Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head was the stand out song from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in 1969. B. J. Thomas famously sang the lyrics while in the movie version Paul Newman performed bicycle stunts. Raindrops reached number one on the BillBoard chart for four consecutive weeks, while most of American hummed the first refrain.
When a client arrived at my office in the pouring rain wearing his new suit and not a raincoat or umbrella in sight, all I could think of were the words “raindrops keep falling”. Somehow raindrops falling on a younger Paul Newman was whimsical, raindrops falling on my client’s suit that he was going to wear all day into the evening, not so whimsical.
I inquired about a raincoat. My question was met with a negative. Client didn’t “like” to wear a coat. I asked about an umbrella. Again, a negative.
Here’s the thing. When it comes to protecting our own value, it’s not about what you “like” or what makes you feel comfortable. It is about what protects your value.
Ask any woman if tweezing her eyebrows is always comfortable? But being remembered as Frida Kahlo with a unibrow may not be protecting your value. Wearing high heels is not always comfortable. Wearing heels often helps a woman look and feel more empowered. In our own ways we take steps to protect our value.
Is getting in 5 or 10 thousand steps a day always something we like to do? We do what we need to do to protect our physical health.
For one a challenge is wearing a raincoat for another it is eye contact and another it is making “small talk”. To overcome all of these challenges one needs to make oneself do something or learn to do something that they might not want to do. And the point is what? We have been doing things we didn’t want to do since elementary school or before: homework, playing nice, or eating broccoli.
Are you literally or figuratively letting rain drops fall on your head?
