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Manners vs. Etiquette

image by William Arthur Fine Stationery

Etiquette was at the top of the list of things I wanted to learn during year of the grown-up. It’s not that I see myself as garishly impolite (though I may be and not know it), but that I want to know an acceptable thing to do in various circumstances that tend to leave me a bit bewildered.

I often find myself in situations where I feel like there is a “standard” way to do something – a way that those “in the know” do it – but I don’t know what it is. So last year I started trying to learn what options are acceptable in various circumstances so that I can worry less about myself and pay more attention to the people and ideas present.

As I began to read about etiquette, I found that there is a distinct difference between etiquette and manners. Etiquette refers to the “rules” that are applied in a given context, while manners refers to the spirit of valuing others above oneself. For example, In the U.S. it is considered good etiquette to not chew with one’s mouth open, which is a natural way to foster a pleasurable dining experience for everyone sharing the table.

Letitia Baldridge explains it well in the “Introduction” of her book Letitia Baldridge’s New Manners for New Times:

Etiquette is protocol, a set of behavior rules you can memorize like a map, which will guide you safely through life. Manners are much more, since they are an expression from the heart on how to treat others whether you care about them or not.

Manners teach you how to value another’s self-esteem and to protect that person’s feelings. Etiquette consists of firm rules made by others who have come before, telling you to do this and do that on specific occasions.

Etiquette means acting with grace and efficiency, very laudable in itself, but your manners are yours, yours to use in making order out of chaos, making people feel comfortable, and giving pleasure to others.

She goes on to explain that helping a bewildered guest discover appropriate etiquette in a specific situation (assuming this is done in generosity and not condescension) is good manners. Which conversely (and ironically) means that those who chastise people for their “bad manners” are displaying bad manners. I find that both comforting and hilarious. But I’m trying not to be smug about it, because that’s rude.

I still have much, much to learn when it comes to etiquette. But I love the idea that I can grow in good manners with no roadmap whatsoever just by making an concerted effort to honor others above myself. As a person who tracks with the teachings of Jesus, that idea isn’t new to me. But in day-to-day life it seems more of a platitude than a practice. When someone breaks something of mine or their kid colors on my favorite lamp, I’m not looking to make sure they continue to enjoy themselves at my home. I’m generally pissed and hoping they feel like crap.

Yeah, my manners could use a little improvement.

Am I the only one who didn’t already have this difference straight in my head? What aspects of etiquette do you wish you knew more about? Which do you wish others knew more about?

Want to get more bits about etiquette and being a grown-up? Follow Project Grown-Up on Twitter or like us on Facebook.

How To Pick a Movie the Whole Group Will Enjoy

I live in the Middle East. The theater in our neighborhood (now that we live in a city with a theater) has two screens. It shows mainly bollywood and horror flicks. If you don’t want to go to a movie you can go out to a restaurant, have a picnic on the beach or in the desert or….

Nope. That’s about it.

So it’s pretty often that we find ourselves with a group of friends trying to select a movie to watch. But there are always issues in selecting movies with a group.

First, it takes forever to decide. Usually the group will just vote, but vote on what? All the DVDs in your collection? All the new releases on iTunes? Deciding which movies to include in the vote is its own round of decisions.

Then you vote and, while the winning majority are totally stoked, a few of the minority might be really bummed. And bummed leads to iphone browsing, chit-chat and other things that make the majority either frustrated that you’re distracting them or feeling bad because they know you didn’t want to watch that movie in the first place.

Am I the only one who has suffered choruses of “Are you sure? Are you sure you’re sure? We can watch something else…”?

But there’s an easy solution. We’ve been using this around our house for a while now and it has yielded good results every time. I even used it on a set of siblings recently and it worked like a charm.

Here’s the format:

First, let each member of the group select a few movies for the “pot”. These are the movies you’ll eventually be selecting from. We usually have people select between four and six, depending on how large the group is.

Next, go around the group and let each person “veto” a movie. Keep going around until there is one film left and, voila!, there’s your pick.

That’s it!

Of course, be flexible with it. Make it work for your own family and friends. We change it up a bit to suit different scenarios. In the case with the kids, we had one sibling choose three movies and let the other sibling choose between the three. Change it up to suit your needs. And let me know how it goes!

How do you pick movies in a group? Are you always the victor? The disappointed? Do you think you’ll try out a version of the “veto” method?

Links for Late March

Today’s RoundUp is pretty random, but I kind of like that. I am kind of like that.

While the topics might be all over the map, the idea is that no one person be inundated with five (more) things to read. Pick one or two that sound interesting and let me know what you think.

This is Why I’ll Never be an Adult
Seriously funny stuff. If you’ve never visited hyperboleandahalf, you must check it out. But only if you can overlook a little foul language.

David Cross on Talking to Celebrities
V. important skill, of course

Tax Prep For the Novice
If you are new to filing taxes, here’s some info from the Wall Street Journal to get you started.

Sleepover Situation: Ask the Parents First
The people at Emily Post talk about what to do when kids initiate invitations without asking you first.

Twelve Stressful Things to Stop Tolerating
I don’t agree with every word on this page, but this list is a great way to see if there is anything you might want to nix from your life right now.

When Should You Abandon A Goal?

I’ll make this easy on you. When should you abandon a goal?

You should abandon a goal when that goal is infringing on more important things; be it other goals, other people, or your own well-being.

Goal-wise, 2011 was a complete bust for me.

Historically I am awful – awful – with setting and meeting goals. So it was probably not the best idea to try to change that in a year of big transition and general displacement. I’m not sure what I was thinking.

Well, I was probably thinking that progress needed to be made and that something was better than nothing. And I think I was probably right about that. But maybe I didn’t go about it in the best way.

For starters, I made wildly ambitious goals. On their own they would have been too much to tackle at one time, but combined with a good bit of travel, a big relocation, and not having our own place for the majority of the year made it downright silly for me to expect to accomplish such major new things.

Don’t get me wrong, it was good for me to have set the goals. I got much farther than I would have otherwise. But at some point they began tooling me around, suffocating me in a blanket of pressure that didn’t exist.

And then November came.

In the spirit of NaNoWriMo, and looking forward to launching this blog, I made myself a very outrageous goal of writing 50,000 words of content during the month of November. Now there is a slight chance I could hit this goal under the right circumstances. But with a revolving door of guests in a house that wasn’t settled yet and with the holidays quickly approaching… well… these were not the right circumstances.

I quickly fell behind. Which meant that what I would have to execute daily to make the goal was accelerating with each passing day. I felt the pressure piling. As it became obvious that I wouldn’t meet the goal, I became pissed about it and pissed about everything that was (or that I thought was) keeping me from completing it. I wasn’t throwing dishes exactly… I just had this underlying bad attitude all day. Each day. Many. Days.

But a bad attitude is not something I accept for myself, and as I began to notice it I took it as a cue to ask where it was coming from. I stopped, asked, and discovered what I shared above. And there it was, the great unveiling. I suddenly realized that I didn’t actually HAVE to reach this goal. The goal was something I set. It was a good goal. It was good to aim and to try and to see how it felt and how it would go. But it was far from mandatory. This pressure was self-inflicted, and unnecessary.

So I punted the goal. Like that yoga move of deflecting distracting thoughts I just let it float on by.

Immediately I could breathe again. And rather than be upset that I had not reached this obnoxious goal, I was able to celebrate what I had accomplished – which was that in one of my busiest months of 2011 I had managed to produce around 26,000 words of raw content, which is much, much more than I had ever done before. I hadn’t met my goal, but I had met my aim.

The purpose of the goal was to challenge me in my writing. To see how it felt and to see what I could do. I may not have hit the target, but the purpose was fulfilled. And by walking away from the goal at the right time, I allowed my other priorities (in this case joy and my home life) to remain in their rightful place rather than forcing them to bow to some unnecessary goal.

With some goals (like employer-imposed deadlines), hitting the target is crucial. But when it isn’t, recognizing when you’ve become a slave to your goal and breaking free is not failure, but success at a bigger thing (keeping your priorities in order).

In short, goals should be a tool. If you become the tool, abort!

Taking Stock

Are there any goals you need to re-examine? Put another way, have you been putting a healthy personal and family life on the back-burner to pursue self-imposed aims? When was the last time you rested and cleared your mind? If it’s been a while, it might be time to re-evaluate. Maybe it’s just the timeframe that needs to be adjusted. Maybe you need to scale back, editing and scrapping certain aspects of your aims for the time being. Or maybe you need to just let it float on by.

What do you think? Am I wrong about this? Are there other good reasons to abandon (or rethink) your goals? Most of you are much more experienced than I am with goal-setting… what have you learned?

What Is A Grown-Up?

I don’t know about you, but the word “grown-up” makes me bristle. And if I ever hear it in a phrase like “You need to grow up” or “When are you going to grow up?”, it makes me downright angry. So how could I possibly come up with something like Project Grown-Up?

Well, that story is elsewhere, but with the myriad definitions of “grown-up” out there, it seems prudent to give a word or two about what grown-up means in the context of this blog.

In short, for our purposes,

a grown-up is someone who is growing into the person they want to become

It’s not a person who has passed a certain milestone (an age, marriage, child-bearing (or rearing), a particular job, or owning a home), it’s not the person your parents or society want you to be or the person you think society wants you to be. Which also means that the mere passing of one (or all) of the possible milestones doesn’t make one a grown-up either.

Of course, by this definition, to be growing into the person one wants to become, one must a) be becoming, b) know what one is presently aiming for, and c) match the becoming and the aim. As life changes on a dime, and as our desires and circumstances are constantly in flux, none of this is cemented. Which means that the idea of growing up is really more about acting intentionally than anything else.

The alternative is remaining who we’ve always been… stuck in our ruts, the product of our upbringing and life experiences. Having the same hang-ups and what my friend Shea calls “social b.o.” that we’ve always had. Because the fact of the matter is that we are becoming and changing. The question is whether we’re doing this in a direction we intend, or if we’re letting someone else – or even our own inaction – do the deciding for us.

This does not mean that to be a grown-up one must always busy about frenetically. Rather, actively deciding for oneself what is appropriate in a given season of life, taking into account personality, interests, and priorities, and then living that out. This is grown-up. For some of us that means a lot of down time (spent in conciously decided ways). For others that means paddling like heck toward a certain goal. What they have in common is not their appearance, but what lies just beyond view; it’s intentionality, its becoming.

Of course, once we determine to set out on any adventure, we can benefit from those who have gone before us and know the lay of the land a little better. This might mean picking up a map, asking for directions, or just listening to the stories of fellow sojourners. Which is why Project Grown-Up will contain things relating to both the setting out (and persevering) and useful resources for the road.

Saddle up, y’all.

So what are your big interests or hangups? Maps you need or baggage you want to leave behind?

Introducing: Kiva


Kiva - loans that change lives

I first met Kiva a few years ago whilst reading “Half the Sky”. I was intrigued by the notion that an individual with a few extra bucks in their bank account could get involved with microfinancing through actually being the lender, and like usual lending, get repaid as the loan gets repaid.

Soon thereafter my friend Ashleigh wrote about her (positive) experiences with Kiva on her blog, and with that endorsement I decided to give it a shot.

I put in $150. At $25 contributions, I could make six. I could do without the money for the near future, and if I needed it later on, I could cash it out. What was there to lose?

Since that time – and without ever adding a dime to my initial $150 deposit – I have made 18 loans to people all over the globe. That’s $450 worth of invested capital. And I can still pull out any time.

My love for Kiva has only grown in the time I’ve been funding through them. They make it incredibly easy to put stagnant money to good use, the website is easy to use, and they really stay on top of their communication.

As I get older, I want to become a better global citizen. Kiva has been a painless, accessible step in that direction. I certainly want to do more, but this is an incredibly easy thing I can do along the way.

(If you’d like additional information on Kiva, start with the about or How It Works page from their website.)

Have you used Kiva? What do think of it? What other things have you done recently (or would like to do one day soon) to grow as a global citizen?