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Right on the eve of another elimination tonight on Survivor : South Pacific, I’m finally able to sit down and give my opinion on what lessons for ourselves we might be able to extract from Stacey Powell’s journey on the show.

Stacey was a fun character to watch and to see react in the episodes.  She was a great antagonist to throw up against Coach and his sometimes zen-like personality.  She had sass and she liked to keep things real.  But that’s where I think things faltered for her.

She forgot that Survivor isn’t the real world, and that you can’t necessarily react like you would in an everyday scenario.  In your real social life, you can escape the people and things you may not like and voice your opinion with little resistance.  But Survivor is more like a work environment.  You can’t escape your co-workers (fellow castaways) or your “bosses” (whoever may be in “control”), and you have to learn how to deal with them accordingly to best help you and when to hold your tongue when needed.

What it all boils down to for us and for her is that sometimes you have to eat your pride and keep your opinions to yourself to be able to work with people you may dislike.  We do this all the time, especially in the workplace.  We may not necessarily like our bosses and co-workers, but in order to keep food on our table and money in the bank we have to reluctantly deal with people we ordinarily wouldn’t put ourselves in contact with.

We all saw that Stacey was definitely one of the stronger women on her tribe by her great performance at the immunity challenge and usually by that merit alone, most tribes would have kept her.  Just look at Mikayla’s experience on her tribe, she’s not in an alliance but noone was ready to throw her to the wolves when Brandon wanted to vote her out.  She was deemed a strength asset and too valuable to discard.  Dawn, up to this point, has had a similar story as well.  Even though both are currently “expendable,” it has definitely been in their benefit that they haven’t rubbed anyone the wrong way either.

That said, I even found through a post-interview with her that the editing didn’t show us that she was pretty close with both rancher Rick and Brandon (as well as the edit-given bond with Christine).  So we know that she didn’t totally just isolate herself.  Her association with Christine at the beginning didn’t help her, but she definitely could have made up ground by giving in and at least tolerating the powers-that-be; Coach, Albert and Sophie.  But by rooting herself as an oppositional force to their control, she put herself in the position of expendable.

We never want to do that in the workplace.  We do, and then we don’t get hours or we put ourselves into a position to be fired/terminated.

Now I’m not saying we always have to be the good little soldier and do everything we are bidden by an individual we totally dislike.  What I am saying is that in this world there are times when we need to look at our situations and feel out what we need to do that would best help our hopeful outcome.  You may not get along, but when you look at things in a business-sense you can definitely learn to make things work your way even if you don’t gel with the people.

With Edna being physically weak and an alliance straggler and Brandon being a social disaster to his alliance, with a little work Stacey could have definitely kept herself alive long enough to survive through their oustings.

I will def miss Stacey’s great facial expressions though.  So, what do you all think was Stacey’s biggest hurdle?

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