“The Importance of Manners"

"Etiquette is all human social behavior. If you're a hermit on a mountain, you don't have to worry about etiquette;
 if somebody comes up the mountain, then you've got a problem. It matters because we want to live in reasonably harmonious communities." ~Judith Martin 

Hello.  I'm glad to be here.  I want to start out by saying that those of you in this room today, are lucky.  You are in college and you are taking advantage of opportunity within the college.

But did you know that only 39 percent of young Americans are expected to graduate from college?  

You probably know a number of students who have already dropped out this semester.  As you know, school sounds like it will be fun - lots of new people to meet, opportunities to join various groups, taking classes and learning and of course, being on your own and hanging out with your friends.  Then reality set in.  Some classes are boring; some require completing homework, writing research papers, preparing speeches, understanding math equations and chemistry formulations and then taking tests.  Where do you find the time to do everything?  What about you job?  How are you expected to spend so much time studying?  When do you ever get to sleep? And, how in the world does "etiquette" fit into this?

My talk today is about what the messages are if you do want to stay in the workforce, and I think there are three. 

THREE MESSAGES I WANT TO LEAVE:

1. Stay in college and graduate -Behavior is extremely important – teachers, references, meeting people, networking, 

3. Confidence and feeling good about yourself in all kinds of situations beginning in school and going from beginning job up the corporate ladder b/c you know how to behave in many situations. Introductions; Conversation; be on time

6. Applying for job – networking, cover letter, resume, interviewing

One, sit at the table. Two, make your partner a real partner. And three, don't leave before you leave. Number one: sit at the table. Just a couple weeks ago at Facebook, we hosted a very senior government official, and he came in to meet with senior execs from around Silicon Valley. And everyone kind of sat at the table. He had these two women who were traveling with him pretty senior in his department, and I kind of said to them, "Sit at the table. Come on, sit at the table," and they sat on the side of the room. When I was in college, my senior year, I took a course called European Intellectual History. Don't you love that kind of thing from college? I wish I could do that now. And I took it with my roommate, Carrie, who was then a brilliant literary student -- and went on to be a brilliant literary scholar -- and my brother -- smart guy, but a water-polo-playing pre-med, who was a sophomore.

05:00The three of us take this class together. And then Carrie reads all the books in the original Greek and Latin, goes to all the lectures. I read all the books in English and go to most of the lectures. My brother is kind of busy. He reads one book of 12 and goes to a couple of lectures, marches himself up to our rooma couple days before the exam to get himself tutored. The three of us go to the exam together, and we sit down. And we sit there for three hours -- and our little blue notebooks -- yes, I'm that old. We walk out, we look at each other, and we say, "How did you do?" And Carrie says, "Boy, I feel like I didn't really draw out the main point on the Hegelian dialectic." And I say, "God, I really wish I had really connectedJohn Locke's theory of property with the philosophers that follow." And my brother says, "I got the top grade in the class."

05:49(Laughter)

05:51"You got the top grade in the class? You don't know anything."

05:54(Laughter)

05:56The problem with these stories is that they show what the data shows: women systematically underestimate their own abilities. If you test men and women, and you ask them questions on totally objective criteria like GPAs, men get it wrong slightly high, and women get it wrong slightly low. Women do not negotiate for themselves in the workforce. A study in the last two years of people entering the workforce out of college showed that 57 percent of boys entering, or men, I guess, are negotiating their first salary, and only seven percent of women. And most importantly, men attribute their success to themselves, and women attribute it to other external factors. If you ask men why they did a good job,they'll say, "I'm awesome. Obviously. Why are you even asking?" If you ask women why they did a good job, what they'll say is someone helped them, they got lucky, they worked really hard. Why does this matter? Boy, it matters a lot. Because no one gets to the corner office by sitting on the side, not at the table, and no one gets the promotion if they don't think they deserve their success, or they don't even understand their own success.

07:10I wish the answer were easy. I wish I could go tell all the young women I work for, these fabulous women,"Believe in yourself and negotiate for yourself. Own your own success." I wish I could tell that to my daughter. But it's not that simple. Because what the data shows, above all else, is one thing, which is that success and likeability are positively correlated for men and negatively correlated for women. And everyone's nodding, because we all know this to be true.

07:39There's a really good study that shows this really well. There's a famous Harvard Business School studyon a woman named Heidi Roizen. And she's an operator in a company in Silicon Valley, and she uses her contacts to become a very successful venture capitalist. In 2002 -- not so long ago -- a professor who was then at Columbia University took that case and made it [Howard] Roizen. And he gave the case out, both of them, to two groups of students. He changed exactly one word: "Heidi" to "Howard." But that one word made a really big difference. He then surveyed the students, and the good news was the students, both men and women, thought Heidi and Howard were equally competent, and that's good.The bad news was that everyone liked Howard. He's a great guy. You want to work for him. You want to spend the day fishing with him. But Heidi? Not so sure. She's a little out for herself. She's a little political.You're not sure you'd want to work for her. This is the complication. We have to tell our daughters and our colleagues, we have to tell ourselves to believe we got the A, to reach for the promotion, to sit at the table, and we have to do it in a world where, for them, there are sacrifices they will make for that, even though for their brothers, there are not.

08:54The saddest thing about all of this is that it's really hard to remember this. And I'm about to tell a story which is truly embarrassing for me, but I think important. I gave this talk at Facebook not so long ago to about 100 employees, and a couple hours later, there was a young woman who works there sitting outside my little desk, and she wanted to talk to me. I said, okay, and she sat down, and we talked. And she said, "I learned something today. I learned that I need to keep my hand up." "What do you mean?"She said, "You're giving this talk, and you said you would take two more questions. I had my hand up with many other people, and you took two more questions. I put my hand down, and I noticed all the women did the same, and then you took more questions, only from the men." And I thought to myself,"Wow, if it's me -- who cares about this, obviously -- giving this talk -- and during this talk, I can't even notice that the men's hands are still raised, and the women's hands are still raised, how good are we as managers of our companies and our organizations at seeing that the men are reaching for opportunitiesmore than women?" We've got to get women to sit at the table.

10:02(Cheers)

10:03(Applause)

10:06Message number two: Make your partner a real partner. I've become convinced that we've made more progress in the workforce than we have in the home. The data shows this very clearly. If a woman and a man work full-time and have a child, the woman does twice the amount of housework the man does, and the woman does three times the amount of childcare the man does. So she's got three jobs or two jobs, and he's got one. Who do you think drops out when someone needs to be home more? The causes of this are really complicated, and I don't have time to go into them. And I don't think Sunday football-watching and general laziness is the cause.

10:45I think the cause is more complicated. I think, as a society, we put more pressure on our boys to succeedthan we do on our girls. I know men that stay home and work in the home to support wives with careers,and it's hard. When I go to the Mommy-and-Me stuff and I see the father there, I notice that the other mommies don't play with him. And that's a problem, because we have to make it as important a job,because it's the hardest job in the world to work inside the home, for people of both genders, if we're going to even things out and let women stay in the workforce.

11:20(Applause)

11:22Studies show that households with equal earning and equal responsibility also have half the divorce rate.And if that wasn't good enough motivation for everyone out there, they also have more -- how shall I say this on this stage? They know each other more in the biblical sense as well.

11:38(Cheers)

11:40Message number three: Don't leave before you leave. I think there's a really deep irony to the fact that actions women are taking -- and I see this all the time -- with the objective of staying in the workforceactually lead to their eventually leaving. Here's what happens: We're all busy. Everyone's busy. A woman's busy. And she starts thinking about having a child, and from the moment she starts thinking about having a child, she starts thinking about making room for that child. "How am I going to fit this into everything else I'm doing?" And literally from that moment, she doesn't raise her hand anymore, she doesn't look for a promotion, she doesn't take on the new project, she doesn't say, "Me. I want to do that." She starts leaning back. The problem is that -- let's say she got pregnant that day, that day -- nine months of pregnancy, three months of maternity leave, six months to catch your breath -- Fast-forward two years, more often -- and as I've seen it -- women start thinking about this way earlier -- when they get engaged, or married, when they start thinking about having a child, which can take a long time. One woman came to see me about this. She looked a little young. And I said, "So are you and your husband thinking about having a baby?" And she said, "Oh no, I'm not married." She didn't even have a boyfriend.

12:55(Laughter)

12:56I said, "You're thinking about this just way too early."

13:00But the point is that what happens once you start kind of quietly leaning back? Everyone who's been through this -- and I'm here to tell you, once you have a child at home, your job better be really good to go back, because it's hard to leave that kid at home. Your job needs to be challenging. It needs to be rewarding. You need to feel like you're making a difference. And if two years ago you didn't take a promotion and some guy next to you did, if three years ago you stopped looking for new opportunities,you're going to be bored because you should have kept your foot on the gas pedal. Don't leave before you leave. Stay in. Keep your foot on the gas pedal, until the very day you need to leave to take a break for a child -- and then make your decisions. Don't make decisions too far in advance, particularly ones you're not even conscious you're making.

13:55My generation really, sadly, is not going to change the numbers at the top. They're just not moving. We are not going to get to where 50 percent of the population -- in my generation, there will not be 50 percent of [women] at the top of any industry. But I'm hopeful that future generations can. I think a world where half of our countries and our companies were run by women, would be a better world. It's not just because people would know where the women's bathrooms are, even though that would be very helpful.I think it would be a better world. I have two children. I have a five-year-old son and a two-year-old daughter. I want my son to have a choice to contribute fully in the workforce or at home, and I want my daughter to have the choice to not just succeed, but to be liked for her accomplishments.

14:45Thank you.

continueThose of you in this room today, are lucky.  You are in college.   But, unfortunately just being here won’t help your future.  The college completion rate in the U.S. has slipped behind many other countries in recent years and we now rank 19th out of 28 countries.  Higher education levels are associated not just with higher earnings, but also with better health and more community engagement.  Only 39 percent of young Americans are xpected to graduate from college.  This lack of education has serious implications for individuals and society.

PROBLEM: No education, dropping out of school.

PROBLEM: In 2012, 39 percent of young Americans were expected to graduate from college, compared with 60 percent in Iceland, 57 percent in New Zealand and 53 percent in Poland.

PROBLEM: But in the United States, a larger-than-average proportion had less education (so-called downward mobility) while a smaller-than-average population had more education (upward mobility).

PROBLEM: Twenty-nine percent of American men and 17 percent of American women had less education than their parents,

PROBLEM: Among those Americans whose parents failed to finish high school, only 5 percent secured college diplomas

PROBLEM: In addition to less educational mobility, the United States, along with Japan, Germany, Austria and Estonia, has "less equitable access" to higher education, meaning that it's harder for people with lower socioeconomic status to attend college

PROBLEM: Unemployment

PROBLEM: Finding a job

PROBLEM: Getting along with others.

PROBLEM: Fear and shame and feeling unworthy

LIFE AFTER: Believe you’re worth it. (That’s the only difference between people who feel so fearful and ashamed – they don’t think they are worthy of connectedness and love.)

LIFE AFTER: (Dr. Brene Brown) Whole hearted. They had a sense of courage (the courage to be imperfect), compassion (to be kind to themselves first & them to others; we can’t have compassion for other people if we can’t treat ourselves kindly), & connection (as a result of authenticity; they were willing to let go of who they thought they should be in order to be who they were).  The other thing they had in common was vulnerability. (They fully embraced vulnerability; they believed what made them vulnerable made them beautiful.  They talked about the willingness to say “I love you” first. They’re willing to invest in a relationship that may or may not work out. Vulnerability is the core of our struggle with shame and worthiness, but it is also the birthplace of joy, creativity, belonging and love ).

VULNERABILITY: Some examples: Waiting for the doctor to call; asking my husband to help me if I’m sick; asking my wife for sex; asking my husband for sex; asking someone out;   So we numb ourselves.

We are the most in-debt; obese; addicted and medicated adult cohort in U.S. history.

We can’t selectivity numb emotion; here’s the bad stuff; vulnerability, grief, shame, fear, disappointment; I don’t want to feel these.  I’m going to have a couple of beers and a banana nut muffin.  You can’t numb those hard feelings w/o numbing the other feelings like joy, gratitude, happiness.  Then we are miserable and are looking for purpose and meaning and then we feel vulnerable and then we have a couple of beers and a banana muffin.  It becomes a cycle.  

We make everything uncertain into certain.  Religion has gone from spiritual to “I’m right… you’re wrong… shut up.”  Politics is into blame.  Blame is a way to discharge pain and discomfort.  

We perfect.  We take fat from our butts and put it into our cheeks.  And, we most dangerously, perfect our children.

We pretend that what we do doesn’t have an effect on people.

There is another way: To let ourselves be seen.  To love with our whole hearts. To practice gratitude and joy.  I am enough.  When we can say that “I am enough” we stop screaming and we are kinder and gentler to other people around us and we’re kinder and gentler to ourselves. 

LIFE AFTER EXAMPLES MUST CONTAIN A FEELING.  People don’t buy things, they buy feelings.

LIFE AFTER: Dinner Parties

LIFE AFTER: Business Lunches and Dinners

LIFE AFTER:  An educated, neat, well-put together, healthy person who will find a well-paying job or start his/her own company mixing with other sophisticated professional people. 

LIFE AFTER: Higher earnings, better health, more community engagement

LIFE AFTER: * Investments in education pay off handsomely for both individuals and taxpayers. The net present value of a college education — the benefit in today's dollars after costs and discounting for future inflation — is over $380,000 for U.S. men and nearly $240,000 for U.S. women, the report found.

LIFE AFTER: Even though bachelor's degree holders enter the workforce at a later age and forgo “opportunity costs,” -- or money they could have made during those years instead of being in school -- over the course of their lifetimes, they made an average of over $1 million more than someone with just a high school degree, and those with associate degrees made $325,000 more than those with high school diplomas.

LIFE AFTER: College degrees are also stepping stones for postgraduate degrees, which offer even bigger payoffs, Abel and Deitz wrote. One other unquantifiable benefit, the wrote, is that college instills in students “aptitudes, skills and other characteristics that make them different from those who do not go on to college.”

LIFE AFTER: Lastly, the New York Federal Reserve report found that college major does, unsurprisingly, make a difference in terms of potential wages. Majors that require technical training, such as engineering and mathematics, have returns of 21 percent and 18 percent, respectively, while those majoring in the liberal arts fields such as leisure and hospitality and education all have below-average returns of 11 percent and 9 percent, respectively.

In 2013, 47 percent of 18- to 19-year-olds and 39 percent of 20- to 24-year-olds were enrolled in postsecondary education. 

Changes in the number of students enrolled in school can stem from fluctuations in population size o

THREE MESSAGES I WANT TO LEAVE:

1. Stay in college and graduate -Behavior is extremely important – teachers, references, meeting people, networking, 

3. Confidence and feeling good about yourself in all kinds of situations beginning in school and going from beginning job up the corporate ladder b/c you know how to behave in many situations. Introductions; Conversation; be on time

6. Applying for job – networking, cover letter, resume, interviewing

 this weekend of camaraderie, learning and fun through involvement.  Women, when surveyed about what will make them happy, often choose health, wealth or losing ten pounds. But they become frustrated because most of them just continue to chase those elusive goals for months or years.

This weekend can help you finally get started towards achieving your goals

We will exercise together.  We will cook and eat together.  We will talk together. And, we will continue to learn together.

Come and immerse yourself in a luxury spa-like atmosphere for 2 1/2 days while you learn the components of a healthy lifestyle and get off to a running start towards all of your health and happiness goals.