Variety Rants & Miscellaney

I don’t have a coherent post for you today.  Instead, please enjoy my variety rants and miscellany.

• Dear goodness, can we stop wordsmithing my goals already and get ON with things?  They are directionally correct and I’ll be able to demonstrate whether or not I achieved them — how many levels of nuance do we need to get to??
• Are there as many levels of nuance as there are levels of Dante’s Hell?
• Found on the ROWE blog: Demand clear expectations. Demand constant communication about outcomes. Demand transparency.
• Stop making me try to read your mind! You are lazy, lazy, lazy in that you expect us all to read your mind and track with your changing thoughts, even when you don’t verbalize those thoughts.  This trait is going to bite you in the ass one day!

• Deep down, and despite what the publicly “right” answer might be, am I more interested in being challenged at work or finding work easy?  If I’m challenged in an area of strength, do I perceive the work to be easy?

• Sometimes I’m haunted by the fact that the work we all do — my team & my partners — is pretty stupid.  We’re support people for support organizations.  None of us are rainmakers.  Sometimes it just seems sort of pointless, like we’re actually making things more complicated or enabling less.

• Tons of folks apparently took Best Buy up on their buyout offer! More than were expected — and apparently lots of directors & VPs, not just line & staff folks.  I think this is cool:  even in a down economy, people are on the lookout for opportunities that let them exit their status quo for a dream, or an early retirement, or a refreshing change.

• My laid-off friend had a couple of interviews recently.  I’m crossing my fingers!

• Sometimes I think we’re doing a lot of things right at work, though.  My boss is fond of pointing out right now that the down economy and poor company performance are actually creating opportunity to make change happen more easily.

• I think I’m better at destroying things than creating things.  Once, I dismantled an entire garage with a sawzall, sitting on the roof and cutting it apart section by section.  Later there was much swinging of a sledgehammer.  In the end there was nothing left but a concrete slab with a vintage powder-blue Caddy sitting on it, like a phoenix rising from the garbage-house flames.  I wonder what Habitat for Humanity did with the Caddy.

• Y’all should consider donating to Habitat for Humanity.  They are a tremendous, excellent organization.  They are really an up-by-your-own-bootstraps, barn-raising for your friends & neighbors kind of a deal.

• What is behind my need to get approval from authority figures? I’m a full-grown adult with a kid, what the hell do I need approval for?  I try to diagnose the root cause of this need all the time, and I still can’t figure it out.

• I am really enjoying this blog because it insists I write every day.

10 Years Out

As a follow-on to the lottery exercise, I’m going to answer Anastasia’s questions from this post here in its own post.

In a nutshell, she asks: what does my ideal career situation look like in 10 years?

Now, I’m not generally one to make a heavily scripted 1o-year or even 5-year plan.  This works well for some, but doesn’t mesh well with my thinking style.  On the other hand, Anastasia is right to ask what my ideal outcome is, since you can’t attract or achieve what you can’t describe.  So I know generally what my ideal situation 10 years out will be, and I can dive deeper into the specifics of that situation as I need to (e.g. when I’m ready to move more quickly towards that destination, or if I need to tweak what that destination looks like).  But at this time I won’t script out the specific steps I’ll take.

10 years out, I :

• Have an equity stake in a small, high-growth private firm,
• Am probably not the original founder of that firm (not really my style) but came on board early on,
• Lead strategy and new business development for that firm (my favorite kind of stuff to do),
• Probably also own the back office functions and staff (also stuff I like to do)
• Carry a highly marketable title, such as VP of Strategy and Operations,
• Am highly compensated in salary and benefits, more so that I would have been at the F50C by this time,
• Work highly flexible, adaptable hours (my kiddo will be 10 by this time and I want high flexibility to be involved in school and lots of time for my family),
• Write: I Enjoy my work enough, and work flexible enough hours that I also easily have room to publish a relatively sophisticated blog and do some highly-selective freelancing & column work,
• Volunteer: I Enjoy my work enough, and have enough room in my schedule to have a leadership role again on a nonprofit board (larger nonprofit with multi-million dollar budget and/or statewide reach — this is a size I like),
• Am well-regarded (at least locally, not sure if I care or not about nationally) in my field and am sought out as an expert and collaborator,
• Run every day and race regularly; have completed a marathon,
• Have plenty of time to read widely (fiction, news & business),
• Have big & small adventures, and cozy home time, with my family,
• Laugh a lot,
• Wear jeans most days to work

Like the lottery exercise, 10-Years-Out is another great exercise to do when times are uncertain or scary. Thanks, Anastasia, for the prompt!

What Would You Do If You Won the Lottery?

I think one of the best time to do the lottery-what-if exercise is when times are scary.  Because if your current circumstances — your Plan A — go away, wouldn’t you rather have a Plan B that you really love (or at least a vision if not the actual plan), instead of a Plan B that’s more of the mundane same-old same-old?
Make a mere repeat of your Plan A, your Plan C.

Make your Plan B really special.

That way, if Plan A collapses, you’re well poised with a clear vision to start to execute that vision.  And if times start feeling abundant again, and Plan A is going well, why not consider: now that you have a great vision, what’s stopping you?

The lottery-what-if game is a great way to brainstorm some truly soul-nourishing Plan B options. Here’s what I’ve come up with, sort of in rank 0rder:

1. Focus full-time on this blog, freelance writing & writing columns.
2. Open the COOLEST skyway convenience shop ever, in downtown Minneapolis. Filled with what you need and expect but also with amazing oddities & unexpected fun crap.
3. Open an Etsy shop and sell custom-order poetry.
4. Consult for non-profits on back office management, career development & grant writing.
5. Run the back office of a small creative business and get an equity position.
6. Be a courier or concierge.
7. Stop working entirely, and work at home on artisan & homestead things (growing & preserving my own food, remodeling my house, keeping chickens, converting my car to run on biodiesel, you get the drift.)
8. Buy and manage all the properties on my block.

See, some are kind of crazy, some are do-able fantasies, and many are things I can start doing very easily and quickly!

Feeling Really Discouraged

So I found out Friday that two colleagues whom I like and admire have been promoted. This is great news and I’m very happy for them.  I am also feeling super discouraged.

Why does this bother me?

Because these two, I thought of them as peers.  Peers who were one management level ahead of me, one title ahead of me. (This isn’t about pay or pay grade for me, it’s about title and the publicness of title.)

So I was behind, right? This is my thinking. If they’re a title level ahead of me, yet my peers, I must be doing something wrong and need to catch up.  They were a yardstick of sorts, because we were more alike than different.  And I did not measure up.

And now they are two title levels ahead of me.

So I feel stuck. Stupid.  Not even stuck: sliding backwards.

But why does this bother me so much?

I have been asking myself this for a year, ever since I read The Resilience Factor and took a class from the author.  I’m not yet 100% sure.  I know I have big hot-buttons, icebergs the book calls them, about:

• Recognition, especially by authority
• Public recognition of success, in this case via my publicly-known title
• An idea that I’ve failed if others succeed at a faster rate than me

Icebergs are those really deep-seated beliefs, the ones that are hard to even make yourself aware of, let alone let go of.  I am not sure where these icebergs came from. Something in childhood, early school perhaps? My parents set high standards, but never unrealistic expectations nor conditional love.

These icebergs do not serve me.  These icebergs directly contribute to my caution in reaching out to take risks with big payoffs (like aggressively positioning myself for promotion) or trying new experiences (it took me a year to decide to start this blog, and six years to decide to go to graduate school).  Of the several types of resilience the authors have identified, I am far less resilient than the norm on reaching out.

Plus, these icebergs make it easy for me to feel embarrassed and ashamed about myself, depressed, and apathetic (“why try”).

So what am I gonna do about it?

Two things.

1. I will work to neutralize icebergs when they get activated. (The book has useful tactics for doing this, but they are new behaviors I have to learn.) I will keep working to consciously make myself aware when an iceberg gets activated, deliberately choose to feel differently instead of giving into the auto-emotional response, and tell myself, “This doesn’t serve you at all, let it go.”

I will also make lists of factual proof contrary to what the icebergs are telling me.  In this case, proof that I am not failing nor unpromotable includes my stellar performance review score and explicit statements from my boss, former boss, and director that I am ready to promote and that they are positioning me for promotion.

2.  I will figure out how to more effectively and aggressively promote my career. Advocating for myself is perhaps my biggest weakness. I’ve long complained that I don’t know how to promote myself, but this isn’t true: via feedback I know I’m a great career coach to my employees and other colleagues.  So I will become a student of this. (I’m the daughter of academics, after all).  I will look for concrete, actionable tactics. I will ask myself what I’d council another to do, and take my advice.  I will seek out blogs & books about career advancement and study them.  And I will ask a couple of trusted colleagues for recommendations on a mentor for this specific topic/skill set.

Oh, and I will blog about it

That’s why I started this thing, yes?  Among other reasons, I just need to lay bare my biggest shame and my biggest blind spot. Ruminate on it, learn from others, hear comments & feedback, think out loud.

Weekly Review 12/6/08

As mentioned, I skipped the holiday week and held over the 11/21/08 Goals & MITs to this week.

How did I do?

1. Goal: Add more great content.  MIT: Update resume and post masked version.

Yep, that one got done during the holiday week. Check out my resume here. If anyone would like to read it and offer critique or advice, please do! And by the way, there is some great resume advice over at Free Money Finance.

2. Goal: Add more great content. MIT: Write 5 days minimum (this is an interim goal to help me work up to writing every day – I’m still trying to work out the baby/day job/moonlighting schedule)

Well, I wrote every day but Friday and I’ve decided I’m taking Fridays off: it’s pizza night wherein we make our own pizza after work.  Can’t be working 100% of the time, need to increase the fun quotient! BUT, I’m still not writing as much as I want to. That’s partly a function of the baby/day job/moonlighting balance, and partly because I think up great posts when I’m out & about but I just can’t type fast enough on that damned tiny iphone virtual keyboard.

3. Goal: Increase readership & recognition. MIT: Continue commenting on career & related blogs; expand to working mom blogs.

Yep, doing this and nope, not doing this as much as I want to. See comment above.

What’s on deck for next week?

1.  Goal: add more great content.  MIT: write write write write write write. Also, mix up shorter & longer posts.

2.  Goal: increase readership & recognition: MIT: comment comment comment guest post comment comment comment comment.

3.  Goal: add more great content.  MIT: write the next two interview question sets and send along to the interviewees.

What Studying Poetry Taught Me About Business Writing

Be graceful.

Get to the point.

Be simple, clean.

Be necessary.

Let the eye scan it.

Respect your reader.

Quit while you’re ahead.