Month: February 2021

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Prepare to Make Decisions

What do freedom and preparation have in common? Duh.

A Long Time Ago….

In a Career Far, Far, Away…

I learned about freedom.

Then, I learned about preparation.

Hey! How ya doin’? Are you all A-OK out there? I’m enjoying my long weekend. I listened to audiobooks and tuned in to the impeachment proceedings. That combination got me thinking about freedom. Freedom to act and even more, the need to be prepared.

As adults, with families and responsibilities, it often feels that like we don’t have freedom. We have responsibilities and obligations. The more of the trappings of the American dream we collect, the less free we believe we are. Education and opportunity turn into jobs, homes, families, and retirement funding – lots of stuff we don’t want to lose. In wanting to keep what we’ve earned, we lose perspective. Working starts to feel like a zero-sum proposition.

During my late twenties, I got to experience total freedom. My husband and I had just sold a business. At the time capital gains taxes were INSANE, so we didn’t get the big bankroll we expected. But, during the years of building our business, we’d practiced austerity at home. We needed only one minimum wage income to keep the lights on and things rolling, including our two cars and our utilities.

Given our frugal lifestyle, the proceeds from the sale of our business could support us for a long time. That meant I got the opportunity to work, basically anywhere, with the feeling that I could walk away, at any moment and find something comparable. No sweat.

Let me tell you, after the heroics of self-employment with a brick and mortar business and the mandate to show up and keep delivering, no matter how long it took or how hopeless things appeared, this feeling of nonchalance was incredible. At my job, an eight-hour day with a lunch break felt like child’s play and if I wanted to, I could walk away clean with no harm, no foul to my family.

In my happy, post-entrepreneurial state of sustainability, I felt bold, courageous. I got to be myself. I felt zero need to cowtow to anyone. I could speak my mind frankly. I didn’t have to worry about l office politics, people’s opinions, making ends meet, or really anything. I just had to show up, and do my job in the way that suited my personality.

It was exhilarating.

These were my typical thoughts at that time in life: “I’m working for me.” “We can live on one salary, so either of us can quit anytime.” “This is easy.” “I can’t believe people get paid for this.” “How can I do better?” “How can I do this faster?” “How cool would it be to figure that out?” “It’s time to go home already?” “I can’t believe I can walk away any time and be Just. Fine.” “I make less than anyone here, but I’m independently wealthy.” “I can do anything I want.” “I can leave any time.” “How can I help?” “How does that work?” “What else can I do to help the team?” “It’s time to go home already?” “This is great.” “I think I’d like to get another degree while I’m doing this. I have plenty of time.”

That experience taught me a lot about what fearlessness and a sense of expansive resources do to mindset. After years of seventy hour weeks, razor-thin margins, the fate of my family, and the jobs of a dozen employees riding on our ability to keep things running, the contrast was extreme.

Looking back, of course, things weren’t quite that amazing. I wasn’t yet thirty and I still felt like I had forever to create a retirement fund. Eventually, our savings would go away if we weren’t careful and a major medical catastrophe could have wiped everything out and set us on a very different course.

Doesn’t matter. What mattered was the mindset. That mindset was the greatest gift of all time. I experienced what it felt like to believe that I was totally, financially, free and independent, and at the same time, perfectly capable of working twice as hard at any moment. I experienced a total lack of a scarcity in my mindset and it was phenominal.

It also provided a comparison to help me understand when fear and scarcity are setting in.

Years later, when I needed to make a difficult decision at work, the impact of that difference was made clear to me.

I was asked to make a judgment call. There were lots of people with different opinions about what I should do. I felt a lot of internal pressure to make sure that I made the decision without any personal bias. I needed to know that my decision was best for my employer, not for me, not for my family.

Let’s be clear, my company supported me in this work in every way. But because I had experienced what it felt like to act and make decisions out of total freedom, I knew that my mind was far from that place. I understood that I needed to be willing not only to walk away from my job but to also believe we would be ok if I did. In order to be sure that my choice was unbiased I needed to be free of the fear of losing my job, fear of not finding another one, and fear of not being capable.

That clarity made the work much, much harder. At that time, I did believe I needed my job. I believed that I would never find another as perfect. I believed that nobody would hire me at that same pay and I that couldn’t survive independently from my job.

Talk about a problem. Before I could make my decision at work, I had to clean up my whole life. I wasn’t willing to make a decision until I was sure I could be unbiased and the clock was ticking.

Watching the folks in the Senate over the weekend, I wondered how many of them were in that same boat.

I remember the weekend before I made my decision. I dragged out all our finances. I took out all our bills. I laid everything out. I had to be willing to walk away from my job if my decision wasn’t in alignment with others. Not because my company was pressuring me. Remember, I had lots of support. I needed to be dead certain that my decision was made freely. I needed to be sure of my own clarity of mind, for me.

I worked numbers for hours, in pencil at our dining room table. By the time I was done, I was sure that if my husband kept his job and I could get a minimum wage job, we would survive. After all the self-inflicted pressure I’d been feeling, I almost welcomed the chance to go back to an hourly wage.

I spent the next day laying out my pros and cons. Late Sunday, I sent in my decision, feeling the strength that comes from knowing you’re making a choice for all the right reasons.

That taught me a lot. That experience was far more difficult than it needed to be because I wasn’t prepared. I didn’t have my personal house in order. That weekend started a new phase in my life. I banished debt, one 0% credit card at a time. I prioritized savings and I expanded my network by volunteering and learning new skills. I made getting back to that independent state of mind a top priority.

Today, my thoughts are these: “I have everything I need to do what I need to.” “I’m ready for a new chapter.” “I’m 100% able to walk away at any time.” “My personal inventory is up to date.” “I know where I stand.” “What if this can be easy?” “How can I get better?” “How can I live on even less?” “Who can I help?” “I wonder what that’s about?” “I’m ready for whatever comes my way.” “It’s the end of the day already?” “What do I want to learn to do next?” “What does my team need?” “Where’s the popcorn?” “This is a tough puzzle.” “This is great.” “It’s the end of the day already?” “I’m on vacation until 8 am” “I love my job.”

Here’s the deal.

When I was struggling with my own feelings of fear and inadequacy, I had a net worth ten times what it was when I was in my twenties and feeling like the Queen of Everything. Less people were depending on me because our child was out on his own. I was in much better shape. But that wasn’t how I felt, and it wasn’t what I believed.

To this day, I still have never felt as free as I did that year after we sold our business. Too bad, but I have hope that I will. What I am sure of is I will never again have to put everything on hold to clean my personal house before I make a judgment call. I’m prepared. I have already accepted that my job will go away. One way or another, all of our jobs go away. We move on, even if we stay with the same employer.

So ask yourself, what work do you have to do on your personal inventory to be sure that you are 100% free to face anything work throws at you?

That – is your path to freedom.

And that? Is just good to know.

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Learn to Carve

What do digital transformation, skill gaps, and workload all have in common? They all require you to learn how to carve.

It’s Saturday at 2 pm and I’m still in my bathrobe. I’m working on my blog on the weekend. Surely there is nothing you can learn from me.

Are you still here? Well, all right. Here goes. Gartner says that in the next ten years constant upskilling will replace experience in importance in the workplace. CompTIA says that the ability of IT professionals to understand both technology and business is rising in the list of skill gaps that technology professionals need to be closing.

Beyond all that, workload and technical skill gap issues are still smokin’ hot for IT just as they have been for several years now. Oh, and by the way, your company still wants you to innovate, which means, you’re going to need some downtime for your brain so you can come up with new ideas that are all your own.

What does that mean? You better figure out how to do what you need to do, when you need to do it.

You better learn to carve – carve out personal time, carve in technical training and business training.

Did you just scream? You know I’m still in my bathrobe right?

Fortunately, I’ve been reading Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport and marveling over the ways in which addiction can help with scheduling. Stop snickering. An all-nighter does have a way of clearing your calendar, but that’s not what I’m talking about.

Among other things, he addresses these points: digital media and the attention economy have created a state of distraction which results in both an inability to focus and an activity void when we step away from it. To successfully disengage from that digital experience (think social media, surfing, news, and streaming) we have to plan what we are going to do instead. Quitting cold turkey on any behavior leaves us staring into an uncomfortable void and vulnerable to relapse. I’ve hammered on this before – you need to have something great to do in your time off, in order to let go of the emails, all the important work that never ends, and the distractions that chip away at our lives.

Cal Newport then delves into how to reclaim your leisure time. None of this is new info to people who follow this blog but what he does propose is a reverse calendar – plot carefully the time you allow for non-constructive leisure and thereby force yourself to fill the rest of your time with something better. In a word, carve out the best leisure you can. Leisure that gives you time to ponder and create just feels like you have more life in your life.

So let’s bring all that back to the office. You know you have to set aside specific chunks of the day to do focus work that makes a difference. Time for the type of serious training and continuing education professionals need is often something we try to squeeze in on the side. Kinda like your exercise and maybe dinner.

What’s the answer?

Pretty much I’m proposing that we treat training the way we treat a vacation. Those of us who’ve figured out how to actually get our time off, know we need to have it on the calendar early – before the emergency project comes up. That’s so our managers can plan around it, which they can do… if it’s on the calendar.

So your professional training needs to go on the calendar. Your boss needs the details so she can plan around it. Just like a serious vacation, you need to know what you’re going to do and how much it will cost.

Also, you need to understand what you need to learn.

Because technology as a supporting role for business is simply table stakes now, interdisciplinary training along with technical training is going to be the new normal. You can’t come up with cool ways to add value to your business if you don’t know what your business partners are doing. You also can’t offer technical solutions that you don’t know how to build. Looks like us nerds are going to have to start planning in both business learning as well as technical skill development.

Once you know what you need to learn, and you’ve found a good way to learn it, either through a real-life project and online learning, or formal training, you’ll need to budget the time and the money. Just like a vacation. What? This doesn’t sound like fun?

Here’s the other thing. You should leave town – just like when you go on vacation. Try to hand over loose ends to a teammate, turn off your cell phone and put your out of office message on. You don’t have to literally leave town but if you can get your manager and team to treat you like you have – well, then, who wouldn’t want to take on training?

Sound good? Here’s how to make it real.

  1. Get your manager’s buy-in.
  2. Schedule your learning days, plan and fund your training.
  3. Don’t forget to include the certification test. Do the whole thing.
  4. Be a team player – offer to support your buddy’s training vacation too.
  5. Use the practice of learning days to create cross-training. It’s so much better to get called back for a production issue from your class than from your first post-pandemic trip. So get the team to try like crazy to solve issues without you… just like you’re on vacation. Then, if there’s something they need to brush up on, it’ll be clear and you won’t have to call in from the beach.

Once you’ve carved out time for learning, quality downtime so you can have free-thinking for innovation, time for vacation, and time to do focused work each day, you’re well on the way to be being a master carver, 2021 style.

And that? Is just what we trained for.

If you want help getting your calendar under control, set up a free 25-minute session. I’d love to talk time management with you. After all, it’s 2 pm on a Saturday and I’ve spent the morning enjoying a novel, I’ve put out a blog and I’ll be chillin’ watching the Super Bowl tomorrow.