My mum is a ‘lots of love’ LOL-er too, so this one gave me a big smile.
(via Amit Gupta’s Tumblr)
I’m not a super-confident person, so more nerves is something I can probably do without… but today was one of the rare moments when I actually wish I’d been more nervous.
I’m currently organising and participating in a ‘trainer skills’ development program. Basically a four-day training course on how to be a better trainer/presenter. This is something that I really value and am interested in, so am excited to have opportunity to reflect and practice my skills. I’ve done something similar last year, but this time I’m doing it in a specific work-based context. Today we had to give a mock training session to the other participants in the group. To be honest, I didn’t put quite as much effort into preparing this session as was probably required, but nevertheless I felt calm and unfazed about the whole thing (before-hand and during the session). You might think that was a good thing, that it showed I was confident and prepared, but it turned out that I sucked. Well, it wasn’t that bad… I can still happily face my colleagues without embarrassment… but it definitely should have / could have been better.
So, why do I wish I’d been more nervous? ‘Cause I’ve figured out that feeling nervous means that I actually care. When I delivered sessions as part of a previous course last year, and more recently when I gave a presentation on TED to 200+ staff, I definitely recall feeling nervous. Particularly I recall the feeling of my heart beating so strongly that I could feel it in my chest, throat, head… And the butterflies in the stomach… And the buzzing feeling afterwards… Where you feel like you’ve just overcome a hurdle and then can’t wait to rush back and do it all again. Today I had none of that. The nerves (and the post-presentation buzz) seem to occur when I care. When I care about the content. And when I want my audience to care about the content too. And caring means that I prepare more and that I bring genuine energy because I want my audience to be as excited by the topic as I am. It’s much easier to be exciting when you’re excited right?
Scott Berkun’s Confessions of a Public Speaker has a good part on managing fear and the similarities between fear and excitement…
Ian Tyson, a stand-up comedian and motivational speaker, offered this gem of advice: “The body’s reaction to fear and excitement is the same…so it becomes a mental decision: am I afraid or am I excited?” If the body can’t tell the difference, it’s up to you to use your instincts to help rather than hurt you.
I love this quote. And I’m becoming more and more conscious of the fact that when I experience nerves before presenting, they’re because I’m genuinely excited rather than scared. I’m a big believer in listening to your body and the cues it gives you to help you understand your emotional reaction to certain experiences, so today I’ve learned some valuable lessons.
So, what am I going to do with this new self-knowledge? Perhaps I should only present and train on content that I care deeply about? Certainly finding more opportunities to do this is something that I will actively seek out. But, that’s not always going to be possible. It’s likely that my job (both current and possibly my future roles) will mean that sometimes I need to deliver content on topics that you won’t find me ranting and raving to friends/colleagues over a bottle of wine about! So, I’ve decided that before I deliver any content, before I stand up in front of my audience and open my mouth, I first need to care. And that may mean putting myself in the shoes of my audience and figuring out why they care about what I’m going to deliver… how the information or skills that they are hoping/expecting to receive may make their lives/jobs better or easier or more fun. Or even if I’m not totally excited by the overall content/topic perhaps I could find a small part that interests me, makes me think or makes me smile, and then start by really caring about that.
So, despite my less than average performance today, I’ve definitely learned a valuable lesson, and that’s something to be grateful for.
After much resistance and deliberation, my good friend Emily has decided to join the dark side and get an iPhone. While I am somewhat ashamed to admit just how fused I have become to my iPhone in the 18 months of so that I’ve had it, I have been meaning to do a little post about my most favourite/useful iPhone apps, and Emily’s purchase has provided a much needed prod. Couldn’t quite managed to keep it to 10, so here are my top 11…
Photography
Social
Productivity
Utilities
By Clare 4 Comments
I’ve never really liked the term ‘work-life balance’. Perhaps it’s because I’ve never really understood what it means. It’s something that everyone seems to talk about, so I feel like I should know what it is. But I’ve never ‘got’ it. In any case, whatever it is, I’m pretty sure that I don’t have it. And I don’t know anyone who really does. Everyone always seems to want more of it, but is in a constant struggle to get it. Having ‘work-life balance’ seems to me to be a very desirable and highly prized, but ultimately unattainable, state of being.
After some reflection, I realised that the biggest problem I have with the term ‘work-life balance’ is that it separates work from life. So, you go to work, and then after work and before you next go to work is when you live your life. Huh? I recognise that I have a propensity to overthink things (and sometimes be a little too literal), and perhaps that this is a classic example of this, but for me ‘work’ has always felt like a very big part of my life. So it always felt a bit odd for me to try and balance two things when one was in fact part of the other. Of course, maybe ‘work-life balance’ was never meant to be about balancing work vs life, but about balancing the role/impact/demands of work within your life. But, it just never made sense to me. And ‘life’ seems like a rather generic ‘catch-all’ term to capture the diversity of interests, obligations, activities, and needs that people have or engage in when they’re not at work. ‘Work-life balance’ is an over-simplified and over-generalised term, and this over-simplification and over-generalisation is causing much confusion and frustration – leaving people constantly feeling that ‘work-life balance’ is something that they had failed, or were failing, to achieve.
The importance of the period over which we measure or consider ‘work-life balance’ is also often over-looked. This is a point that Nigel Marsh makes really clearly in his great 2010 TEDxSydney talk (check it out, it’s worth the watch!). A day is clearly too short a period to achieve ‘balance’ in our lives, but we also need to avoid falling into the trap of ‘when I retire, I’ll swim more / see the grandkids / take up that second language / travel / pay more attention to my wife…’ – it’s far too long a period. It’s something that Scott Belsky, founder of Behance and author of Making Ideas Happen, also mentions in this interview: “I have come to view balance not as a daily thing, but a periodic concept…. Balance is not achieved at any given point in time, only over time.” An awareness of the period over which you’re considering your (or other people’s) ‘work-life balance’ is essential, but not commonly considered.
On the subject of time… I think there is also a tendency to think about achieving ‘work-life balance’ in terms of balancing our diary (the how and where and with whom we spend our time). Specifically, time spent at work, and time spent doing other ‘life’ stuff. When we think or talk about ‘getting more work-life balance’ we’re often refering to increasing the time we spend on certain activities (eg. going to the gym 4 hours a week instead of once every month) or with certain people (eg. leaving work early one day a week so we can pick up our kids and take them to the park). There is that classic exercise where you’re encouraged to think about what’s really important to you (the if-you-had-72-hours-to-live test, or some variation of it) and then match that up with how you currently spend your time. It’s not that this reflection and prioritisation isn’t important or valuable, but it seems to create an impression that there is some formula or timetable or scheduling that one can implement to achieve ‘balance’. I’m pretty sure there’s not.
So, I’ve decided that I don’t believe in ‘work-life balance’. It’s a term that’s too simple, too vague, and too generic to be meaningful or useful. I think we need to stop worrying about how many hours are spent on each activity and trying to balance the timesheet. We need to stop thinking and talking about ‘work’ vs ‘life’ and instead we need to re-examine and re-articulate what ‘balance’ actually means.
Instead of ‘work-life balance’ I like to think in terms of ‘life well-being’. There are a number of different aspects that contribute to my overall ‘life well-being’. Importantly, these aren’t activities or obligations or people (like work, volunteering, family, education for example), but rather they are deeply personal, intrinsic needs (and these may vary from individual to individual). For me the areas are:
As this post has turned into a mini-essay, I’ve decided to split it into two parts… In the next part I’ll provide some more explanation about how I think about each of these aspects and the relationships between them, and why I think the approach of focusing on ‘life well-being’ rather than ‘work-life balance’ is more likely to lead to feelings of fulfillment, satisfaction and harmony.
What do you think about ‘work-life balance’? How do you use the term? What does it mean to you? Is it something you’ve achieved or are trying to achieve? How?
I had a disappointing weigh-in at our personal training session this morning. Not happy with myself at all. Had a great result the week before and clearly got a little complacent (that Baileys and scorched almond ice-cream I had in Braidwood was delicious, but clearly not the best idea!). So, in an effort to turn things around, I’m going to do the Tim Ferriss-4 Hour Body thing and photograph everything I eat and drink (except water) for a week. And to add a further element of potential public humiliation, I’m posting all of the photos to Flickr (and announcing the fact that I’m doing this in this blog post!).
So day 1 is done. You can find today’s photos (and all the rest as I make my way through the week) on my Flickr account.
I stumbled across the fantastic Spousenomics blog today (and immediately subscribed to the RSS feed). One of my favourite posts was the one on graphing your marriage, which included this picture…
The x-axis is how much time you spend on things, and the y-axis is how important each of those things are.
While the idea of considering what’s important and what you spend time on isn’t particularly new, being a visual person I really like the idea of graphing it like this. And of course you can do this for a range of different aspects of your life – not just marriage/relationships. I haven’t put pen to paper to graph my life (or my almost-marriage), but after giving it some thought today I’m pretty sure that there will be a number of things in the top left and bottom right corners…
Lately I have been thinking about the products or objects that I use that make my life a little bit easier, are particularly well designed, and that make me smile ’cause they just ‘work’. The two things that sprung to mind were my Hookturn reusable coffee cup and… my iPhone. Perhaps the universe caught wind of my thinking and my growing dependence on my iPhone and decided to test me a little, because this morning, as I was carrying a stack of old newspapers to the recycling pile, I dropped my iPhone in the dog’s water bowl. Bummer!
My phone isn’t insured – I found this out when I dropped the phone in the sink while brushing my teeth and got toothpaste in one of the speakers and when I went to claim was told I didn’t have any insurance – so I have resorted to the interweb to get some ideas on how to fix it. This has clearly happened to A LOT of people (given the surprisingly large volume of information available – just google ‘how to dry wet iphone’), but the number of success stories is at least somewhat reassuring.
So, in case you ever find yourself in a similar situation, I thought I’d document what I did/should have done (noting that, at this stage, this is not a proven method!).
The most important thing is that you DON’T TOUCH ANY BUTTONS! Resist the temptation to see if it works by turning it on/off, calling someone, opening an app etc.
First step is to remove the case (if your phone has one). Then dry the phone as best you can with a towel. You might want to give it a bit of a shake to get as much water out of it as you can.
Next remove the SIM card (I think the main reason for this is so the phone doesn’t ‘do anything’ (and therefore risk shorting out) if someone calls/texts you. This of course assumes that you phone was/is still ‘on’ following it’s retrieval from the water).
Then put the phone in a zip-lock bag of rice (apparently silica crystals and kitty litter work well too, but rice seems to be more handy). Seal it up. And leave it alone! The rice helps to draw the moisture out of the phone (and perhaps it also makes you less inclined to fiddle with it).
There are mixed opinions on the web about using a hairdryer on your phone. When I removed my phone from it’s case I did use a hairdryer for a few minutes (on a very low heat setting) to remove some of the obvious moisture.
But the key thing seems to be a) rice and b) time. Some people say 2-3 days in the rice are needed if your phone was submerged for a few seconds, 6-7 days if it was longer. So right now my phone is sitting in a bag of rice on the kitchen bench, and that is where it’ll stay for at least a day or two, while I learn a valuable lesson about life without my iphone!