Tag Archives: Facebook

Five things I’m not afraid of anymore

16 Nov Times square fisheye

Hi. I’ve got fifteen minutes and I’m thinking about fear today.

If you plotted fear on an axis, it might look something like this:

Fear is the part that goes backward. The part that takes you forward? That’s love. The opposite of fear is love.

A very smart lady, Nancy Morris, once told me that in a training session (she’s teaches the art of accomplishment). It stuck with me long past the lesson itself. And now it’s absolutely, irrevocably cemented in my head because I have proof.

Here it is, my proof. Five things I’m not afraid to do anymore:

Wear a bathing suit. Show me a woman who thinks her body looks just perfect in a bathing suit, and I’ll show you—never mind, you won’t find her. Like most women, I wasn’t excited about pouring my aging, post-two-babies, plus-two-C-section-scars body into a bathing suit to take my toddler to the pool. But when I saw the absolute joy as he kicked and wiggled and experienced the water, I lost my fear of being judged for flab. Love conquers fear. I’ll take public humiliation any day for a chance to go swimming with my kids.

Talk back. From time to time at work in various jobs, I’ve butted heads with colleagues or managers. Sometimes, it’s a matter of opinion. Sometimes, it’s a matter of principle. I can shut up and take it, or I can speak up and try to change things. I choose the latter. I’ve learned that when I care more about doing a job than keeping it, I can be enormously effective. Love conquers fear, so I can stand on principle for the things that I’m passionate about, and as a result, get vastly greater satisfaction in my career.

Swing for the fences. I wrote a novel. That’s big—you put your butt in your chair for hours and hours and hope the muse meets you there. I’ve also supervised a complete kitchen remodel while seven and a half months pregnant, including sourcing all of the materials. I’ve gone to Egypt for weeks alone when friends wouldn’t go with me. I’ve moved away from my friends and boyfriend to take a new, vastly better job in Portland.

All of these things had huge potential for failure, but I’ve found that swinging for the fences is the best way forward. I’m not afraid to take risks because I might not accomplish what I set out to do. The alternative, not risking it, is that I will definitely not accomplish what I want to do.

Dabbling: one of five things I'm not afraid to do anymore.

Dabble. I embroidered a bunch of Christmas stockings for my family (ahem, I don’t sew). I started a blog. I tried Twitter, started and stopped and started again. I got an iPad and dozens of apps. I got a treadmill. I took the GMAT. I cut my hair (bangs for the first time in fifteen years). I tried silver nail polish (not a good look) and jeggings (comfortable, but weird). I bought quince at the farmer’s market.

I can’t tell you whether the quince thing will be good (I’m still searching for recipes), but I can tell you I’m happy I tried so many of these things. I might end up hating them, grow out my bangs, throw out my jeggings, and go back to my regular life. And that would be OK. I’m no longer afraid to try something and have it be an absolute failure. I order the weird things on the menu because, who knows? I might love it. And if I hate it, I’ll order something else.

Be real. A while ago, as I was working on a corporate communications strategy for Facebook, my boss and I were on the phone playing with Facebook’s groups functions, each of us on our own computers with our own accounts. I had just created a company page, and now I needed to add him as an administrator. Problem: He wasn’t my Facebook “friend.”

Uh-oh. “Don’t be friends with your boss on Facebook” is the number one cardinal rule of social media, is it not? Or even, “Don’t be Facebook friends with work people.” I’ve heard that before. So when my boss said, “Well, I guess you’ve got to add me as a Facebook friend now so I can be the admin for our company page, too,” I just did it, and damn the consequences.

Which were … none. Rather, nothing more than my boss kindly asking how my novel-writing weekend went (when I posted that as a status update). Happily, I’ve never put anything online that I’d be ashamed to have my grandmother or CEO read or see. But still—there’s definitely a work-life separation that I think most folks try to achieve. I, for one, am over it. I’ve gotten over the fear of being real. I’m just going to be me, seamlessly, in work and in life. The “Work Heidi” isn’t a different person from the “Home Heidi.”

So that’s me, I’m WYSIWYG. What about you? Do you have any fears? Hey, you’ve got fifteen minutes—start conquering them. GO.

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Three things I can’t live without

10 Nov Three things feat

Hi, how’s it going? Good week? Big plans for the weekend? Me, too. A whole weekend on my own (away from the family). I hardly know what to do with myself!

There’s a game that circulates on Facebook from time to time, asking you to write in a few items that you’d take with you to a deserted island.

Well, sometimes they ask, “What would you take with you to a desert island?”

And (the writer geek in me speaks up now), if they were really asking that, I’d say: Enough food and water to last throughout my stay, and shelter of some kind. Because, really, if we’re talking desert island, it’s all about survival.

But if we’re talking deserted island—you know, white sand beach with palm trees and tropic fruits in abundance, but no people—then it’s not about sustenance. It’s about company and creature comforts.

(OK, desert island/deserted island lecture over. You may now resume reading a normal person’s blog.)

So what three things would I take?

Assuming I could get power, I’d take a laptop with Internet access (a girl can dream), my Kindle and my feather pillow. I’m pretty sure I’d get more novel-writing done there than I do here in the cycle of work/family/sleep/work/family/sleep.

But these are a far cry from what really matters to me. I have three words, imprinted on a silver bracelet more than a decade ago: “Adventure, Joy, Creativity.” These remain the hallmarks of what make me, me. These are three things I can’t live without.

One of the three things I can't live without? Being a world traveler. Feature photo by Kiwinz, insert photo by MikeBehnken.

And remember when I told you about the three business goals I developed for myself in Guiding by Goals? Well, I have three things I can’t live without in my personal life as well. I strive to be:

  1. A lifelong learner
  2. A world traveler
  3. An involved parent and partner.

I told a former boss about these three personal goals and she snorted. “That doesn’t seem very ambitious, Heidi, aren’t you already doing those?”

Well, yeah. I am. But I think of these goals as ever-present, not just something out in the distance that you have to work toward, bit by bit. In fact, their presence in my daily life is exactly what’s so important about them.

I have ‘lifelong learner’ on my list because I’m always on a learning curve. Whether it’s new technology (the impetus to start my blog, so that I could learn WordPress), or a new skill like embroidery (hey, if knitting can be hip, don’t you dare knock embroidery), I dig that experimentation phase when I’m not really sure how to get from A to B, but enjoy the trial and error.

I also can’t seem to get enough of smart people. I read more than a book a week, hopping from marketing books to general corporate strategy, then over to Chick Lit, taking a right at mystery and suspense, short jog to legal thrillers and rounding the curve with some literary historical nonfiction and memoir. (Hyperlinks are to recent recommendations.)

And to really plug into thought leadership, I go for Harvard Business Review (try #HBRchat sometime on Twitter, it’s fun and you’ll meet interesting people) and TED’s rich collection of presentations. (By the way, I’m putting you on notice that it’s now one of my goals to give a TED talk.)

So, do you have three goals for your personal life? (Or four or five, I’m not a stickler.) Are they goals with a finish line, like “Lose 20 pounds” or “Write a novel,” or are they goals that you are accountable to both now and in the future.

I’d argue that the best goals are those that you can and must achieve continually. Then, there’s no time like the present to achieve them. GO.

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The mission statement

30 Oct

Hi. I’m Heidi. At work and in life, people know me as a “firestarter.” Why? More on that in a bit.

I’ve been thinking about creating a blog for quite a while, but one thing that stops me—really, stops me in my tracks—is the question of what my blog should be about.

I’ve dug into social media over the past year and realized the one key piece of advice for blogs, tweets, posts and shares is that you must have a clear sense of why you’re there.

Advice for bloggers: be consistent, be authentic, be purposeful. Photo by Visualpanic

Sounds simple? It’s not. Consider how many careers have imploded when people make disparaging comments about their bosses or companies on their Facebook pages, only to have that come back to haunt them.

I’ve seen public MySpace pages that literally throw a candidate’s professionalism out the window. I’ve seen one successful candidate post that he’d secured a role OTHER than the one actually offered to him on Facebook—and his job offer was promptly revoked. And I’ve seen a woman post Facebook status updates about going out of town for fun when she was supposed to be at a family funeral.

That’s a sure-fire way to get yourself in deep doo-doo. Facebook friends (who were also colleagues) reported her, and she’s no longer with that company.

So, why are you here? Why are you on social media? Why are you blogging, tweeting, posting, sharing, commenting?

These are the questions I had to answer before I felt confident that I could start a blog.

For example, on Twitter in 2008 and 2009, I developed a presence that helped me connect to marketing professionals in 47 of my company’s offices throughout North America, talking about projects  and marketing tips. When my role changed, I quit tweeting for nearly 18 months because I was stymied by this question: If I wasn’t tweeting for them, why was I on Twitter?

Ultimately, I realized that you must have a kind of charter, a mission statement for each social platform. The charter says why you’re sharing, your target audience and the boundaries you have for letting people into your network.

I’ve got some answers.

I think of Facebook as my “personal life online,” so I fill posts with cute pictures of my kids and family, what we’re up to on the weekend, personal projects, recipes and little things that happened in my day that made me smile.

I refuse to be negative. I don’t often talk about work, and only then in positive, general terms. I don’t say anything that would offend my grandmother or CEO. And I keep the circle of friends relatively tight. If I bumped into you in a coffee shop and would immediately want to hug you and sit down for a 15-minute chat, I’d add you to my circle of friends. If not, I don’t connect.

Twitter is an entirely different animal. Now that I’m back to tweeting, I’ve made my account public because I want to use it as a way to create new relationships and source information, both about work and other personal interests. I don’t talk about my family or my weekend. Instead, I think of Twitter as my “intellectual life online,” running the gamut from social media and marketing strategy, which I do for work, to tips about writing and publishing, which I do in my (laughably small) spare time.

LinkedIn is my “professional profile online.” I don’t use it to post daily status updates, but it’s the authority on my career history and what I have to offer in business.

And then there’s a blog. Why do that as well?

For starters, sometimes I want to post more than can fit in 140 or 450 characters. I’m a writer. I write a LOT. And as an unabashed extrovert, I love to share.

Also, a blog is a way to build identity within a chosen area of interest, be it commercial real estate, books and writing or culinary arts.

Ah, but there’s the rub: I like a lot of different things. I go in a lot of different directions. And maybe I’m not willing to commit to a singular subject. (Maybe? Ha. It’s just not in my DNA.)

Blogs aren’t only about commitment to a subject, though. They’re about commitment to creating content, to consistently posting from day to day, week to week, month to month. And with a full-time job, a full-time family and a full-time passion for writing novels, well, what’s left of me to commit?

My brother Alan helped answer that. He recently moved to Indiana for a full-ride scholarship to pursue a master’s degree at Notre Dame. He’s a smart cookie. And one of the things I love about our relationship is that he often seeks me out for advice despite our ten-year age gap.

It might be about work or relating to a challenging colleague, about school or about dating. And as a businesswoman, a person who is passionate about teaching and coaching, and, ahem, a woman, I offer the advice I can.

Recently, he made my day by thanking me publicly (well, in front of about 1,000 of his Facebook friends) for being a great mentor. And then it hit me: a mentor. That’s what I can be. That’s what I can blog about.

I can offer advice about business, marketing, media. I can offer guidance on parenting and work-life balance (and perhaps I should take that advice sometimes!). I can offer suggestions on recipes and cooking, tips to tighten up your writing, ideas for planning and event or getting any idea off the ground.

This is the firestarter's blog. I'm a creative catalyst. I make things GO. Photo by Herval

At the beginning of this post, I told you I was a firestarter. And that’s my true talent—more than any of the functional things I do, marketing and communications, writing, cooking, parenting, crafting—the best thing I do in life is creating momentum for projects or people. I’m a creative catalyst. I make things GO.

So this is the Firestarter’s blog.

But there’s a catch. (Isn’t there always?) While I’m great at starting, it’s often a challenge to finish. There will always be an interruption, a meeting, a project that’s hair-on-fire to finish. So my challenge to myself is how do I make this happen—how do I not only start, but continue? I’m giving myself 15 minutes. Just that long to communicate one core thought, one small piece of advice, one story that inspires you to start.

So here’s my Fifteen-minute Firestarter, entry #1: Have a mission statement, a charter, a reason to engage. Then, GO!

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