Tag: Change

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Inside My Head Karen

Where is Your Heart?

Where is your heart? As in, that on which your life centers?

Have you ever said the phrase, “My heart says one thing, but my mind thinks differently.” This is a common paradox for individuals wrestling with life.

How do you get your heart and your mind on the same page?

Time.

Allow room for time.

Always let your heart lead the way. But allow a timeline for your mind to get on board. Your mind needs time to wrap itself around your longings. It wants to be in agreement with you, but doesn’t know how and needs to find the answers to the what, why, when, and where. Your mind wants to cooperate. Your mind wants to ask questions. And your mind wants to argue with you – not to hold you back – but rather to help you come up with a game plan.

“You make it sound so simple Karen.”

It is simple. We over complicate things.

Take a sheet of paper and draw a line down the middle. On one side, write the words “What my hearts says,” and on the other “What my mind says.”

Compare notes, and then start making a plan. A compromise. A negotiation. A meet-half-way. A big picture. A timeline. Set goals. And accomplish each goal, one step at a time. When the mind and heart unite and cooperate, the adventure begins.

And guess what that adventure is? You begin to believe and trust with forward steps.

Where is your heart?

– Karen Thrall

*also published on www.karenthrall.com

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Inside My Head Melissa

The Importance of Routine

By definition, routine is a series of actions that we repeat daily and without much thought. These repetitive tasks are often the most mundane moments of life, but for some, routine is sacred – a ritual that keeps life glued together.

I love the idea of having routines, of having a moment that is the same today as it was 10 weeks ago; there’s comfort in that, there’s solace in it’s simplicity. But I don’t have any. Every day is different, every morning and every evening are new terrain for me. I don’t know when it happened, but at some point I gave up on any semblance of structure (I don’t even set an alarm), but now I’m sitting here waving my white flag because I desperately need to create routines. I need to spend less energy wishing my life had order and more energy into creating order.

I googled “how to set routines” and the first result was “1. Wake at 4:30 a.m.” Well, that routine seems like it would require too much energy (how would I ever make it to noon, let alone dinner). I need to start smaller, but first, a confession: it is a rare occurrence that I wash my face before bed. It sounds downright glamorous to carve out 20 minutes at night where I light a candle, wash my face, brush my teeth, and then stretch. But goodness, how does one make themselves do that every night? Are routines something you have to force for awhile? Albeit uncomfortable, and possibly annoying?

I’m going to try a little experiment for the next week and do my best to hold myself to a nighttime routine. Routines are not created in a day, but for the next week I’m going to introduce a consistent pattern to my evenings in hopes that a little structure will leave me feeling calmer and more appreciate of the art of slowing down.

Here’s to hoping it sticks and to little victories.

– Melissa Grant

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Inside My Head Libby

Believe in Your Damn Self

Last weekend I attended a leadership program designed to get women focusing on their dreams, feeling empowered and moving forward. While the target age demographic was well below my own, the energy was timeless. I was truly amazed at the drive and passion so many of these women exhibited – education, entrepreneurial spirit, fighting for equal pay, saying yes to both the personal and professional loves of their lives…wow. I am in mourning for my younger self and what I (maybe, I am quite lazy sometimes…) could have accomplished. Moving on…

Another impressive thing was their lack of fear – I’m not saying that they aren’t worried or feel some trepidation about doing something new, but they’re also comfortable with trying. They know that it might not work out, but they’re still going to make a go at it. And if it doesn’t work out? They’ll try something else – they know this isn’t their last shot, their only opportunity. How do they know? Because they’re making their own opportunities – they’re not waiting for something to happen to them, they are making it happen for them.

Last week on Project Runway, (spoiler alert!!) Laurie Underwood, 29, owner of design label Wanda Grace, was kicked off. Did she cry? No! Was she angry and bitter? No! Did she tell all the other contestants/friends not to cry for her? Yes! This was her final monologue as she cleaned up her workspace and turned out the light…

“This isn’t the end for me because I believe in my damn self. This does not stop my shine. There are other spotlights for Laurie Underwood…to be in and she will be there. I’m still writing my story and the best part is yet to come.”

Amazing. This is the attitude we should all strive for – to try new things that we think will make us happy. And if it doesn’t work out, we should chalk it up to experience, pick ourselves up and move on. Hell to the yes, Laurie Underwood and all you other ladies out there getting bossed up and finding your way!

– Libby Bingham

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Inside My Head

10 Year Reunion

Over the weekend, I attended a retreat focused on our holistic lives as women – the connection between career, love and wellness. It was a valuable and restorative weekend and a chance to meet some fascinating women. One of the first exercises we did to kick off the weekend was to envision our ten year reunion as a group. We were to meet three new people, but rather than talk about where we are now in our lives, we were to tell them what we’d been up to since we last saw each other in 2015. It was an interesting twist on an introduction activity and got us started on what we were there to do.

I realize that for many people, I may have just described your worst nightmare. Not only an ice-breaker, but the same ice-breaker done three times. And while I do tend to enjoy a good ice-breaker more than the average person, I especially loved the opportunity to do this three times. We were encouraged to use this chance to go dream shopping. You could use the same update three times and fine-tune a dream you’d already done some thinking about, or you could start over from scratch each time and tell and completely different story about where your life had gone. I moved to Vancouver, northern California and then was bi-coastal. I continued my consulting business, started a new business and then combined them both by the third time. As for my colleagues, there were lots of trips, new babies, new business ventures and some exotic new home bases.

Future visioning is certainly nothing new and you may not have a group of new people to meet, but there’s something incredibly powerful about saying these words out loud. A trusted colleague, a friend, partner or parent can be a great sounding board to try out your own future update. What would you dream? What’s been rattling around in your head that deserves to be heard? Or is there a decision you’ve been on the fence about? Giving voice to both side of the decision can be helpful. Where could you be in ten years?

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Career Libby

Back to School

As of this week, summer is officially over. My son has been in school since August 31, but we went on a family trip to the beach last week and now it really feels like the end. It makes me feel a little sad, but I also embrace the seasonal transitions, both personally and professionally.

Personally, I’m getting back into my routine: less cocktailing and more working out, along with less staying up late and more getting up early. Professionally, I need to do the same thing.

September is the start of our fiscal year. We tie our performance reviews to the start of the fiscal year so that we can see whether or not we met our goals for the prior year organizationally, departmentally and individually. I think it’s a decent process – it allows for reflection and a kind of kick start to the new fiscal year…a back-to-school bump if you will!

As I begin to reflect on what my department, and specifically what I, accomplished last year, it’s pretty impressive: we brought in almost $8M in revenue by holding over 150 programs. Out of that 150, twenty-one of them were my programs – all face-to-face and some lasting 2 hours, others 5 days…not too shabby for a part-timer. (I won’t say that I contributed significantly to the revenue numbers, but I helped!)

I think it’s important to periodically check-in with yourself and review your body of work. Work can sometimes feel like, well, work, so understanding all that you’ve accomplished is essential to maintaining forward progress and staying energized. It’s okay to be proud!

You should also be able to articulate your role on the team. While your individual successes are what make you shine, your part in elevating the entire department or in helping the organization meet their goals is what makes you valuable. Together, these are the things that keep you employed, but they are also the recipe for increasing your own self-esteem and a metric for whether or not this job is still the right fit for you.

– Libby Bingham

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Inside My Head

Always On and Always Connected: What Does It Mean?

I got my first cell phone in college, back when Nextel phones were still a thing and I paid by the minute, paid long distance charges, and certainly didn’t text. And I only bit the bullet after a stalled car made me late for work and I didn’t have a way to let them know I wasn’t going to be on time. This was strictly an emergency phone (though perhaps the definition of emergency shifted as the cost of my minutes went down…but I digress). About 5 years after that, I got my first smart phone through work and I’ll admit to being thrilled because as a young professional, it was a sign that I was important (the naivete of youth is adorable, isn’t it?). Fast forward to 2015, and 92% of adults in the U.S. now have cell phones. And don’t even get me started on kids having phones…

This leaves us facing etiquette challenges that just simply didn’t exist ten or fifteen years ago. The Pew Research Center, a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts, recently released a report, Americans’ Views on Mobile Etiquette. It’s fascinating stuff.  I share this not to reminisce about the good ol’ days before cell phones ruined our lives or propelled us into the greatest technological era of all time (depending on your view), but I do find our attitudes interesting when it comes to the appropriateness of using our phones.

When asked for their views on how mobile phone use impacts group interactions, 82% of adults say that when people use their phones in [social] settings it frequently or occasionally hurts the conversation. Meanwhile, 33% say that cell phone use in these situations frequently or occasionally contributes to the conversation and atmosphere of the group. Women are more likely than men to feel cell use at social gatherings hurts the group: 41% of women say it frequently hurts the gathering vs. 32% of men who say that the same. Similarly, those over age 50 (45%) are more likely than younger cell owners (29%) to feel that cellphone use frequently hurts group conversations.

And while those 82% said that using phones may hurt the conversation, 89% of adults who own a cellphone say they used it at their last social gathering. 89%. Yowza. Yet, before we mourn the loss of personal connection, of those 89%, 78% reported using their phone for what Pew termed a “group contributing” action: posting a video or photo about the gathering, sharing something that happened, looking up information to contribute to the conversation or connecting with someone at the gathering. My, how the times have changed from Zach Morris’ Saved by the Bell phone…

The report goes on to talk about always being connected, the types of activities for which we use our phones and how much usage we tolerate in different public spaces. As you would expect from a research study, Pew simply presents the facts. They don’t chastise us for our behavior, nor credit cell phones for bringing us together across the globe. Rather, they present the information and let you decide what it means to you. And it’s certainly had the wheels of my brain turning since I read it. What does your connectivity mean to you? And what do you think it says to others?

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Career

Starting Over

A friend of mine recently shared a LinkedIn post with me, “Competition can copy everything but not your culture.” While there are definitely some good reminders about creating and strengthening your culture in here, both of us were intrigued by one specific suggestion:

Keep disrupting your own organisation structure. An interesting exercise which we do is assume all of us got fired one day, and someone with no emotion of the past was re-building our team based on where we are today. It is amazing how many insights come out of this exercise, and while no one actually gets fired, many of the organisation’s priorities evolve in a refreshing way.

What a fascinating idea. If we could detach ourselves from the knowledge of how things came to be, would we make the same decisions? So often we get attached to structure and roles because that’s just how things are. We end up with workarounds or solutions that are almost right because we’re too focused on keeping things the way they are because that’s the way we do things.

While I think we might lose a lot if we regularly fired everyone and started from scratch, the idea itself of staring over can be very freeing. Not only can organizations get stale, but we can get stale. Does there continue to be a need for the service or product we provide in the way we provide it? What needs might we anticipate now that we couldn’t have dreamed up five or ten years ago? Is there a way I could better be utilizing my skills? How has our organization grown since we last evaluated? How have I grown? What could I share that maybe I couldn’t have a few years ago? What if our organizational politics didn’t exist?

Whether it’s your work structure or the way you’ve structured your personal life, what would you do if you were starting from the beginning?

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Inside My Head Karen

Fear + Humans = Normal

Karen Fear
photo credit @michaelhull

Fear.

Of?

______________________________________________.

Fill in the blank.

My Aha Moment: Every human on the planet can write something on that line.

Isn’t that incredible?! Think about that for a moment. The entire human race, from every region of the planet, can identify with fear. It manifests itself differently in all of us. What might create fearfulness in one person may help another experience fearlessness.

Someone is afraid of heights while another is fearless of heights.

Someone is afraid of large social gatherings while another is fearless and the life of the party.

If I’m a child, I may be afraid of the dark or afraid of monsters in the closet. If I’m a teenager, I may be afraid of not having friends or being picked last in classroom games. If I’m an adult, I may be afraid of not having enough money or afraid of getting a serious illness.

Doesn’t matter what the age, what part of the world you live in, or whatever status you perceive to have – you do experience fear. We all do. Whether fleeting or immobilizing, momentarily or hauntingly – fear is real.

I was reading a bunch of quotes on the Internet about fear. Countless quotes on fear! That in and of itself is mind blowing. Could it be the topic of fear is one of the most researched, talked about, counseled and examined? Does fear land in the top 5 psychological analyses? (I don’t know. These are genuine questions.)

These countless quotes were actually pretty inspiring: encouraging us to let go of fear and reminding humans we can overcome fear.

As I reflected on my personal life, I notice my fears morph. What might have caused me fear at one point in my life, no longer causes me fear. Each fear I encounter is usually associated with The Unknown.

My Resolve #1:  Fear is universal and woven into the human race. The reassurance: someone identifies with each of us.

My Resolve #2:  Fear changes and Experience is its overcomer. The reassurance: we will learn deep truths and get through it.

My Resolve #3:  Fear does not isolate us from community. The reassurance: we belong and we are loved.

My Resolve #4:  Fear is waiting for us in our tomorrow world. The reassurance: we will conquer yet again.

My Resolve #5:  Fear does not make us weak. The reassurance: we are strong and perceptive.

My Resolve #6:  Fear commands us to trust that which we do not know. The reassurance: we’re being propelled into new understandings and empathies.

My Resolve #7:  Fear is a gift to others. The reassurance: because of our fears, we are able to support someone else in his or hers.

– Karen Thrall

*also published on www.karenthrall.com

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Inside My Head Karen

I Cannot See Ahead of Me

Karen sightIt is a scary moment when you open a door and enter a room where all you see is darkness, and you know you have to maneuver through its corridors without a glimpse of light.

Which is scarier, not seeing or the unknown?

“You must do the things you think you cannot do.” – Eleanor Roosevelt

We like the comfort of seeing. We do what we do amidst light.

I see, therefore, I know.

I see, therefore, I can.

I see, therefore, I will.

But what if you can’t see?

I don’t see, therefore, I don’t know.

I don’t see, therefore, I can’t.

I don’t see, therefore, I won’t.

What if you have to proceed even though you can’t see or can only see dimly?

I cannot see, then I will learn.

I cannot see, then I will trust.

I cannot see, yet I will endeavor.

Sometimes we have to make decisions on what we can’t see and on the unknown. When these moments enter our lives, (and believe me they will enter your life) we need to change our posture from illuminated decision making to unknown decision making. No human is void of the unknown. Each individual story will have at least one chapter where they cannot see ahead.

There are no absolutes in the unknown.

Think about entering a dark room and trying to get to the other side. With careful steps and hands extended, we cautiously and nervously proceed. Some will enter the room and will turn right back around; the unknown is too frightening and they will opt out. Those that choose to attempt this challenge can only do it one way: one step at a time and with a tremendous amount of trust. And as each step moves you forward, you learn. Learning comes from what you just did, not what you are about to do.

Learn from your previous steps, trust the forward steps and choose to endeavor.

– Karen Thrall

*also published on www.karenthrall.com

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Career Libby

Time to Move On

My brother is a commercial diver by trade (helmets not tanks). He has been diving for almost twenty years and working for the same company for the past seven. Last week he just up and quit. He was reluctant to tell my parents and me and my husband about it, feeling it was an irresponsible move, but he did finally tell us. Here’s our collective take on things:

  1. Always do your best. This is something instilled in both my brother and me from birth and the message is usually delivered as, “Don’t do a half-assed job.” When whatever your co-workers or company is doing impedes your ability to do your best, it’s time to move on.
  2. You can’t change other people. You can only change yourself and how you receive other people’s interactions with you. If you’ve done all you can to adapt to the inane behavior of others and they continue to encroach on your sanity, it’s time to move on.
  3. Safety is no accident. This is true no matter what, but when you’re on a boat in the middle of the ocean responsible for the lives of a five man crew, it transforms from catch phrase to survival tactic. My brother would never be considered lackadaisical, whimsical or frivolous. If he asks you to do something on his boat, you do it or risk an injury to yourself or others. If you’re working with people who do not value your health and well-being, it’s time to move on.
  4. Loyalty is a tricky thing. Loyalty is something you want in a business environment – some level of trust and comfort allows people to settle in and do their best work. It is helpful when building a team and growing an enterprise. But it must also be paired with buckling down, looking out for the company interests and a subordinated ego. If your boss chooses a slacker crony over your hard work and productivity, it’s time to move on.
  5. Your reputation will proceed you. If you work hard, do your best, act in the best interests of the company, and behave like a brand ambassador at all times, people notice you. And if you’re one of the few people behaving this way in your organization, they will notice you even more. If your principles are being compromised, it’s time to move on.

When you have a tried and true work ethic, when you have spent years gaining experience and expertise, when you have treated all your co-workers – those both above and below you in the organization chart – with respect, you can move on. Something else will come along. It would be ideal to have something planned before making a move, but life doesn’t always work like that. Though if you behave in such a way that people want to be associated with you, you won’t have any worries when you finally say, “Enough is enough. It’s time to move on.”

(P.S. Within a week of quitting his job, my brother got a new full-time job, a part-time job AND an offer for a seasonal job. He’s fine and we’re all very proud.)

– Libby Bingham