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Friday, January 28, 2011

getting a little personal

I get excited about off the wall stuff.  Yes, I realize, I am a "dork" for not only remembering physics equations, but having that high inflection in the tone of my voice, which means only one thing: joy when reciting them.  I love learning about systems- whether it is the adrenal or Systems of a Down.  I love orthopedic and prosthetic equipment- now that is just weird.

One thing I am not too keen on is weekly planning meetings.  Yes, I see the utility in them- they are a must, but lets just face it, they are not that fun.  This Thursday, I decided to switch it up a little.  I decided to add in the end two items.  I contemplated doing so, because these two items were personal- should I, or rather, is it okay to add in too personal items into work?  I am a little sensitive about not being too down to business simply because I am a young, female leader....not to down play or up play any of the typical stereotypes that surface as a result of that comment...but just want to run an professional, respectable organization where I am respected.

So, this week, in the meeting as we finished up discusing our current professional goals, I asked for a "personal goal"...."it can be anything that you have been wanting to do in your personal life...but you have to start on it this week".  Wow.  To see the look on my director's face was priceless.  His face filled with excitement as he gushed about various goals- his passions erupted as he spoke of all these goals.  One of his goals was to improve fitness, so we both decided one way to measure this would be to time his mile run, ...which by the way, I have not done since, ummm, high school?

The other exercise I added was to come up with a motivational quote that we would recite during the week- a mantra.  Again, it was such a great team building exercise to do this.

As we finished up and I was on my way- I realized something- first, that it is so easy for small business to incorporate fun into their work place- you don't have to be some silicon valley company with fuzeball and guys traversing through company halls on skateboards to be cool (however, that does sound pretty sweet).

Secondly, as I was finishing up the day, thinking about the events and preparing to sleep, I realized our mantra this week ironically was "bring life to life".  I felt like we did that in our meeting.  We brought purpose to our meetings aside from just being centered around work.  We brought balance.  Moments after that thought surfaced at 9:30pm in the evening I received a text from my director-  "4.25=1/2 mile; 9.02= 1 mile, can't wait to hear your times....".  I smiled.

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