Helene Lerner's Blog, page 198

A Breath of Fresh Green

Yesterday, I was walking around Union Square Park in NYC.  The green market was in its full glory.  I loved the aroma of the vegetables and flowers. There were so many people shopping, it was like everything was on sale...but, of course, the items weren't.

How nice it was to have farm produce in the heart of the Big Apple. And there was a silver sculpture of Andy Warhol right outside the perimeter of where the produce was being sold. Like he was putting his blessing on the scene.

I thought to myself, "Only in New York!"

Tastiest Tupperware: And the Winner Is...

We're loving the bright colors and fresh flavors of this hearty salad, which features edamame, garbanzo beans, baby spinach, shredded carrots, dried cranberries, sunflower seeds, and a light lemon vinaigrette.

"Working long hours doesn't have to come at the expense of your health! I prep one big salad on Sunday to eat all week, and then pack greens and dressing in separate containers to keep them from getting soggy before lunch. This recipe comes from Two Peas and Their Pod."

We don't know about you, but we'll take that over a mushy PB&J any day. This weekend, think about how you can incorporate energizing, nutritious foods into your midday meal. A few extra minutes can mean a huge payoff in the long run—not to mention a pass on that afternoon food coma. Have a happy, healthy weekend!

Career Coach: Become a Person of Interest

As you plan to approach the people who can make decisions and help you advance, create the right mindset. View yourself as someone who has the skills and talents to make your organization successful. In fact, you would be doing your company a disservice by not sharing your abilities and being able to contribute at the highest possible level!

List the ways in which you’ve contributed to your organization’s success. Keep your list with you, and review it frequently. Whenever you feel a twinge of self-doubt, your list will remind you of your value.

While you work on building your inner confidence, develop relationships with colleagues you can enlist as champions. These people will sing your praises to others, and you, in turn, can sing theirs. Your champions can be people who work above you or peers on your same level—the point is to pinpoint those who have some kind of influence. Choose allies whose opinions are respected so that when your name comes up, people will listen.

Between your strong professional relationships and your strong sense of self, you’ll be well on your way to being seen as a person of interest.

—Simma Lieberman, Career Coach

Dare to Reflect: The Morning Evangelist

If you're anything like me, you’re all about structure. You swoon over schedules. You’re ruled by routines. The thought of a fresh to-do list makes your heart beat faster, and a Google calendar synced across multiple devices? Well, now you’re just talking dirty. You schedule yourself to within an inch of your life, thriving on a distinctly fast-paced neutral, and you wouldn’t have it any other way.

But what about the sacred hour before your Outlook alerts jangle and your Blackberry springs to life? Even if your days are packed to the brim, there’s a window before your calendar officially opens for business. “Oh, I see where you’re going with this,” you say, shaking your head in disdain. “No, thanks. I’m not a Morning Person. I’d rather sleep.” As a Morning Evangelist, I’d like to make a case for how partaking in a little "sun salute" (with or without the yoga) can serve even the busiest of bees.

Scenario One. You spend an hour beating the “Snooze” button into submission, reaping no benefits in the way of actual rest. When you can no longer convince yourself that “five more minutes” is a viable option, you spring from your bed in a panic akin to discovering that your house is on fire—every morning. Jabbing your contact lenses into your eyes with one hand while snatching a piece of toast with the other, you race out the door, sloshing the stale remains of yesterday’s coffee down your blouse into the process. After a harried commute, you slide into your office with the smug self-consciousness of a high school pinch runner. You feel frazzled. Sloppy. But hey, you’re on time! Victory is yours, even if sanity eludes your grasp.

Scenario Two. Okay, full disclosure—you consciously forfeit an hour of sleep. But instead of faking yourself out by spending that time in a guilty half-repose, you use it to engage in a different kind of relaxation. You read the newspaper. You take slow sips of your caffeinated beverage of choice. You prepare a balanced breakfast, and you savor every bite. You take stock of your goals for the day, either mentally or on paper, and slip gracefully into the most high-powered version of you. By the time you stroll through your office door, you feel alert—and not just because you squeezed in some unintentional cardio on your way to work. Your mind is calm. Your day has direction. And your dry-cleaning bill? Significantly more manageable without all those coffee stains.

So much of stress is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s easy to blame a packed schedule for a lack of "me time," but you can be busy without existing in a constant state of mental and emotional turmoil—you just have to fit self-care in where you can. For me, establishing a morning ritual is a way to cultivate a sense of calm in an otherwise crazy day. When you come at your agenda from a centered place, you’re likely to see an improvement in your output as well as your mood.

If your mornings have historically unfolded in a cartoonish cloud of debris, see if taking a more leisurely AM approach changes your state of mind. See if you really miss that hour of sleep. Take note of what you accomplish over the course of your day, and more importantly, take note of how you feel. Even as a Morning Evangelist, I can cede that not everyone will share my radical beliefs. But my morning routine has changed my life for the better—and that’s the gospel truth.

—Emma Aubry Roberts

Career Coach: Strike Up the Band

Now that you’ve created a vision for your future and listed your strengths and your challenges, you’re ready to take action. Too often, however, women skip an important step: telling the right people! They believe that knowing what they want is enough, and that if they work hard enough, someone is bound to notice.

Let go of that idea. Determine who needs to know your aspirations, and who can help you attain them. Be as specific as possible about what kind of help you need, as well as how your career growth will benefit your entire organization. See yourself as a marketing and PR person for your skills and experience.

Alan Weiss, one of my mentors, says, "If you don’t toot your own horn, there won’t be any music." This is the time for your symphony! Make a list of who needs to know you, and who you need to know. Next to each name, write down why that person is important to your success, and create a plan to interact with each one. Strike up the band—and get your show on the road.

—Simma Lieberman, Career Coach

Career Coach: Take Your Place and Space

Whether you have your own business or want to move ahead in an existing organization, you need to know where you want to go, and you need a strategy to get there. That means you need to:

Stop being a well-kept secret, and start being a person of interest.
Be seen as a peer by colleagues at your level and a valuable contributor by those in leadership positions.
Look the part, rehearse your lines, and be ready for your starring role.

I call this "taking your place and your space" in your career and life.

After researching, interviewing, and observing successful people in leadership roles, I learned that there were common threads and best practices that had helped these people achieve their goals—regardless of gender, age, or ethnic or cultural background. All of the people I spoke with said they had created a mental picture of what achieving their goals would look like. They had identified their strengths, and they had researched what they needed to learn or do differently. In short, they had identified their place and their space.

You can implement this same plan of action by know where you want to go, assessing your present state, and identifying the strengths that will help you achieve your goals. Take out a pen and paper. Write down your objectives in as much detail as you can. Next, list three strengths that will help you get there, as well as three challenges you will need to overcome. Pinpoint ways to focus on your strengths and make them stronger, as well as ways to get past your challenges. If you lack knowledge in a particular area, make a plan to gain that knowledge.

Once you have a plan, you are officially on your way to being seen and heard the way you want to be—to taking your place and your space. We'll be working on this all month long, so stay tuned for the next installment!

—Simma Lieberman, Career Coach

Dare to Reflect: Run Free, Run Together

[image error]

Saturday night, upon my arrival in Dallas, TX, I received an offer to take a quick tour of the city's sights before dinner. The lovely woman who picked me up from their airport took me to see these amazing sculptures of wild mustangs. They brought out the child in me—I wanted to run with them.  (Actually, there were some young children delighting in doing just that!).

On Sunday, I spoke at the Unity Church of Dallas.  The people were very receptive to my message: Step up your game. Step out in a new way. The world is a turbulent place, and we need every individual to be courageous and take an action outside of their comfort zone. After my talk, I conducted a workshop based on my book, In Her Power: Reclaiming Your Authentic Self.

I was struck by the openness of the women involved in the workshop—by their desire to change the behaviors holding them back from fully expressing their power. They were so supportive of one other, and I hope that they continue to meet on their own on a regular basis. Just like the mustangs above, running free doesn't have to mean running solo. Even wild horses travel in packs.

Cutest Cubicle: And the Winner Is...

Traffic engineer Karen brings a bold feminine energy to her male-dominated office with colorful accents and clever design details. Where can we pick up one of those bubblegum pink swivel chairs?

"Being one of two female engineers at my firm, I wanted to showcase my bubbly personality and add a little flair to the office. My favorite feature of my space is the color—it just screams 'Karen.' Everyone who knows me knows I love the color pink! My cubicle has even become a show-and-tell feature for visiting clients. The 'No Parking' sign adds an industry-specific touch, since we deal with various road traffic signs in our design work daily!"

Congratulations to Karen, and thanks to all who entered! We hope some of you feel inspired to spice up some of your own workspaces this weekend.

Career Coach: Welcome to June!

It's a new month, and that means a new career coach here on WomenWorking.com. Meet Simma Lieberman, aka The Inclusionist. She'll be contributing twice a week through the month of June. For more on Simma, visit her website.

Check back on Monday for Simma's first post. To ask a question or make a special topic request, send an email to administrator [at] womenworking [dot] com, or leave a comment here on our blog. Here's to another month of workplace wisdom. Welcome, Simma!

Dare to Do: Redefine Productivity

Recall the last time you thought to yourself, “Man, I was so good at life today.” Are you there yet? Are you feeling the good-at-life glow? Now recall how you spent that time. More likely than not, your concept of “good at life” is roughly aligned with the standard definition of “productive.” And more likely than not, getting there involved working your tail off—at the office, in the gym, or around the house.

Furthermore, the proverbial “good at life” is usually accompanied by some sort of tangible output at the end of the day—a productivity souvenir, if you will. A completed report. A balanced checkbook. Throbbing quads. A home-cooked meal. A tattered to-do list with no items remaining. Something you can point to and triumphantly crow, “See! Look what I did today! So good at life!”

Days like this are satisfying and necessary. They bolster our confidence, drive our efforts, and foster our growth. But barreling through life at warp speed is hardly the only means of being productive. In order to be good at life, you also have to be good at living. That means learning to honor your intangible needs as you do your more traditional ones—not as a necessary evil to which attention must be paid, but as an equally fruitful use of your time and energy.

Just as we produce our incomes and our grocery lists, we also produce our relationships, our surroundings, and our states of mind. If we don’t respect the genuine importance of the latter group, the benefits of the former are rendered moot. Whiling away the hours at a café with an old friend? Productive. Hanging new curtains that enliven and individualize your space? Productive. Spending a lazy Sunday watching an entire season of Mad Men on Netflix Instant? Yeah, we’re going there—productive (in moderation).

No one is recommending that you adopt any one of these activities as your sole purpose in life. The point is not to celebrate unchecked idle behavior. But hobbies – things you do for no reason other than because they bring you joy – aren’t a break from productivity. They’re an active part of it. You can’t know happy unless you know sad. You can’t recognize flavor unless you’ve experienced bland. And you can’t know when you’re truly in the zone unless you develop the capacity to go to another place entirely.

Work long hours. Pay your bills. Cook from scratch. But understand that being "good at life" does not hinge on having something to show for yourself, and let go of the anxiety associated with wasting (read: spending) your time. Rest is not a necessary evil. There is such a thing as productive relaxation, and it stems from mindful enjoyment of the moment you are experiencing. And the sooner you can widen your understanding of productivity, the easier it will become to produce a life you love.

—Emma Aubry Roberts