Creator's Block

Many of you have probably figured out by now that the goings on inside my head are generally utter chaos. This is part of what makes me the complete organizational/neat freak (read: control freak) that I am. Growing up (especially through my college years) I started to become acutely aware of how much I was being distracted by my own thoughts. It wasn't Facebook, TV, or video games that was drawing me away from my responsibilities. In fact, it was fears, thoughts, and anxieties about my other responsibilities. Once I figured this out, one of the first things that helped me tremendously was taking notes and especially making lists. If I was trying to focus on something and another thought invaded my head, instead of giving it its day in court right then and there I would quickly jot it down. Knowing that it was written down, to be reviewed later my brain would let me get back to the task at hand. Over the years my different practices to control my thoughts have evolved and changed, each of them helping me in their own way. I have used brain dumps creatively but hadn't really thought of them as an organizational technique until I read this article by Thomas Oppong. Thomas defines a brain dump as, "...a time to organi[z]e everything on your mind: your worries, questions, needs, wants, important and urgent tasks, and everything on your mind."  So join Justine and myself as we take a look at the brain dump technique and how it might help us in our day to day.

I've heard it over and over again that 2019 is the year of self care, which I honestly think is great. More people need to make their own well being a priority. I'll say it again for the people in the back: more people need to make their own well being a priority.

To some people (read: me) self care means face masks, bubble baths, and a glass of malbec. To others it means spending more quality time with your family, friends, or pets. But one thing seems universal: the need to spend less time grinding and more time enjoying.

How do we do this when we are told to idolize the hustle? Told to follow the grind wherever it leads us? Told that we are only successful if we put everything we have into our work?

Over the last few years we have fallen victim to what is now being called "hustle culture". Hustle culture is the societal standard that you can only succeed by exerting yourself at max capacity professionally. Everyday. Hustle culture does not sleep. Hustle culture does not take lunch breaks. Hustle culture is waking up Saturday morning and making spreadsheets instead of pancakes.

Hustle culture does not take into account what your goals in life really are. So join Justine and I as we discuss hustle culture and how we avoid the trap it sets.

Last week our VP of Sales, Brie Rangel wrote an awesome article called "The Toxic Myth of "Fearless" Leadership". (Which, if you haven't read it yet, you totally should.

In it she talks about the pressure to appear "fearless" in the face of stress, change, and adversity, particularly in a role of leadership.

Brie writes,

"...leaders are often expected to present an air of fearlessness. We're supposed to show no signs of weakness or worry.

Basically, we're supposed to be robots. But that's not real life.

If we continue embrace fearless leadership as an ideal, we're setting ourselves up for failure. Fearless leadership doesn't exist."

But this got me thinking.

The pressure to be fearless isn't just found in leadership. It's literally everywhere. Many of us face the pressure to put on a brave face and tackle our problems head on daily. But Brie is totally right, we're not robots it's unrealistic.

If I know anything about myself, it's that in times of stress or struggle, if i'm not being mindful about how I really feel, I bottle up my emotions. I bottle them up and store them aware in the farthest recesses of my mind until I have no more room to bottle and inevitably have a melt down.

This is not healthy, but this is reality.

Somewhere along the way I learned this as a coping mechanism and I have had to put in a lot of work on myself (therapy, meditation, reading self-help books, practices of gratitude) to make sure I didn't continue down this road.

I say this because on of the things I believe got me to that point was the pressure to appear fearless, or like no matter what's going on I have it all figured out.

I don't have it all figured out. Nobody does.

And to express that you are stressed, or nervous, or unsure of something doesn't make you a less competent or less confidant leader or coworker or mom or friend. It makes you human.

So today we're gonna break this down a little bit and talk about how it not only affects being a leader, but how it affects the whole team.

Here at IMPACT, we work in an agile system -- inspired pretty heavily on Spotify's model -- and have gone through some cross-team restructuring over the past year.

Because of this, a lot of IMPACT employees have questioned exactly how their performance is being judged and measured. IMPACT Founder and CEO Bob Ruffolo provided context to help give a little more guidance:

"My advice: Be the person on your team that your teammates say 'don't take them off my team, we don't want to lose them! They're too valuable to the team!' That's the ultimate judge of performance, and that's ultimately your job description, to be a valuable member of the team."

Though I really appreciated his response, it led to some additional questions on how do we define "valuable."

Defining what "valuable" means is pretty subjective per person and per team. 

In today's 100th episode of Creator's Block Marcella and I discuss exactly what makes an invaluable team member and provide tips to improve on those skillsets and traits so your teammates will never say, "it's OK if they are moved to a different team."

Last week, I enjoyed a couple days in the Connecticut office to immerse myself in an all-day training about World-Class Communication -- led by the one and only Marcus Sheridan. 

Every concept covered was so enlightening to me but one that particularly stood out was all about feedback. Marcus referenced one of my favorite books I read in 2018, Radical Candor, and challenged me by asking whether or not I ask for feedback from my team.

I sat a little more upright and proudly responded "yes, I ask almost every week." When he followed up his question with "and how often do they give you challenging feedback," I realized it was not very often.

On a surface level, you may think that's great! My team doesn't have any issues with the way I coach so I must be the most perfect manager ever.

Right?

Wrong. The reality is, I don't ask them effective enough questions to warrant them giving me direct feedback.

Marcus went on to say that it was not only important for me to receive feedback so I can continue to grow, but that it was just as important for my team to see how I react when receiving feedback so they can continue to grow.

Learning how to receive feedback well can be difficult and it wasn't until I started reading Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well by Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen that I realized I am not as open to receiving feedback as I thought I was.

In today's episode, Marcella and I breakdown the three different types and purposes of feedback and discuss how you can dig deeper to understand the reasoning behind the feedback you're receiving.

Happy New Year, everyone!

It's no surprise at this point that I have been doing a boatload of work on myself over the last year and I intend to keep going with this. I've been building out a library of books and workbooks all designed to get to the best version of myself. I have never been huge on new year's resolutions, but this year it feels different. I have a different skill set now and am better equipped to figure out how to forge a path and manifest my goals.

So, for the first time since maybe I was a young adolescent, I sat my butt down on New Years Eve with a bunch of markers and a notepad and wrote. I actually wrote a list of resolutions. Yes, it's kind of dorky and old fashioned, but I truly feel this is the best way to keep myself accountable. Once things are out of my head and into the universe in a tangible way then I'm forced to face them head on.

Today, I thought it would be fun for Justine and I to chat about our 2019 resolutions and how we intend to achieve them.

1. Improve time management / balance
2. Reduce anxiety / improve stress management
3. Take regular lunch breaks!
4. Opt outside
5. Have the highest performing team
6. Have the happiest team
7. Take part in a mentorship/coaching program
8. Plan my wedding!

1. To have more patience.
2. Have a healthy relationship with the gym.
3. Meditate Regularly (2 or 3 times a week).
4. Read and write more.
5. Follow a budget.
6. Focus on the big picture.
7. Stress. Less.
8. Be kinder to myself.

The end of the year always tends to be a time for some self reflection; a time when we look at what we've accomplished or learned over the last year.

So, Justine and I thought it would be a good idea to make a list of the 18 lessons we learned in 2018! Join us for our final episode of the year as we count down the hard (and not so hard) lessons we've learned through the last 525,600 minutes. 

Justine's Lessons Learned in 2018

1. Communicating effectively with colleagues and clients

2. The need to say no

3. Having a pet at home really DOES help with stress

4. Managing people is hard but when they succeed, it's the best

5. Growing a business is tough

6. Close down apps to help yourself focus

7. Therapy isn't scary

8. My passion… is helping people!

9. Connecting with people in person cannot be replaced

Marcella's Lessons Learned in 2018

1. How to give up control

2. Meditation really does something

3. You don't need to have a perfect picture of your future

4. Know when you can actually multi-task vs. not

5. I actually prefer working from home full time

6. Sometimes you have to work till 10, get over it

7. Podcasting (and putting myself out there in general) isn't as scary as I thought (I made it through my first year!)

8. How to listen to your intuition; what your body, mind, and soul need from you

9. Writing can be fun

Happy holidays, we'll see you in 2019!

The holiday season is in full swing, full of cheerful music, delicious food, shopping adventures and of course... chaotic schedules.

Over the past several years, I've deemed the few weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas as the "Christmas Chaos." I love this season but also struggle to keep a level head as my days seem to get more and more busy leading up to the Christmas holiday. 

As much as I'm looking forward to taking two weeks off and enjoying several days in Cancun, I can't help but be a bit overwhelmed in trying to wrap up all of our clients' quarter's plans and prep and roadmap out next quarter's strategies. 

I know I can burn out when I push myself like this but I also feel incredibly guilty when I say no to people.

Marcella and I used today's episode as a little bit of a therapy session to help coach me on how to say no without feeling so guilty and why it's so important I follow through in doing so.

Note - To help combat the Christmas Chaos, Creator's Block will be moving to bi-weekly publications for a little while.

The conversation of creativity vs. function is not a new one in the design world, but today as I was browsing medium I stumbled across an article on the subject that really ruffled my feathers (to put it lightly). Boris Müller, a Professor of Interaction Design at FH Potsdam, published a BOLD article that poses the question "Why Do All Websites Look the Same?" and even suggests that "The internet suffers from a lack of imagination". Which, WOW… fatalist outlook much?

Müller postures that the internet has become a desolate wasteland of boring design (okay maybe he didn't say it quite so dramatically) based in part largely CMS and blogging platforms.  As a counter argument he highlights some examples of his students' work that he thinks demonstrates truly "creative" design. I have a big issue with this. The designs he highlights completely disregard function and audience and seem to solely be driven by designing for the sake of design. Which, to me, is not web design. In our industry we MUST be aware of audience and a site SHOULD serve a purpose.  Without purpose a page is not functional design, but simply an art piece. Join Justine and I as I huff and puff over what makes web design truly good and how far SHOULD we push creativity vs. function.

This morning I read an article from Jason Zimdars, a designer at basecamp, about why he actually works from home. Spoiler alert, it wasn't about productivity at all, but rather about the practical reasons that we can sometimes take for granted.

Jason talks about the ways it allows him to spend more time with his kids and how those moments can be looked at as happy distractions and it got me thinking about the real reasons I've been working from home as well. 

Most of you know that I work full time remote, despite only being about 35 minutes from our office. Why work remote you say? Lots of reasons. 

For me working from home means:

• I get a little bit more sleep in the morning… and I LOVE my sleep. 😴

• I get to spend less time in the car - I have terrible car anxiety. 🚘

• I get to take a break by walking Kodi. 🐩

• I can control the temperature. 🌡️

• I can use my lunch break to get some chores or errands done. 🛒

• My introverted side has less "recharging to do" 🔋

• On a stressful day, I can get a hug from my boyfriend Jeremy or Kodi! 🤗

...and I could keep you here all day with the list that started forming in my head. So, today I thought it would be fun for Justine and I to talk about the REAL reasons that make working from home worth it every day.