As soon as I click publish, I’ll skip a shower, but on 4 pieces of light clothing, gather my gear and get on my bike for the 3.3 mile ride to work. Once I get there, I’ll meditate, do a little yoga and have breakfast. No getting kids off to school, no drama, no nothing. Just a nice morning. Some moments are easier to be present in than others… :-D
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Melody Beattie writes this about work:
Just as we have relationship histories, most of us have work histories.
Just as we have a present circumstance to accept and deal with in our relationship life, we have a present circumstance to accept and deal with in our work life.
Just as we develop a healthy attitude toward our relationship history – one that will help us learn and move forward – we can develop a healthy attitude toward our work history.
I have worked many jobs in my life, since I was eleven years old. Just as I have learned many things about myself through my relationships, I have learned many lessons through my work. Often, these lessons run parallel to the lessons I’m learning in other areas of my life.
I have worked at jobs I hated but was temporarily dependent on. I have gotten stuck in jobs because I was afraid to strike out on my own and find my next set of circumstances.
I have been in some jobs to develop skills. Sometimes, I didn’t realize I was developing those skills until later on when they become an important part of the career of my choice.
I have worked at jobs where I felt victimized, where I gave and gave and received nothing in return. I have been in relationships where I manufactured similar feelings.
I have worked at some jobs that have taught me what I absolutely didn’t want; others sparked in me an idea of what I really did want and deserve in my career.
Some of my jobs have helped me develop character; others have helped me fine tune skills. They have all been a place to practice recovery behaviors.
Just as I have had to deal with my feelings and messages about myself in relationships, I have had to deal with my feelings and messages about myself, and what I believed I deserved at work.
I have been through two major career changes in my life. I learned that neither career was a mistake and no job was wasted time. I have learned something from each job, and my work history has helped create who I am.
I learned something else: there was a Plan, and I was being led. The more I trusted my instincts, what I wanted, and what felt right, the more I felt that I was being led.
The more I refused to lose my soul to a job and worked at it because I wanted to and not for the paycheck, the less victimized I felt by any career, even those jobs that paid a meager salary. The more I set goals and took responsibility for achieving the career I wanted, the more I could decide whether a particular job fit into that scheme of things. I could understand why I was working at a particular job and how that was going to benefit me.
There are times I have even panicked at work and about where I was in my employment history. Panic never helped. Trust and working my program did.
There were times I looked around and wondered why I was where I was. There were times people thought I should be someplace different. But when I looked into myself and at God, I knew I was in the right place, for the moment.
There were times I have had to quit a job and walk away in order to be true to myself. Sometimes, that was frightening. Sometimes, I felt like a failure. But I learned this: If I was working my program and true to myself, I never had to fear where I was being led.
There have been times I couldn’t survive on the small amount of money I was receiving. Instead of bringing that issue to a particular employer and making it his or her fault, I have had to learn to bring the issue to my Higher Power and myself. I’ve learned I’m responsible for setting my boundaries and establishing what I believe I deserve. I’ve also learned God, not a particular employer, is my source of guidance.
I’ve learned that I’m not stuck or trapped in a job no more than I am in a relationship. I have choices. I may not be able to see them clearly right now, but I do have choices. I’ve learned that if I really want to take care of myself in a particular way on a job, I will do that. And if I really want to be victimized by a job, I will allow that to happen too.
I am responsible for my choices, and I have choices.
Above all else, I’ve learned to accept and trust my present circumstances at work. That does not mean to submit; it does not mean to forego boundaries. It means to trust, accept, then take care of myself the best I’m able to on any given day.
God, help me bring my recovery behaviors to my career affairs.” via Thought for the Day — Hazelden.
The command-and-control approach to management has in recent years become less and less viable. Globalization, new technologies, and changes in how companies create value and interact with customers have sharply reduced the efficacy of a purely directive, top-down model of leadership. What will take the place of that model? Part of the answer lies in how leaders manage communication within their organizations—that is, how they handle the flow of information to, from, and among their employees. Traditional corporate communication must give way to a process that is more dynamic and more sophisticated. Most important, that process must be conversational.
We arrived at that conclusion while conducting a recent research project that focused on the state of organizational communication in the 21st century. Over more than two years we interviewed professional communicators as well as top leaders at a variety of organizations—large and small, blue chip and start-up, for-profit and nonprofit, U.S. and international. To date we have spoken with nearly 150 people at more than 100 companies. Both implicitly and explicitly, participants in our research mentioned their efforts to “have a conversation” with their people or their ambition to “advance the conversation” within their companies. Building upon the insights and examples gleaned from this research, we have developed a model of leadership that we call “organizational conversation.”
Smart leaders today, we have found, engage with employees in a way that resembles an ordinary person-to-person conversation more than it does a series of commands from on high. Furthermore, they initiate practices and foster cultural norms that instill a conversational sensibility throughout their organizations. Chief among the benefits of this approach is that it allows a large or growing company to function like a small one. By talking with employees, rather than simply issuing orders, leaders can retain or recapture some of the qualities—operational flexibility, high levels of employee engagement, tight strategic alignment—that enable start-ups to outperform better-established rivals.” Get more here: Leadership Is a Conversation – Harvard Business Review.
Holy Kaw! via Can a dog increase job satisfaction? [infographic].
“Great relationships develop not from the absence of conflict, but from determining an agreeable pattern for how to resolve conflict. Defining the rules of engagement for how you “fight” with someone you care about is ultimately much more important than trying to never have a disagreement.” Healthy Living on HuffingtonPost.com via Rory Vaden: 10 Rules Of Relationship Conflict Resolution.
In the latest ‘drive-by’ management trend, the deification of Steve Jobs continues…
Mimicking Mr. Jobs’s keynote style and adopting catch phrases like “one more thing”—the words Mr. Jobs often used to introduce products—may make bosses think they’re operating more like the genius himself. But it has provoked plenty of eye-rolling among staffers. “Some employees are teasing me about when I’ll start wearing black turtlenecks,” says Mr. Thammineni, referring to Mr. Jobs’s signature item of clothing.
“It’s not to that point of being annoying yet, but it might get there,” says Dominique Levin, vice president of marketing at Totango Inc., a software company based in Mountain View, Calif., and Tel Aviv. Her boss, CEO Guy Nirpaz, devoured all 656 pages of the book in three days, then bought copies for his employees—including Hebrew translations for employees in Israel—so they could discuss the book at company meetings.
Jobs was a brilliant but an assaholic! Managers should be careful about who and what they choose to emulate…
The great philosopher Mark Cuban shares this…
I hear it all the time from people. “I’m passionate about it.” “I’m not going to quit, It’s my passion.” Or I hear it as advice to students and others “Follow your passion.”
What a bunch of BS. “Follow your passion” is easily the worst advice you could ever give or get.
Why? Because everyone is passionate about something. Usually more than one thing. We are born with it. There are always going to be things we love to do. That we dream about doing. That we really really want to do with our lives. Those passions aren’t worth a nickel.
Think about all the things you have been passionate about in your life. Think about all those passions that you considered making a career out of or building a company around. How many were/are there? Why did you bounce from one to another? Why were you not able to make a career or business out of any of those passions? Or if you have been able to have some success, what was the key to the success? Was it the passion or the effort you put in to your job or company?
If you really want to know where your destiny lies—look at where you apply your time.
Source: Don’t Follow Your Passion, Follow Your Effort [BLOG] « Positively Positive
Me? I think Cuban’s binary perspective that is BS. I am fond of saying it’s not either/or — it’s both/and. In this case, it’s not passion or effort — it is both harnessed and combined effectively. Go to the source if you’d like to read the rest of his perspective, but it seems to me he comes around when he says “When you are good at something, passionate, and work even harder to excel and be the best at it, good things happen.” imho, passion is the fuel that makes the effort possible; without one you don’t have the other…
July was a rough month for Wisconsin’s economy, giving up much of the big employment gains the Badger State boasted in June.
Uncertainty and worry about the national economic picture played a part in last month’s disappearance of more than 8,000 jobs, Gov. Scott Walker and others say.
Bloody numbers
Wisconsin shed 8,200 total jobs in July, according to the latest seasonally adjusted data from the state’s Department of Workforce Development.
The private sector cut 12,500 jobs last month on a seasonally adjusted rate, but public sector growth made up the difference.
It’s a monthly reversal of fortune for an economy that saw the creation of 9,500 jobs in June, more than half of the meager job growth nationwide.
“Wisconsin is not immune to the national economic slowdown this summer, and we are seeing the effects of the national economy in our July numbers,” DWD Secretary Scott C. Baumbach in a news release.
That’s fairly extensive, but many firms are, at the very least, monitoring some of employees’ Internet, phone and email use, especially larger companies and those in sensitive or heavily regulated industries. The market for email monitoring software has grown more than 25% each year since 2008 and is projected to reach $1.23 billion in 2013, according to IT market research firm Gartner; more than one in three large U.S. companies employ actual people to read or analyze employee email, according to a 2010 study by email monitoring firm Proofpoint. Plus, a survey by the American Management Association and The ePolicy Institute found that almost half of the small, medium and large companies surveyed monitored phone use, and two out of three monitored web use. Instant-message and text-message monitoring are also increasing, says Stephen Marsh, chief executive of email archiving firm Smarsh.
Not only do employers watch what you’re doing, but many act on what they find. One in five large U.S. companies fired an employee for violating email policies in the past year, the Proofpoint survey found. What was a fireable offense? Most email investigations pertain to issues of employees leaking sensitive, confidential or embarrassing information, or theft – not racy messages sent to a girlfriend from an office email account or the occasional online shopping binge from the corporate desktop.
Follow the link and go to the source. How many of these things are true in your organization?
When did you last check your email?
I’d bet it was within the last hour. Quite possibly within the last ten minutes. You might well have your inbox open right now, with message alerts jumping up at you.
Almost everyone I talk to feels that email takes up too much of their time. If you work for an employer, in a traditional office environment, you might have your email open from the moment you get into the office until the moment you shut down your computer at the end of the day.
(And you’ve probably checked email after hours or on the weekends, too.)
If you’re self-employed or work from yourself, it’s probably even worse. You might find yourself worrying about emails during dinner, or when you’re supposed to be having some family time.
The problem isn’t knowing what to do. You’ve read plenty of advice telling you to close the inbox, to avoid checking emails first thing in the day, and to get on with your key tasks first. But are you doing it?
As a blogger, I get paid in bags of stale Tootsie Rolls. Is that good? I have no idea. Actually, I am getting a better idea of what my job is worth now that I have checked out some salary comparison sites. Specifically, I I’ve found out that there are places you can blog where you’re paid in fresh Tootsie Rolls.
If you want to see how your salary compares to the industry at large, be sure to visit MySalary, a site where you can find salary ranges for virtually any career. There’s a lot of stuff on the site — job search and education information in particular — but be sure to click the Salary tab and enter your job title and zip code. You’ll instantly get access to a slew of job titles that are similar to what you searched for.
The resulting histogram shows national averages for salary ranges, like this one for speech writers (I always wanted to know what Ben Stein used to make).
You can follow the ‘via’ link above to go to the source and read the rest of the article if you’d like to dig a little deeper…
“I don’t know about you but I seldom meet a B2B marketer who time to think. And it seems that the pressure keeps building as more of us seek to do more with less.
That said, it’s vital for us to think before we execute. It’s not about doing more campaign activity… it’s about doing the right things repeatedly better.
The simple act of a sales and marketing team finding time to think and collaborate together is vital to developing a solid lead generation program. Our results will improve because we’re following this approach: ready, aim, aim, aim, and then fire.” Click here to read more…
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Bright, shiny objects! 
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