I’m reading Brené Brown’s book The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You’re Supposed toBe and Embrace Who You Are. There’s a lot of good stuff in there. Read it. Or check out her website and watch some videos. The chapter I just read was about resilience. One of the essential elements of resilience is cultivating hope. Hope…

You gotta read this: The “Busy” Trap A few short excerpts: Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life…

I got mono and strep throat this month. I was pretty irritated. I needed to be working. I’d moved and taken a lot of time off to pack and unpack. I was ready to have my life back, but instead I was told to sleep. And it’s all I could do. A friend sent me…

It should go without saying that if I’m working for you, I’m on your team. PLAY ME! PUT ME IN! USE MY SKILLS! (Yes, yes. I know I’ve already written a whole post about being part of the team. But, seriously. There’s more to say.) The most exciting corporations and organizations I hear about treat employees…

Some days work looks like this. In casual conversation with friends, this question is asked a lot: “Are you working tomorrow?” It bristles me every time. I know that they are asking if I’m working the one job that I have set hours for.  I know, in that logical, believe-the-best-about-people part of my brain, that…

(Written in October 2011) Pat called me tonight. We’d met this morning so I could show him what I’d been working on. A typical Monday morning, he was getting slammed with phone calls and trying to set up meetings. It was not convenient timing for him, but we didn’t have much choice and wanted to…

I carry a full heart. I fall in love with people and places, traditions and stories. I have a loud, contagious [sometimes obnoxious] laugh, and I am moved to tears by both sad and beautiful things. I love words, and even more than words I love story. I knew I wanted to write in high…

Ok, so I said I have NO idea how I’ve made it the past year and a half as a freelancer. That’s not exactly true. I mean, I know a few things that have helped. 1. I have been willing to work really hard doing almost anything. I’ve worked six days a week (sometimes seven)…

When I tell people I’m a freelancer, their first response is always, “Oh! How’s that going?” It doesn’t matter how well I know them. Of course this question would be appropriate if you had some context for how huge of a shift this was from the work I’d done before. But it seems a little…