Body Language

Here is where I admit that I am a TED talk junkie. I love them. I watch them while I eat lunch sometimes (the perks of working from home), and the talks that move me I watch over and over again. I am not sure if the most powerful talks I've seen were really powerful enough to get me to see things from a different perspective, or if I was ready to hear their messages and therefore they held some power. I've talked about the Brene Brown talks in a previous blog post, but her talks especially her TEDx talk is one of my all time favorites. I have watched it at least 10 times if not more. Maybe that makes me a stalker, or maybe the message is just that good that I want to hear it repeatedly. Anyway, I won't drone on about Brene Brown, but seriously watch her first talk if you haven't already, and read her books. You won't regret it.

The most recent TED Talk that has me fascinated is a talk by Amy Cuddy about body language. I watched it several weeks ago, and was curious about whether her power pose suggestions would work. I decided to try it for myself. In the past few weeks when I have had to give a presentation or just try to get my point across on one of the many many calls I find myself on each day (the perks of working from home again) I have done some form of power posing as I sit comfortably in my office where nobody on the phone can see me doing so. I also did more subtle forms of power posing while I was at my company's HQ and giving in-person presentations last week. The results of my not at all scientific study with a sample size of one and no control group have concluded that power posing is in fact effective. I have not managed to convince everyone at work that I am right about everything yet. However, I've made some small chips away at progress forward, and got approval for something that seemed almost impossible just a few months ago. Was it the power posing, or was it the year + of work I've put into honing my message? It was likely mostly the latter, but the power posing possibly helped me to deliver the message in a way that made me sound more convincing.

I was so excited by my power posing experiment that I told my kids about it. I showed them what power posing was, and then told them that they could do it before tests at school (the more subtle poses I suppose, though I think kids could get away with even the more overt poses). I also told them that they could do it before track meets and soccer games. They both rolled their eyes at me.

This week both kids had their first soccer games of the season. I don't think I reminded tortured the Girl with a reminder to power pose before her game - as I was likely busy just trying to get her there on time. She played well despite no power posing, scored a goal and got out of a 4 on 1 and away with the ball during one of her shifts playing defense. Her team won that game 8-2 - imagine if they had power posed! I think their success could be attributed to the cheer her team came up with. It is creative and pretty awesome - The Girl keeps repeating it. Or maybe it had more to do with skill and the mismatch between their team and the other.

I did say something to the Boy before his game though. He rolled his eyes at me. The first half of his game was rough. His team has 14 players, and I think 13 were there last night. 3 of his teammates have never played with the group before - and I think at least 2 boys are U11 players playing up to U12. Their passing fluidity wasn't quite there. I think they were all trying to get a feel for each other in a game situation again. The Boy looked okay during the first half, but even he was struggling a bit to find his groove. The second half took on a different note though. The Boy (and several others on the team) had some nice opportunities. He had at least one great shot on goal from a good distance away that was just perfectly placed - high in the net, hard for the goalie to save, but the goalie had a great jump save and managed to deflect it out over the back of the net. That led to a corner which The Boy took, and nearly led to a goal, and then a second corner shortly thereafter that he also took and did lead to a goal. His team ended up losing 1-2, in a game they certainly had the ability to win, but it was still a good game. When The Boy found us at the end of the game I asked him who had tipped in his corner kick for the goal, and he said the other team did so he got the credit for the goal. He was beaming, and clearly proud of how well he had played.

In the car on the way home he said "Mom, I didn't want you to be right, or to tell you about it, but I tried the power posing you talked about when I was sitting in the rain shelter tent between shifts. I pretended I was tired and stretching, but I was really power posing." He had a small little impish grin on his face, and he said "I think it works." So was it the power posing? Or was it the 9 months of him getting extra skills training at Left Foot Academy? I guess we can't really know, but hey power posing is pretty easy to do, and if it gives you a mental boost, why not try it?

Tempted to grow

This week was strange. The kids and I had Monday off so it was a short work week for me. It was made even shorter by a quick work trip to Toronto Tuesday/Wednesday. Obviously the week wasn't actually shorter, but working while traveling doesn't feel quite the same as working from home does. While in Toronto some work news surfaced that at least temporarily rocked my world. The person who recruited me into my current role is no longer there. I won't say more than that, but it was most definitely a shock. My first reaction was to speculate about how this change would affect my work. I think it will affect me, but it is too soon to know exactly how that will be. I've decided that my best plan for the moment is to continue my current efforts until my work is no longer needed there. There are several possibilities for me there, but I don't think my future projections will help me cope with today if I dwell on them. The reality is that there is very little I can do to influence my future there if I don't focus on the job I currently have.

I started reading a new (to me) book this week called "Seat of the Soul," by Gary Zukav. Oprah mentions this book in her Super Soul Sunday shows fairly often, and I watched an older re-aired Master Class on OWN that was about Oprah herself where she mentioned it again. I finally gave in and bought the book to read for myself. My first observation is that I am probably not completely ready to read this book. It is remarkably hard to follow as he circles around the concept of our soul and our personality and how the two work together but also apart. I feel as though there is truth in his words, but I need to read them more slowly to allow myself to fully absorb the meaning. Or perhaps I will finish the book, but then come back and read it again at another time. Either way, there are a few tidbits that I've taken from the book already.

The first tidbit is that temptation is your soul's way of allowing you to test yourself without involving others. Temptation gives us an opportunity to grow stronger. I know that when I resolve daily to eat less junk food, to eat more consciously, and not eat to numb my feelings I am always tempted to throw that away. I had seen temptation as weakness, but the book shifted my perspective about it. If temptation is actually strength what does that mean for me? I should expect temptation, and I should be happy for it. When I resolve that I am going to yell less, my kids do things that make me want to yell even more - and again I felt that I was weak in not being able to respond more constructively. Now I see that every opportunity where I would normally comfort eat, or yell to try to solve a conflict with my kids is an opportunity for me to grow - for my personality to better align with my soul if you will. I recognize that this is out there, so it isn't as though I am suggesting that all of you go read this book or believe the same things I do about the messages. For me though, that may have been the lesson I needed to learn this week.

I think back to the person I was just a couple of years ago, and that person would not have been ready to read that temptation was a good thing. She would not have been willing to move beyond the "why me" aspect of a big job change so quickly either. I know I still have a long journey of growth ahead of me, but it is good to recognize how far I've come. As I go forward into a new week I am choosing to be grateful for any and all temptations that try to take me off of my resolved path. I will know that it is my soul's work (or God's work if you are so inclined) to help me grow and make me stronger against those temptations when they continue to arise.

Lake Ontario Sunrise

Ideas wanted

So I may have mentioned before that I was given the opportunity to do something different for work. I told you to email me to find out what it was, and well, nobody did…guess I know where I rate! Anyway, it turns out that the different thing isn’t as easy to launch as I thought it would be, mostly because actual work keeps getting in the way and I find I have very little time for it. Another road block is that it is really hard to come up with ideas for a work related blog. There I’ve said it; my idea was to launch a work blog to help us filter more people to our actual website. I had lots of great ideas in the plan I pitched to my boss, but have I mentioned that it is hard? The goal is really only to start generating a buzz about what we do, and since we are a tiny company our advertising budget is almost non-existent. My thought was that I enjoy blogging as a hobby (can I call it that?), so why not extend it into the realm of work. Can you say naïve?



I’m really struggling with a way to just give you a link to the other blog (perhaps if you googled the words in the picture above you might be able to find it), but I still have this insane idea that my blog is a private thing and that my coworkers know nothing about it. The fact that I’ve shown several of them my house remodeling photos from this blog doesn’t even wave this belief. So should I just give you the link? I mean attracting a bunch of my friends to my work blog isn’t exactly my intent, but I do want to drive traffic to the site. I am supposed to present my idea to the entire company at our annual meeting next month, and it would be nice to show that we have had more than 4 visits to the site by then. Do any of you have any experience with a professional blog? Do you have any ideas about ways to drive quality traffic to my other blog that you would be willing to share?

Status Report

As you may or may not know I have been making little tweaks to my life this year. I decided that it was time for an update, so here it goes. My newest life change has been the shift of my obsessive compulsive running habit from after work to early morning. I now wake up at 5:30 AM most weekdays to run or do some other form of exercise (an exercise video which shall remain nameless because frankly I don’t think it deserves any more attention, has found its way into my routine once or twice a week now). Those first few weeks of waking up nearly an hour earlier than normal were brutal. I had to drag my butt out of bed each and every day, and I kept wondering why I was torturing myself. Now, while I can’t say it is easy to get out of bed in the morning, my body has adjusted and I actually wake up before my alarm goes off most days. I can run up to 5 miles or so before my late return starts to impact T’s morning routine. I’ve been getting up early now for perhaps six weeks, I guess that means it has become my new normal.

Having my run/workout out of the way early in the morning has given me more flexibility in my schedule. I no longer have to scheme ways to fit in my run after work, and I can actually pick up the kids at daycare if I so choose. I’m still getting to work at close to 8 AM, but I am sacrificing an hour of sleep. I know my body has adjusted, but my eyes are bloodshot nearly every day. I don’t think I’m getting enough sleep, but going to bed at 9:30 PM isn’t appealing to me. For now I’ve decided that the pros of getting up early outweigh the cons, we’ll see how I feel in the dead of winter when it is bitch black outside at 5:30 AM.

My other big news is that I approached my boss with an idea that will help me fill in some of the downtime I occasionally have at work. While, it doesn’t seem as though there will be much downtime for the balance of the summer, I was given the go ahead for my plan. I’m excited by the challenge, and hopeful that it will bring good results for the company. Mostly, I’m thrilled that I took the time to put myself out there, rather than just staying with the status quo that was making me miserable. I’m not going to post the specifics about what I’ll be doing because I’m still under the illusion that this blog is not known about at work. While I’ve never said anything derogative, my little online journal isn’t exactly what I want my boss to read. If you want more details, feel free to email me…I keep meaning to set up an email link here and perhaps this will spur me to actually do so.

Baby steps really do get you where you want to go if you have a little patience and a lot of persistence.