > SF) in the last three weeks. As you know I just returned from HK and Vancouver just a few days before all this.

Here’s three very embarrassing stories about me

My Embarrassing Scoble Powerpoint Incident in front of Hundreds of People: After reading this my new colleague Lucy covered her mouth in astonishment for quite a while after reading this, nice.

A victim of my own doing and how to be a dumbass in Facebook: Why my wife sent me an email with every word in all CAPS!!!1

Crises Management Template: Child Relations for Social Networks (Facebook): Some PR agencies create pre-made crisis templates, I created this one for my friend Jennifer Jones, her son was abhorred when she requested he be her Facebook friend a few months ago.

For some reason, after publishing these events, it somehow felt better, perhaps this is why PostSecret is the 14th most linked to blog. Fortunately, I haven’t done anything really stupid, but as soon as I do, I’ll let you know. This post is set on timer, I’m flying over the rockies right about now.

You have some stories to share? Let go and leave a comment below, feel free to be anonymous if that makes you feel safer.

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This entry was posted on Friday, October 19th, 2007 at 8:16 pm and is filed under Ruminations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Comments

Stefan Martens

Sounds magnificent! ;)

Something that didn't happen to me, but which I saw with my own eyes:

My soccer coach wanted to show us some tactics from a DVD he brought.
As he put it in it was - such a cliché - porn.

So he excused himself and went back home to get the right DVD.

When he came back and put that other DVD in, it was...porn. Once again.
That was so incredibly stupid that it still makes me laugh when I think back to it ;-)

Jeremiah Owyang

Oh dear, that's a bad one. So did you remove yourself from the team?

Beth Kanter

Embarrassing moments and mistakes are teachable moments. They don't feel great while they are unfolding, but reflection afterward is a great teacher. I would much rather blog about my mistakes than keep to myself and continue to feel badly and perhaps repeat them.

Last weekend I was doing a workshop for nonprofits that consisted of a lot of people who were very new to social media and were older - from the health care industry and some working with senior populations. I got a lot of skepticism -- "Why would we ever want to use this stuff," etc. My laptop was being used for the presentation and I forgot to turn off my skpe. In the middle of it, my 87 year old Dad calls me on skype video. His calls always start with him screaming into the mic "Beth, can you hear me? Can you see me?" I was mortified at first and then I asked him to tell everyone how old he was and why he uses skype and his thoughts about blogs. It worked out because of the context. Next time I have to remember to sign off of skype.