Being sick is never fun. I missed posting on Friday because I was sick and forcing myself to go substitute teach. I missed posting yesterday because I slept all morning due to being sick and being on a lovely mix of medicines. I can hardly wait for this sinus infection to be over.
In the meantime, I still wanted to share this lovely post from Curt Rosengren on training yourself to look at situations and come up with more positive solutions. The path to success in anything you do can be made easier, just by believing that a solution is possible.
Posted by Rebecca as Creativity, inspiration, and motivation at 9:01 AM EDT
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I still owe the actual post for yesterday, but i think I’ll be forgiven. I woke up very sick with sinus junk yesterday, worked all day at a local preschool (with the right side of my head feeling like it was about to explode), and then left work to drive down to Portland for the weekend. My day was completely full.
On what felt like an endless drive (it took five hours to get from Bellevue to Portland last night), I was listening to the radio trying to find out why traffic was so goofy. This ad came on for a jersey business, and the name made me spend half my trip chanting it over and over to stick it in my brain so I could blog about it.
The company’s name (I hope I’m spelling this correctly) is Exper-Tees. They’re located in Auburn, and they apparently make sports jerseys. How fabulous is that! It describes what the business’ self-described niche in the community is, and it’s a nice play on words.
Posted by Rebecca as Naming at 10:30 AM EDT
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I’m being a bad entrepreneur this morning, doing my laundry while I’m rotating between half a dozen different business tasks. I’d apologize, but this is always how I’ve done my best work!
One of the tasks I need to work on today is updating my resume, which is now about two or three months out of date. I’m considering revisiting my summary of qualifications, which is still geared toward the museum world.
When I help people with their resumes, it often amazes me how many of them don’t include some sort of summary at the top. Knowing that recruiters (or their computer software) spend maybe 20 seconds on a resume, doesn’t it make sense to have something near the top that helps them know at a glance who you are? You can’t count that they’re going to scan far enough to see your specific accomplishments in that initial 20 seconds. You have to do something to make them want to scan down and see those.
A summary of qualifications is an ideal way to do this. It can highlight years of expereicne in the field, specific skills that make you the ideal candidate, and can show off your communication ability. The next time you sit down to update your resume, consider adding this important section to your resume.
Posted by Rebecca as Changing careers at 10:42 AM EDT
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We all know I appreciate a good business name (even if I really haven’t had any to share in recent months), so I enjoyed reading these tips for naming you business.
I’m not sure I agree with everything, as evidenced by the names of my blogs, but I definitely has a good laugh at some of his examples. I was especially fond of those faux Latin names.
I am starting to think about getting an index box and some index cards and storing business ideas I have in there. Perhaps I’ll make a divided box and label one of the divisions “Business Names”
Posted by Rebecca as Naming at 8:49 AM EDT
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Sometimes the Carnival of the Capitalists has some great posts featured. In one of the more recent ones, this fabulous analogy appeared.
It often amuses me how often business cultures can be defined as simply another way of looking at a non-business activity, but this comparison may just be my favorite. It’s so true. It takes time and nurturing to build an organization’s culture, and so many businesses miss that point.
Found via Carnival of the Capitalists
Posted by Rebecca as Leadership and management at 9:53 AM EDT
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We’ve often heard about the wage gap between men and women, but here’s an article that sets forth the theory that women need to take certain steps to level the playing field in a negotiation.
The four mistakes listed are quite interesting. I know three of those apply to me personally, even though I’ve been working on beating number three. I now blame myself entirely when I don’t say “no” when I should. (Admittedly, I still feel a ton of guilt when I say “no”, but baby steps…baby steps…)
Posted by Rebecca as Leadership and management at 8:14 AM EDT
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I’ve been using Bloglines for a week or two now, and I’m realizing that I’m devleoping bad habits.
Traditionally, I aggregated RSS feeds to my LiveJournal. While I read them (twice a day), I would immediately move any URLs of articles I liked into Outlook, along with a date, category, and cheesy title. Things would get blogged in a somewhat timely manner, and life was good.
Then I decided to try Bloglines on a whim one day. (I also added about 30 feeds.) I read through my various categories two or three times a day. Those that I want to look at again get flagged as staying "new". Then I forget that I’ve done this. Then I forget the post even exists. Finally, a couple of days later, I will go back, decide that i really do want to keep the post or article, and clip it.
This article has the distinction of waiting the longest to be put through the entire Bloglines process.
I can’t even begin to tell you how many times I read and re-read this article. I’m just not sure any more. But it deserves to be shared, because we can all stand to benefit from the information in it, which is why I kept clinging to it.
Listening is one of those skills that is completely not inherent (I’ve spent the week with children under the age of seven. I am completely convinced now that listening is a learned behavior.) It’s one that we must work on continuously becuase it is such a challenging skill. It expects us to be completely selfless and to be completely open to the person speaking. It asks us to drop our preconceptions and to allow our worldview to be challenged.
Posted by Rebecca as Leadership and management at 5:35 PM EDT
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My weekend was crazy last week, and it spilled over and took over this week in scary ways, so today i’m going to drop a couple of posts just trying to get back on track. My future schedule is also going to be a bit nuts, so expect more evening than morning posts for a while.
The first offering today is this great post from Slacker Manager on those tools that every manager should become very familiar with. I need to get more in touch with this list (although I will run from anything Excel-related. Even creating the inventories for my business reduced me to tears.)
There are a number of posts regaridng various, efficient, and creative uses of GTD. If you get a hankering, you ought to Google for them, since I’ve been silly enough not to save them in del.icio.us, Furl, and Bloglines. It’s a great system for getting things done, ironically enough.
Posted by Rebecca as Leadership and management at 5:22 PM EDT
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I knew there was a reason Fate conspired to have me write this post late in my day.
I had a bad weekend. My uncle, who had been battling cancer for over a year, lost his fight Friday morning. I’m nowhere near family geographically, so I was tied to my computer much of the weekend trying to keep up with everything.
Yesterday, I put some pieces up on eBay (no bids yet, sadly). That was apparently the high point of the weekend itself as I had many computer issues while I was sitting here.
Today, I was called in to sub. The school has a morning assembly every Monday. This Monday morning, one of the students delivered a powerful speech on suicide, and it rendered the students rather unruly the rest of the day. (I’m being polite. The kids were an utter handful, and this from someone who normally doesn’t have classroom management issues.)
I got home, totally frazzled and swallowing double-stuft oreos whole. My roommate and a friend brought me chocolate and Easy Mac, which provided some comfort.
Then I headed to another of my jobs, where I discovered I was getting off early. Normally this would be a huge problem given my extremely tight finances at the moment, but I celebrated. I was in a bad mood. I knew I was in a rather uncivil mood. I didn’t want some poor kid to receive the brunt of that.
However, by the end of my shift, I was laughing and smiling, my mood completely changed.
That’s the sign that you’re working where you should be. You should be able to have a good laugh, to smile…even after a horrid few days. Something to think about as you realize that your job is driving you to tears on a daily basis…
Posted by Rebecca as Changing careers at 7:44 PM EDT
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This really is true of many different areas of our lives, but most often we are unable to take an unbiased view of a situation we’re in the middle of. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It just means that we may need to bring in an unbiased outside observer to help see things we may be missing.
Posted by Rebecca as Leadership and management at 8:16 AM EDT
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