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Hello Divas!
Many of my clients struggle with toxic relationships. How do you protect yourself and avoid unhealthy relationships? I wanted to share a post of mine that was very popular when published in MOMeo Magazine. Take a look and let me know your thoughts!
xoxo
Dabney
I have been hosting the Social Media Manners chat for over one and a half years, and have enjoyed every single moment of building a community of people who value positive interactions on social media.
About Last Night…
Last night our guest for our live chat was Klout. As most of us know, Klout has become the industry standard for online influence measurement. Most of us value our ability to use social media effectively and we tend to take such measurements seriously.
Typically in the chats that I host, I value that the hour is not about my guest, or me but about the community. The hour is about you, the individuals who allowed our community to become “US”. For most chats, I will come up with a list of questions for my guest, and encourage your questions throughout the chat as well. This allows you to engage and be heard.
Given the recent changes Klout has made, I knew I needed a plan to avoid confusion and to produce an hour where all concerns and questions could be addressed. I asked for questions in advance and heard from many of you and was able to compile a list of questions that covered your concerns.
My goal was to avoid having our guest being inundated with hundreds of replicated questions. I announced our new format for the night many times prior to and during the chat.
Most of you followed the plan and I appreciate it. In doing so you showed great respect to our guest and our community. Respect in all relationships is key and a very core component to online success.
About Last Night…
Often, when boundaries are set and new rules are instituted, there are idivdiduals who will resist change, dismiss the boundaries and take it personally if they are asked to do modify their behavior. As in all cases, this is about the person resisting change, not the actual changes being made. When one is immature, reactions are often misplaced and amplified. Just as the child who is given a cookie each day and then suddenly given carrots… what happens? Think about it. One word. Tantrum.
Tantrum. During our chat last night, we had a member of our community do just that. I was shocked and dismayed, as this member of our community is one whom I have engaged with and connected others to.
What occurred was this; in attempts to gently send a reminder to stay on course with our format during our chat, I simply sent this tweet….
”Shhhhhh, hold your questions until the end. xo”
In return, this individual created a blog post. In reviewing timelines, one can easily see the intent was clear. The objective was to write the post and deliver it to our stream before our chat was over. The post was titled….
“I was Thrown out of a Twitter Chat”
In reading my message again, I am not clear as to how my words could be interpreted as “Throwing someone out of a twitter chat”. I was simply sending a reminder to hold questions until the end of our chat. In this case specifically, I knew that the questions being posed to our guest were on my list and I wanted to allow our guest to continue with her amazing content without disruption.
Let me be clear. I at no time asked anyone to leave our chat and in no way felt it wrong to ask a member of our community to respect the format for our planned event which I prepared and moderated.
To leave our chat to write a post to defame my brand and our community was a breech of the very core values of which I speak to. Such actions showed an ultimate act of disrespect, and I view such as an example of extreme immaturity and very poor Social Media Manners.
To act out of anger with intent to humiliate and diminish my professional standard, and then laugh and take joy in the fact that many of us were offended was disrespectful beyond measure. To outwardly lie in a public blog post and say one was “thrown out of a chat” coupled with further untrue accusations was legally and ethically wrong.
About Last Night…
To the members of our Social Media Manners community, I thank you for your support and your defense of the words posted in the blog discussed and disrespectful tweets. I appreciate that many of you are choosing not to respond to this person’s mentions or read the post as in doing so, we will continue to give this bully type behavior the intended results of increased web traffic. In fact, in giving mention to such a person on twitter, regardless of the reason, we learned that our high Klout scores will in fact, give this person a score increase.
As I have stated many times ~ to bully another person on or off line is unacceptable. However, we are only able to control our REactions to another’s actions. I do believe in accountability however and feel strongly that one should not be allowed to simply post non-truths as a result of hurt feelings, grudges and tantrums. Often accountability comes in many forms. Legal, Social and yes…even Karma. Time will tell as to what form accountability takes in this situation.
About Last Night…
Beyond the dissidence of last night, I learned much. I learned I was valued. I learned I was respected. I learned what really matters is that in coming together each week as a community; we have formed a family and partnership making millions of impression in regard to Social Media Manners each week.
Let’s continue to focus on the amazing things we share and learn together. Together, we have built an amazing community and surrounded ourselves with leaders in our industry and relationships we respect.
Let’s release the bully. As in the playground of our childhood, when the bully is ignored…he will simply stomp off and target another group.
Goodbye Bully…. You don’t live here anymore.
Recently, I have become very good friends with Tami C Gaines, the author of Preemie Parents. In her book, Tami shares her lessons learned as the mother of twins born at twenty five weeks into her pregnancy. Tami and I share the same desire to learn and grow through adversity and I am inspired by her story. As I watch my friend walk in her greatness, I am reminded of a lost chapter in my own. It is one that I seldom share or discuss and until recently, I never realized that this lost chapter in my story is one that has defined so much of who I have become today.
Some of you may know that I am the mother of two children. My daughter, the “Little Diva” is twelve and my son, “The Teen” is sixteen. What many of you do not know, is that I am also the mother of a “Little Angel” who left this world before she ever lived. Her name was Emma Turner Porte and on April thirteenth, I will celebrate her fourteenth birthday.
I recall with sadness, the day fourteen years when I noticed something was just not right. I was in my twenty-fifth week of pregnancy and had been feeling simply fabulous and excited about welcoming my second child. On this day however, I noticed that the blissful movement and stir of life within me had stopped. No kicking, no squirming from my baby. Just silence. I intuitively knew before I was told that something was very, very wrong.
Testing was ordered and I was sent to the hospital, as I was reassured that all was probably well. I recall my intuition telling me that was not so, yet hoping and praying it was. During the sonogram, the monitor was turned away from me and as the probe was rolled over my baby within, the technician’s face confirmed by biggest fear. Then doctor spoke the words that I thought I would never hear. “Dabney, I am so sorry. Your baby has died.”
I was not prepared. My body shook and trembled and I cried from the depth of my soul. I had never experienced such emotional and physical pain. It was as if the sounds of my sobs were coming from someone else. I clung to my swollen belly and cried for hours. In that moment, I learned what true loss felt like.
As I exhausted myself from crying, I looked within my soul for energy to go on. I knew I needed to take this journey of grief in a manner that would allow me to experience the pain fully so that I would find success in letting go and moving on. Even fourteen years ago, I knew I did not want to be a victim of adversity.
I delivered my sweet Emma two days later. We held her lifeless body in heated towels as I sang to her, kissed her and told her how sorry I was that she would not be joining us here. I still recall how beautiful she was. She was physically perfect and looked much like my twelve year old daughter looked on the day of her birth. When they took her from my arms, a piece of my soul went with her and I physically felt pain in my heart. The word Heartache now truly had meaning to me.
My journey beyond that day was more difficult than any journey I have taken since. There was the funeral, the maternity leave without a baby, the empty nursery, the wave of pain and the challenge of moving ahead looming in front of me.
Each spring, as the tulips and daffodils start to bloom and signs of new life surround us, I am carried back to memories of Emma. I think of how old she would be, what her passions would have been and what her laugh would have sounded like. I can clearly picture her when I close my eyes as I connect with her spirit that has quietly and privately surrounded me each day over the years.
For years, I have celebrated Emma’s unlived life privately, as many do not understand what if is like experience a death of a child in the manner in which I did. It is as though because her life was not lived outside of my womb, it was not lived at all.
Today I am choosing to celebrate out loud the gift that was given to me for those brief twenty five weeks. For you see, it is today that I realize that the pain of my past has lead me to exactly the place I belong. As my first experience facing true adversity, I challenged myself to walk through it and in doing so; I was led to this present moment.
During the funeral, words were spoken to offer peace. Many told me there was a reason for my loss, that God had his purpose. I was told in the end, we would all see the lesson Emma taught us. The words whispered to me on the day I lay my daughter to rest with my Grandmother, are the ones I recall most.
Only a daughter of yours would be sweet enough to never live, so that she could teach lessons to us all
Today, I now know the lessons I learned are ones I share through my work today. Adversity can in fact define us. It is up to us to choose how. In revisiting this lost chapter of my life that I seldom turn to, I smile. It is with a mother’s love that I realize it is my own child Emma, who taught me how to be a Diva. Through losing her, I realized the importance of getting better and not bitter when faced with a life changing moment of adversity, loss and pain. In the end, I became stronger and embraced my power. Fourteen years ago I started to walk in my magnificence.
I celebrate Emma for her gifts and thank her for teaching me a lesson long ago. It is my daughter who taught me the many lessons I would need to be prepared for future adversity. I believe it is Emma that sprinkles Diva Dust on me when I need it, giving me my sparkle. Today, I celebrate my most precious angel for giving me my Diva Wings and helping me soar.
xoxo Happy Birthday my Sweet Emma xoxo
~~~~~
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