The Blunder Years

Brenda is a good friend of mine from online. She was actually a guest on Episode 14 of this show. We have shot the breeze on layoffs in the past, so I decided to have her back on for an interview for a side project I am doing about people being laid off. Since that project is not yet live, I'm currently posting some of this stuff on my own feeds. Since these are pretty personal topics (terminations, losing income), I doubt people will actively share 'em, but eh.

Brenda is a mid-career professional who has been through about three layoffs in her day. Predominantly we talk about signs whereby you know a layoff is probably coming, and then at the end we talk a little bit about “being called down to the basement,” drinking Diet Coke through a straw, and individual layoff stories we’ve had. Don’t worry, it will all make sense eventually.

Also, I do not really know what a "mid-career professional" is.

This is my friend Adam based down in Austin, where he’s been for six years. He’s had a bunch of different gigs in the recruiting world, the employer branding world, and even touched hospitality, sports writing, and some other cool stuff. I’m taping this intro on March 31, a Tuesday; this previous Thursday, which I guess was the 26th, he got laid off from his current gig because of COVID-19. We had a quick discussion on the context of that layoff, how it could have gone better, and his rules for effective, empathetic layoffs. Here’s not so breaking news: you need to communicate effectively. Let’s go get it.

If you’ve followed some of the stuff I write and post, I gave up drinking for Lent, which is probably about 33-34 days as I tape this introduction. My guest today is Kathryn, based out of Colorado, who also got sober and got more into strong women (strongwoman) events as part of her post-drinking development. She had a crappy 2016, relative to my generally crappy 2017, so we talk about some of that, sobriety, work challenges, pushing through hardship, and more. Let’s get into it.

This episode was actually a nice dose of self-awareness for me. The guest is Alabama-based educator and leadership developer Joel Hawbaker, who talks about courageous humility and has a website called Real Life Leading. I am not exactly sure how I first came across Joel, but we were supposed to do a taping or two in fall 2019. I missed two of them -- I think one was for a work project, which I suppose is good, and the second was because of day drinking and missing the time, which is inherently bad. We finally did get to connect and it’s a really almost beautiful conversation about where education is headed, where religious involvement is headed, how to forgive, whether we’re all inherently selfish and apathetic, and a couple of guiding principles for your 30s. I’m glad we finally got to it. Let’s get into it.

This is an interview with my digital friend Maggie, who helps with communications and strategy and beyond in the association space. The conversation covers a lot of different ground, but we especially talk about mental health in the workplace and the idea of “neuro-diversity,” and whether we can ever get it to scale that executives will care more about these topics. There’s an unfortunate story about how a co-worker at one job reacted to her. Let’s get right to it.

In the summer of 2003, my friend Diana and I were both new corps members in Teach for America. We were both training in Houston, TX. I was actually going to stay there for my teaching commitment, and she went to New Mexico -- but we taught at the same school, shout-out to Lantrip Elementary, for that summer. Now, that was 17 years ago, and a lot of stuff has happened since. This podcast will probably be in two parts, although the second part has not been taped yet. This part is a look at some of the assessment work that Diana does with Hawthorne Union, her company. Basically, what we did was this … she sent me some of their assessments, I took them, and in this episode we go through the results and the areas where I am and am not “woke.” (Or maybe employable.) So across 17 years, we went from riding janky school buses together in Houston at age 22 to analyzing each other’s pros and cons in our late 30s. Oh, in related news, both of us are divorced as well … so that might be part of the second go-round here. But for now, let’s talk about assessments. We’re gonna start by discussing why the Predictive Index assessment is better than a lot of other junk out there.

Mike Tunison, who you might know better as Christmas Ape or XMas Ape online, is one of the founders of the Kissing Suzy Kolber sports blog and a former reporter and writer for The Washington Post. In October 2017, he appeared on the “Shitty Media Men” list, and since then there’s been a degree of “cancellation” to his career. We actually started by talking kind of generically about standing up for your values and the like, and then later in the interview we got into more specifics -- so I killed the generic value stuff and focused on the experience of being part of the cancel culture. Then, at the very end, I added a small section where Mike talks about his work as a canvasser in Virginia and describes how upper-middle-class white families are perceiving Biden and Sanders. Let’s get into it.

Right before Christmas 2019, when I was kinda struggling big-time with income and employment context, I had this interview to be an apartment complex manager about 2-3 miles from my house. Interview was standard generic BS, with no real questions of relevance or to prove competency at a job, and it lasted maybe 20 minutes. As I was exiting, the couch outside was all beautiful young women. I instantly thought to myself, “Well, I’ll never get this job.” It was maybe noon. I decided, probably unwisely, to go to this bar near my apartment and have a sandwich and a couple of beers.

While there, I had a phone conversation with Fritz. He is a QA and automated tester in the St. Louis area. We met on social platforms. I think LinkedIn was first. I have a lot of problems with social and connectivity, for sure -- there are many flaws to social media -- but meeting people like Fritz is positive. So, we eventually did this podcast conversation and talked about cancer, risk, faith, raising daughters, and working for yourself. Actually, the whole conversation starts by talking about how people don’t pay you on time. Let’s get going.

Probably sometime in early to mid 2018, I started engaging more online with this dude Jordan Barta. I think it was initially around HR Technology, because he works in a sales function in that space, but eventually we started talking about a bunch of other stuff on Twitter, including flaws of work, education, politics, virtue-signaling, and more. I wanted to have him on this podcast. We literally tried to do this episode five times on different Wednesdays and Fridays and something got messed up every time; I think 80 percent of those were my fault. Well, we finally did it and it came out pretty solid. He actually lived in Finland and Germany for a while, so there’s a nice section in the middle about “socialism” vs. “capitalism,” which is a big topic in America these days. We also talk about work, management, life lessons, your partner/spouse challenging you, and the flaws of the education system. Let’s hit it.

This is a self-hosted episode that I promise / hope will not be incredibly self-indulgent. It's about my decision to give up drinking for Lent 2020 and some of my past and future issues around all that. Hopefully you enjoy it.