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Posts tagged ‘Work’

7
Feb

Love.Live.Dream

Here’s to everyone out there looking for a new job, or any new opportunity in life.

Remember this:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Credit:

http://shop.holstee.com/pages/about

3
Feb

it rains and pours good things

Although this little fellow looks somewhat miffed at being in the rain, I am happily enjoying the fact that it’s raining (opportunities) for me…

There’s one really good opportunity, with a company and people I really like, there’s still Microsoft, too…..  I’ll have an update soon.

In the meantime, Happy Friday everyone…. I’ll be back with a story soon!

photo by Andrea O'Connell

18
Nov

Weekly Photo Challenge: Breakfast

This week’s photo challenge is breakfast – which I rarely have time for, but love just the same.

Today’s breakfast was really yesterday’s breakfast – a big cup of Cheerios  – which I didn’t eat today either.

If I were not so stubborn about getting out of bed, I might have time for breakfast!

I need to leave my house by 7:45 to get to work by 8:30.  The problem is, I wait until the third snooze alarm before I get out of bed – at about 7:30, which leaves me 15 minutes to get ready……

Sometimes I wake up before the alarm, at about 6:30 or 7:00 which is amazing in itself.  If I didn’t have to sit comatose at the edge of my bed forcing my eyes to open then manually arranging my brain parts so they’ll fire, I’d probably have time for a leisurely breakfast.  It takes about a half an hour for my body and brain to recognize each other in the morning – many times my Corpus-callosum and Amygdala refuse to speak to each other – that’s what I call a hairy start of the day.

I’m not me in the morning.  Usually don’t recognize myself because I look like the Madwoman of Chaillot in a Halloween costume and still drunk with sleep.

I hate mornings….’nuff said?  🙂

Shot with iPhone camera

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17
Nov

the drama triangle and toxic workplaces

At my ISPI meeting tonight (International Society for Performance Improvement), our guest speaker was Ed Muzio, CEO of Group Harmonics, and author of Four Secrets to Liking Your Work, and more recently, Make Work Great, both popular books offering great solutions to “stopping the drama” in the workplace.  The YouTube video below, called Stop the Drama and Do the Work, is only 4 minutes, or so, but it packs a good punch of common sense.

In the video Muzio discusses the Drama Triangle Avoidance model.  There are three roles in this model, Muzio explains them like this: 

1) Persecutor – someone who blames, criticizes, shames, snipes or back-stabs a victim.  The 2) Victim role then, is someone who follows orders, deflects blame, could be cynical, displays “poor me” attitudes, displays hopelessness. And finally, 3) the Rescuer Role – they are the Cheerleaders, they fight the power or plan a coup, they help the wounded one, tend to their hurt feelings, and they are the go-to person to fix problems.

In these three roles: Persecutor, Victim, and Rescuer are certain behaviors that inhibits work from getting done.  The trick is to reject the roles.  For instance, there are nasty and toxic people in my workplace who like nothing better than making others miserable – stealing your work, undermining your efforts, and basically trying to make you look bad so they look better.  They are everywhere in my workplace, especially prevalent in leadership roles which makes their influence worse.  (Why people who hate people are allowed to lead people I will never understand.)

Ed Muzio has a solution that will be helpful both inside and outside of the workplace.  The secret?  “Behave as if the role is not real.”  If we refuse to be the victim, the persecutor cannot be real….they may act as such to all outward appearances, but without a victim they’re just a lot of hot air!

Take a look at the video- it’s all explained – I think you’ll enjoy it, too!

And then there’s the all too common toxic workplace ….

Next month our ISPI guest will be Dr. Linnda Durre, her book Surviving the Toxic Workplace, is a huge success.

Do insulting screamers, incompetent assistants and outdated equipment drive you crazy?  Are you surrounded by vicious backstabbers, sneaky idea stealers, and lazy whiners?  Do the nitpicky control freaks, negative pessimists, and office gossips bring you down? Welcome to the Toxic Workplace, a not-so-rare condition that has reached epidemic proportions. In this ingenious step-by-step guide, renowned psychotherapist Linnda Durré shows you how to diagnose and treat these problems quickly and effectively to ensure the health of your company, your career, and your sanity.

This is a book I want to read!

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5
Sep

gadget geek

I hope everyone had a wonderful Labor Day weekend.  I certainly did, but it went by much tooooo fast!

My weekend was all about family, reading, and playing with gadgets!

I’m kind of a geek when it comes to electronic gadgets.  I recently got a new Dell desk top that’s super fast and super nice to use.   I have a Dell laptop that’s only 3 years old, but it’s already very out of date.  To replace it, I’m thinking of getting a mini laptop.

The mini laptops are reasonably priced, starting at about $300.00.  Of course, if you fill it with a larger hard-drive and more RAM, it’s going to be around $660.00 to $800.00. approximately.  I priced them today.  I configured a Dell model with the most RAM and with the most powerful hard-drive I could find, and it turned out to be almost $800.00.  That’s a bit much to spend just to be able to sit on the couch and work!  I have decided to wait a bit.  If I do decide to go back to school, I’ll definitely purchase it.

I have a Motorola XOOM tablet that I love.  I chose the XOOM over the iPad2 because I have an iPhone and it’s the exact same thing, only larger.  The XOOM is an Android, which I had never used before.  It looks just like the iPad2, and is quite easy to use to surf the web, send emails, and update the blog.  It’s not much of a word processor – though it could be, I find it awkward to use in that regard. But, could use it in a pinch.

I also have a Nook Color that I wish I didn’t purchase because now the tablets – either Android or iPads – allow you to download the Nook, or the Kindle free of charge.  The best thing, I suppose, is when my battery dies on the XOOM, I can switch to the Nook, and vice versa.  And, the great thing is, they sync automatically, meaning they remember what page you were just reading on another device.

I purchased some new web/eLearning publishing software, too.  Because I work for a university I am able to use the educational discount, and its sometimes as much as 75 percent off the retail price.  I just got a new software called “Snap” by Lectora.  It allows you to turn PowerPoint presentations into a web-based tutorial with Flash animation, voice and video.  It’s really easy, too!

The Adobe Acrobat X Pro software just came in the mail Friday.  Adobe Pro is a great tool to create, edit, and transform a PDF document into an interactive form – you can also embed media into it.  I will have to learn how to take full advantage of all it can do – I am a novice with this one.   I also ordered a software bundle that hasn’t arrived yet.  It’s a software that is terrific to demonstrate how to navigate through a computer application, i.e. a specific series of steps that a user must do to accomplish a task.  It’s called Camtasia, and it’s bundled with Snag-It.  Camtasia uses a video program to record what is happening as a user types and navigates on the computer.  The Snag-It software is really cool, too.  It  allows you to capture pictures of your computer graphics to replicate – turns them into JPGs or PNGs, or whatever form of graphic you like to work with.

And then, yesterday, I finally got a GPS for my car! (It was an early birthday present!)   I absolutely love it!  It’s a Garmin Nuvi 1450LMT, and has real-time traffic reports, and maps of North America and Canada, too.

I can’t wait to use this tomorrow morning to get to work.  It will be nice to know where the traffic backups are beforehand.   I travel all highways to get to work, and now that the kids are all back in school, it’s murder to get to work.

According to the GPS, it should take me 14 minutes to get to work.  Hah!  It’s actually, on a good day, 40 minutes.

Speaking of work, tomorrow is almost here, so I’m heading for never-never land.

Before I go, I want to share with you my favorite quote that reminds me of Labor Day:

Sometimes it’s important to work for that pot of gold. But other times it’s essential to take time off and to make sure that your most important decision in the day simply consists of choosing which color to slide down on the rainbow.  (Douglas Pagels)

I try to do that everyday, in some small way.

23
Jul

Work, work, work!

If I’d missed posting tonight it would be the first post missed since starting the post-a-post-a-day for 2011. I’m with my boss so that makes it better.

We have one more little job to do (Hateful Excel spreadsheet that won’t print right).

Anyway, it’s almost midnight so I’m outta here…..

PS… I’m posting from my phone! Ain’t technology grand?!

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