Ordinary Life, Extraordinary Living

Fun on a Hot Summer Day

Pictures from a recent birthday party in the backyard: 

Slip 'n slide, 12-year old boys, and Super Soaker water guns. 

Followed by the fascination of what happens to silly putty left to melt on the patio furniture:

BTW--It cleans up alot easier than one might think.

What Happened Before Blogs?

In the Boulder County Business Report, a local paper, the current issue lists bloggers in the area. (No, I wasn't on the list, although I do have a higher number of average visitors per day than others on the list.  Hey, you can't be everywhere all the time.)

One of the blogger names caught my eye, someone I worked for over ten years ago, at U S WEST.  This manager has since moved on to several startups and is now a respected thinker in the area of network security and software convergence. In reading his posts (which are steeped in technical slang and is Greek to even me, with a background in high-tech), I wondered about what people did before blogs.

We all have ideas and opinions on things we are passionate about. Would this manager have walked down the hall and had a 20-minute discussion with a colleague? Or would his advocacy and musings in the technical arena have come out inappropriately in a meeting about project status? Or been squashed all together, only to show up in a nighttime dream? 

What happened to all of our original (or maybe not so original) thoughts before blogging became mainstream? 

Seth Godin speaks to this aspect of blogging--as just one original thought turned into a post enhanced by another post and another and another. And hey, I mused about this before reading Seth's post. Yes, you can have original thoughts that are enhanced by someone else's original thoughts, in parallel.

I'm grateful to be blogging, to have a place to explore and create more, out of fuzzy inklings and half formed phrases in my head.

Hiring Good People

Dan Pink's blog pointed me to a well-written posting from Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape and one of the guys who figured out how to make the Internet alot more usable with a web browser (Mosaic). For many of us, who spend alot of time using the Internet, this is like the Edison inventing the light bulb.

Andreessen's posting is on how to hire really good people. His experience comes from hiring for startups but I think his advice applies to all companies.  Andreessen has a way of busting myths and conventional wisdom with light, conversational humor. In particular, I like the posting because it draws from real life experience and boils it down to a few key, actionable tips. I won't spoil it by giving you the golden nuggets here. Go read for yourself.

One more thing. I was impressed by not the number of comments and trackbacks on the posting itself, but by the fact that Andreessen was clearly reading all comments (some of them very lengthy) and then responding in detail to the comments. The wikipedia listing for Andreessen validates this in describing how Andreessen developed Mosaic, the first web browser:  "Andreessen was fastidious in monitoring and responding to all user comments for suggestions and improvements to the browser, which fueled its accessibility and its popularity."  Talents serve us in many ways.

Update on Wascally Wabbits

Last year about this time, I blogged about my problem with rabbits in my backyard. The rabbits seemed to have moved to the front yard and while they are a nuisance, I see them more in my neighbor's yard than mine.

I'm not the only one that thinks rabbits are a nuisance. People are Googling on the phrase "getting rid of rabbits" and ending up at my blog, reading the posting from last year.

Based on a recent article from the Wall Street Journal, rabbits are a problem all over the world. In the port of Rotterdam, rabbits have become a problem in terms of digging up ground and unsettling pipelines.

The port has hired a man whose sole job is to hunt rabbits. His secret?  He uses ferrets to root rabbits out of their holes.  He drives around the port facility, shooting from his truck, being careful not to hit a pipe in the process. His one-day record is 364 rabbits. That's alot of rabbits. It makes me wonder how many more were underground, shaking in their bunny holes.

My rabbit problem seems to pale in comparison. If you end up at my blog, based on searching for solutions to your own rabbit problem, know that it couldn't be nearly as bad as the port of Rotterdam. Ahhhh, the wonders of schadenfreude. 

Grand Gestures

I read in a travel magazine about Rory Stewart, author of the book, The Places in Between. The book describes his 600-mile walk across Afghanistan in 2002, right after the fall of the Taliban. He's told by an Afghan when entering the country, "You are the first tourist in Afghanistan. It is mid-winter. There are three meters of snow on the high passes, there are wolves, and this is a war. You will die, I can guarantee."

In the travel article, Stewart talks about grand gestures and heros--things that the human spirit knows about but our intellectual mind has trouble comprehending.

Closer to home, a friend of mine, Traci Maddox, is biking 3,400 miles across the U S, starting near Portland, Oregon, and ending in Portland, Maine. While not nearly as dangerous as walking through a war zone in the middle of winter, Traci has her own troubles to contend with (mosquitos, headwinds, hail storms, and lack of ATMs), which she has nicely documented in a blog.  By now, she's someplace in North Dakota or maybe even Minnesota, having surpassed the 1500 mile mark and blogged about Day 30 on the road.

In both cases, the craziness of the adventure is offset by the will of human beings to experience their own and others' humanity. Traci, who makes her living as a coach and organization development consultant, wrote this before she started her trip: 

"So I’m a nearly 45-year-old woman who is about 30 pounds overweight with a recently broken leg getting ready to ride 3,400 miles when my longest training ride has been 3 hours! Am I crazy or what?" 

In her postings, Traci describes the help she gets from people along the way. In Stanley, ND, a friendly city worker visits their campsite to warn them about a severe storm coming and a shopkeeper takes pity on them when they can't find an ATM and credit cards aren't accepted.

I'm looking forward to getting a copy of The Places in Between and reading Traci's blog--great summer reading and some inspiration for a grand gesture of my own.....

Circus vs. Art

A great quote from George Lucas, when asked at the D: All Things Digital conference what he thought about Internet video:

"There are two forms of entertaining. Circus is random. And voyeuristic. It's basically what you see on YouTube now. I call it feeding Christians to the lions. The movie term is throwing puppies on a freeway. It's very easy. You sit there and see what happens....

Then you get to art. Art is where a person contrives the situation and tells a story, and hopefully that story reveals the truth behind the facts. Storytelling is trying to come up with an idea that is insightful in terms of giving you a different insight into how things work, or is amusing."

I definitely strive more for creating art than circus. And I admit that every once in awhile, I'm prone to being part of the circus.

Slash Careers

If you missed the June events in Denver with Marci Alboher, kick yourself, twice.  I interviewed Marci for the Northwestern University Club of Colorado on one night and then the next night, Marci gave a talk for the Lighthouse Writer's Workshop on the topic, "Secret Lives of Writers." After this second appearance, she emailed that it was one of the highlights of her "slash tour."

On the night that I interviewed her, Marci captivated the audience with her observations on trends leading to more slash careers, stories of specific slashes that showed how to get started and keep it going, and details on the lifestyle changes that a slash career requires/enables.  The Q+A from the audience was thoughtful and thorough, from asking if the slash career meant advocating multi-tasking (answer:no, it's about going deep into a couple of areas, not wide) to wondering if unpaid work counts as a slash (answer: yes, if it's something that the individual deeply associates with his/her identity.)

The most rewarding part of the evening was talking with the attendees afterwards, while Marci signed books. Individuals felt validated, as in "Hey, I'm not weird, the rest of the world just hasn't caught up." They saw new possibilities, not having to stick with the same career they've come to hate after twenty years. And they were inspired to create a career that fits them perfectly, instead of trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. Throughout it all, I was in whole brain heaven, surrounded by people willing to engage in both left-brain and right-brain activities to create a full life.

While in town, Marci was interviewed by Channel 9 news in Denver (KUSA). Here's the link:
http://www.9news.com/life/programming/shows/mornings/article.aspx?storyid=71943
(The link expires in 30 days so there's no time like the present....)

Marci's book is One Person/Multiple Careers: A New Model for Work/Life Success. If you get her book and really like it, please provide a review on Amazon. Help get the word out on what a great worklife can look like.

Boys and Women

My older son will be entering high school in the fall. It seems to be the norm these days that 8th grade graduations are big affairs. The school had a formal ceremony where the kids dressed up, walked up to receive a certificate when their name was called, and wound their way back to their seat with moms and dads lined up at the receiving end to snap a few photos.

At this age, my son hates having a fuss made. He moves quickly at the sight of a camera. Instead of getting a photo of him passing through the receiving line, my camera's delay resulted in a photo of the back of the lady next to me standing up.

One of my friends, who has three sons, had a pithy comment at the end of the ceremony: "At this age, the boys are boys and the girls are women." 

I snapped this photo of my son and his friends at the reception afterwards. Enough said.

What Are You Waiting For?

I was recently approached by someone setting up a business to provide resources to job seekers in a niche market. She wanted my feedback on providing coaching services to job seekers and wondered if I was interested in being one of the coaching resources.

My first reaction?  Job seekers are often desperate people and I don't like working with desperate people. (Yes, coaching could certainly help that population and I'm sure there are other coaches who specialize in serving that population.)

Which led me to memories of being laid off during the last part of my career, working in large companies. My two layoffs, one in 1996 from U S WEST (now QWEST) and the other in 2002 from Avaya, couldn't have been more different.

In 1996, I was the desperate job seeker. I was well-connected inside the company but practically invisible to people who could help me on the outside. I was heads down in the minutia of project management and hadn't even attended an all-employee meeting the week before where the company talked about impending job cuts. I hadn't updated my resume since I started at the company, six years prior. And I didn't know where I wanted to go with my career.

In other words, I had no foundation for moving forward.

On top of this, I was the major breadwinner of a family of four, with two kids under the age of 5 in day care. 

I learned from that experience.

By 2002, I had developed a network outside of the company that connected me with my passion--bringing the human spirit into companies and organization development.  I was well aware that I was in a precarious position in my role at work--not doing technical work in an engineering organization. My husband had purposely re-financed our mortgage at a lower rate several months earlier, so that we would have lower payments during an interruption in income. I knew where I wanted to go with my career and had laid the groundwork. I had attended a meeting of professional coaches, researched coaching schools and had signed up for my first class. 

Two years prior to my lay off, I formally transitioned my role at work to the people side of the business equation, creating my own job of Retention Leader. I studied burn out on a large software development project, created career development talks, became part of a group to create more of a community feel at work, and helped implement a thank you note program that is still in existence today. I was informally coaching a manager (with a limited set of tools in my toolkit) who had approached me for coaching.

Four years prior to my layoff, I looked for ways to dip my toe in organization development and team effectiveness work, providing lunchtime brown bags for my colleagues and signing up to help my engineering colleagues with decision making processes. I took any personal development workshops the company would pay for.

It had been years in the making, preparing to leave the company, to move on to another type of job and career. A colleague said to me on my last day at Avaya, "It was too soon." To which I replied, "No, it's not too soon."  I had been preparing for that day for a long time. I just didn't know I was ready.

Job seekers don't inherently need to be desperate.  And my situation from 2002 is clearly in the minority. 

A phrase that has come up recently in my work is this: We don't have time to waste.

If you are working at job that you love, hooray! And if you are not, become proactive about your career now, before you need to become the job seeker. What are you waiting for?

June 13, Balance, Control, and Security for Careers

I'll be interviewing Marci Alboher, New York Times career columnist and author of One Person/Multiple Careers: A New Model for Work/Life Success, at a public event in Denver on June 13.  Click here for online registration, which will close on June 12. Walk-in registration is available at the door.

I was initially attracted to the book by the link between Alboher's "slashes" and the concept of Boundary Crossers, a phrase coined by Dan Pink in A WHOLE NEW MIND. Yes, Boundary Crossers, people who operate in multiple worlds but fit in no one world, sound alot like "slashes", individuals who define themselves with more than one thing in their work life, as in "lawyer/theatre director" or "musician/real estate agent" or "neurosurgeon/news correspondent."

And as I was re-reading the book to prepare for the interview, it hit me what this book is really about. To quote from the book: "[Slashes] ...seem to have found the answers to some of the most vexing issues in working life today, from job insecurity to career burnout to work/life balance." 

As a coach, I'm often uncovering new options with my clients. And that's what this book does for the reader. Uncovering new options for balance, control, and security in careers. It's about hedging your bets by having not just a balanced financial portfolio but also a balanced career portfolio. It's about nurturing parts of you that lead to wholeness--whole brain thinking, mind-body-spirit being, and full out living. And it's about taking control of your career by customizing it to fit you perfectly.  A unique you, doing all the things you do best, rolled into one package, can't be outsourced and is consistently engaging.

If you are in the Denver area, please join me for this special event on June 13, at 7pm. Online registration closes tomorrow, June 12. Walk-in registration is available at the door. Click here for more details.