I recently entered a writing contest on trazzler.com, and I need your help to win! If you haven’t already voted, here’s how you can do it:

• Go to www.trazzler.com and sign in using your Facebook account or by creating a Trazzler account.
• Once you’re signed in, go to www.trazzler.com/contests/bend/entries and check out my entry (Discovering unseen treasures in a lava cave in Bend, Oregon) – currently in the #2 spot.
• VOTE for my entry by clicking on the green “Save” button to the right of my story. A vote is counted when a registered user clicks “Save” on my trip page.
• The contest closes on June 15, so vote now and spread the word.

Thanks!!

(OK, call me a stalker, but I looked at the votes for the person in first place. There are some people who have voted two or three times under different accounts, and the writer herself has voted twice! Ggrrr…don’t get me wrong. I definitely thought about doing that, too, but I won’t resort to it.)

Best lines from recent episodes of “Glee” come from Coach Sylvester that made us laugh out loud…

“I’m going to kick you square in the taco.”

“So you like showtunes. It doesn’t mean you’re gay. It just means you’re awful.”

With the last one, I immediately thought of the “Musical Mania” channel that I created on Pandora, which is a channel of showtune after showtune, and I listen to it more than I’d like to admit. It allows me to play out my dream of being in a musical which, unfortunately, would never happen since I can’t sing that well. But no one can stop me from performing in my own house.

A few weeks ago, I attended a lunch workshop titled “Thoughts on Thinking,” where the speaker spoke briefly about a study that explained how the way you praise a child could possibly determine his or her efforts and idea of success. After the workshop, I turned to Matt and said, “I think that just revealed everything about why I am the way I am!” All you fellow perfectionists out there will get a kick out of this.

Here’s what the study is all about:

For the past ten years, psychologist Carol Dweck and her team at Columbia (she’s now at Stanford) studied the effect of praise on students in a dozen New York schools. Her seminal work—a series of experiments on 400 fifth-graders—paints the picture most clearly.

Dweck sent four female research assistants into New York fifth-grade classrooms. The researchers would take a single child out of the classroom for a nonverbal IQ test consisting of a series of puzzles—puzzles easy enough that all the children would do fairly well. Once the child finished the test, the researchers told each student his score, then gave him a single line of praise. Randomly divided into groups, some were praised for their intelligence. They were told, “You must be smart at this.” Other students were praised for their effort: “You must have worked really hard.”

Then the students were given a choice of test for the second round. One choice was a test that would be more difficult than the first, but the researchers told the kids that they’d learn a lot from attempting the puzzles. The other choice, Dweck’s team explained, was an easy test, just like the first. Of those praised for their effort, 90 percent chose the harder set of puzzles. Of those praised for their intelligence, a majority chose the easy test. The “smart” kids took the cop-out.

Why did this happen? “When we praise children for their intelligence,” Dweck wrote in her study summary, “we tell them that this is the name of the game: Look smart, don’t risk making mistakes.” And that’s what the fifth-graders had done: They’d chosen to look smart and avoid the risk of being embarrassed.

In a subsequent round, none of the fifth-graders had a choice. The test was difficult, designed for kids two years ahead of their grade level. Predictably, everyone failed. But again, the two groups of children, divided at random at the study’s start, responded differently. Those praised for their effort on the first test assumed they simply hadn’t focused hard enough on this test. “They got very involved, willing to try every solution to the puzzles,” Dweck recalled. “Many of them remarked, unprovoked, ‘This is my favorite test.’ ” Not so for those praised for their smarts. They assumed their failure was evidence that they weren’t really smart at all. “Just watching them, you could see the strain. They were sweating and miserable.”

Having artificially induced a round of failure, Dweck’s researchers then gave all the fifth-graders a final round of tests that were engineered to be as easy as the first round. Those who had been praised for their effort significantly improved on their first score—by about 30 percent. Those who’d been told they were smart did worse than they had at the very beginning—by about 20 percent.

Dweck had suspected that praise could backfire, but even she was surprised by the magnitude of the effect. “Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control,” she explains. “They come to see themselves as in control of their success. Emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of the child’s control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure.”

(“How Not to Talk to Your Kids,” Po Bronson, New York Magazine, Feb. 2007)

From elementary to high school, I was told by my teachers and peers that I was smart. Kids wanted to see my homework or to work in groups with me. In earlier grades, I was given different assignments than other kids, and was a 7th grader for only three months before skipping ahead to 8th grade. But even at a young age, I remember not wanting to disappoint my teachers by doing poorly. On the other hand, my parents always encouraged me to “do my best,” and I never felt pressured to bring home good grades for them. If anything, I was more anxious than they were about my grades.

When I got older, I crammed before tests, memorizing information because that’s what worked for me – and that’s what earned me the high scores. (I subsequently forgot about 90% of what I’ve learned in high school.) In my junior and senior year of high school, when math and science got harder for me, I was never praised in those subjects. And in those classes, I was happy to get Cs. In subjects where I was praised more often, I stressed out over getting good grades. And now it all makes sense. I had been told repeatedly that I was smart, that I was a great writer, that I was a good student – and I didn’t want to crush those expectations.

I can see how that subconscious way of thinking has affected my outlook on life and my fear of taking creative risks. Take capoeira, for example. When I began capoeira, being a white belt meant I had the freedom to not get the moves right and to stumble through sequences. But I was told by a lot of people that I had great form, especially for a beginner. In light of the study that I mentioned above, maybe I was conscious of people watching me and thinking that my moves looked good – so I was afraid to take risks and possibly not look good. I was – and still am – afraid to make mistakes, although in my current capoeira group, I’m more willing to make a fool of myself.

At work, I feel like I don’t know as much as I should for someone who has been there for four years. And I don’t always ask questions because they may seem elementary. Why? Maybe because I think people expect me to know certain things already, or they think I’m smarter than I really am – so I want to live up to their expectations.

The article starts off with a story about an extremely intelligent boy who shies away from anything he’s not good at. He’s probably in junior high now. Sadly, at 32, I can totally relate to him (about shying away from mediocrity, not about being extremely intelligent). I think the key here is to understand that, even though people have perceptions of me, they don’t necessarily have expectations of me. My belief that people expect results from me is probably imagined. In reality, people are more consumed with themselves than with me, so I shouldn’t be so anxious about disappointing others. I’m sure people have much more important things to do than to watch what I’m doing. haha.

I’m not here to brag about what people have told me I’m good at. And I’m also not discounting the importance of praising people for their talents. But I definitely see a correlation here between my experience and my challenges today, and maybe this is something worth thinking over some more. For those of you who have similar issues, I’m curious to hear what you think…

There’s a guy I know, and I think he’s pretty cool. His name is Matt, and we’ve been married for five years now. Here’s a picture of us (drawn by Nan Lawson), with our eyes closed. Matt says it looks like I’m holding a Bible, like I’m doing door-to-door evangelism. To clear the record, that is not what I’m doing. I’m holding a book because I love to read.

May 7 marks our five-year wedding anniversary, although sometimes, I feel like we’re already an old couple. If we both have free weeknights, we like to eat dinner in front of the TV, watching “Wheel of Fortune,” followed by “Jeopardy.” Just this past week, we saw a preview for the next day’s show – the celebrity finals on “Jeopardy” – and Matt got pretty excited. “I know what I’m doing tomorrow!” Unfortunately, I had capoeira, so I missed the big event. When we watch “Wheel,” we groan when people land on the “bankrupt” space, heckle people when they can’t solve the puzzle, and accuse contestants of being greedy when they keep spinning the wheel. My co-workers (most of whom are around 50 and older) tell me that they only watch those shows when their parents are visiting.

Sometimes it’s funny to think about how the two of us ended up together. We are similar in many ways – our love for the outdoors, our practical thinking (him more than me), our frugal nature, the preference to be behind the scenes, and our down-to-earth demeanor. But we’re also different in a lot of ways – in ways that are complementary to one another. He’s rational, realistic and mellow; I’m idealistic, dreamy and can get a little spazzy. He spends his free evenings doing small house projects or sitting quietly in front of the computer, reading car forums. I spend my free evenings all over the house, moving from one project to another, singing show tunes the whole night.

Sometimes our differences drive me nuts, like how he gets on my case about putting dishes on both sides of the sink rather than one side. Or how he likes the lights really, really low during movies (which I don’t really mind, except that I usually like to knit while we watch movies, and I need SOME light). But a lot of the differences are what I love most about him.

I love that he’s such a hard worker, and he rarely complains (not to say I’m not a hard worker. I just don’t work AS hard, and I do complain…). He shows his love through acts of service, and he will quietly and diligently help friends out without complaining or expecting praise and recognition to be lavished on him. In fact, he would hate attention for doing anything nice. He isn’t so vocal or touchy-feely about how much he loves me, and I sometimes give him a hard time for that, but I have to remember (and appreciate) the way he feels most comfortable expressing his love. He does so much around the house to keep it clean and organized, and actively looks for ways that we could live more efficiently. Whatever he does, he does well.

He thinks through things very carefully, and rarely acts without having thought through all the options and consequences. A minor example: If he wants to make a big purchase, like a car part or some sort of electronics, it might be months or a year before he finally takes the step to actually buy it. But up until that point, he’s done extensive research on different models, prices and vendors. When he finally does make a purchase, he’s confident that he’s getting the best deal and the best quality.

We started our friendship over e-mail, ICQ (chat) and the phone calls. And I still remember the day that I met him, as he pulled up to my friend’s house (where I was house-sitting) in Elk Grove with his loud, lowered white Civic. We saw each other for the very first time, despite having spent hours on the phone and having written pages and pages of e-mails to each other.

“He’s cute,” I thought.

“She’s really short,” he thought.

For our first afternoon together, we watched the Kings beat the Lakers in the play-offs (a joyous afternoon for me) and ate quesadillas. When I started making lunch, he jumped off the couch and said, “I’ll help you!” I still tease him about trying to make a good impression. Hanging out with him was so easy, so comfortable. It was like hanging out with any of my other guy friends who I had known for years. It felt so natural for us to be friends.

He met my parents and some of my friends as “the guy who I’ll be working with in Brazil,” so there was no pressure on his part to be “the guy Mel is going to marry.” I remember, though, the morning we were getting ready for church. He was ironing a shirt, and I was walking past him, and I thought, “I could see us getting married, and this would be us in the future.” Funny how these thoughts pop into your head even after just hanging out with someone for 24 hours.

And here we are, eight years after meeting and working together in Brazil. Marriage isn’t easy, and it probably never will be. As time passes, it’s easy to grow stagnant or to let our selfish tendencies surface, but those moments need to be reminders that I need to continually strive to be the best wife and friend to Matt that I can be. And in the midst of the challenges, we’ve had many great moments together. Moving to Seattle was especially beneficial for us, as I’ve seen growth in both of us individually and as a couple. We were thrown into situations that we never would have experienced in California, and we had the joy of working through them together and becoming stronger people and a stronger couple in the end.

I see ideas brewing and adventures ahead for us, and I’m excited to see what’s in store. I look forward to experiencing life together, and one day, finding ourselves as 80-somethings sitting on the couch, still watching “Wheel of Fortune” together.

(And speaking of anniversaries, yesterday marked our four years in Seattle, and tomorrow is my four-year anniversary at my job – and I’m still loving both!)