Nothing particularly amazing happened over this past holiday weekend - I went home, finally got to celebrate Mother's Day with my mom, witnessed a very quiet house without our dog Ginger and consoled a mourning Sam, spent time with friends and family, and just tried to soak up as much Austin as I could before I had to leave. I love Austin.
However, this time in Austin did make me wake up to the fact that I will need to start making some important decisions about my future and where I want life to take me (not that you have much of a say in where life takes you sometimes...I'm just saying).
I have almost been in the real world for one year and what they say is true: it's hard. I've spent time away from my family for the first time, I'm working at my first full-time job, and I'm in a new city for the first time in my life. I didn't expect it to be easy but I didn't know what to expect as far as what would be hard and how I would deal with it. Throughout the process, I've obviously started learning some things about myself:
1) I do want to spend some time away from my family. As much as I love them and I'm not saying that I can't wait to be away from them, I feel like it's a good thing to not be so accessible to them and them to me. Dallas is proving to be not far enough as it's still very easy for them to say, "oh just come home for the weekend." Eight hours of driving later, I have spent the weekend away from doing things with the new people that I have met here in Dallas, away from getting things done at my apartment, and wondering when my family will make the trek to see me instead. They've even joked that if I was somewhere more desirable they would come visit me, which really doesn't make me feel all that good.
This brings us to our second point...
2) My first job decision was very planned - where I wanted to be and what I wanted to be doing. The job part of that was not wanting some sort of hybrid planning position where I wouldn't get to be a pure planner. I accomplished this mission. The other part of that was the city. I knew I didn't want to be too far away from my family because I wasn't sure how I would handle it. That may sound defeatist but I was trying to be realistic and do what made sense for me. The urge to go far far away had not really struck me and even though some cities seemed "cool" I didn't know how living there would actually be. Both of those pieces landed me in a great job that gave me wonderful introductory learning as a planner in a city that was not too far away from home. Sounds pretty regular now.
As I near my year mark at my job, the end of my lease at my apartment, and the completion of one year out in the real world, I'm already getting the itch to look at my options.
For one, my next job choice will be based on the job and a city that I want to live in. And I will want to live in this city because of its personality, not due to the proximity to my family. Let's face it, Dallas doesn't inspire me. I know that any city I live in will have to hold its weight against Austin and I consider that to be a tall order. How can I be inspiring at work if my surroundings don't inspire me to interact with it more? And part of me knows that this is not entirely Dallas' fault...I know that I could have made more of an effort to do things and I'm sure that part of me just didn't want to like Dallas in the first place. I was certainly told by many that Dallas sucked and even though in the beginning I tried not to pay attention to that, I fed into that sentiment quickly.
Another thing is, I am starting to feel that call to move somewhere completely different. Part of me just wants to plunge into the deep end to just do it. A lot of it would be the experience, but part of me knows that I need to make a more measured decision than that. It's still obviously about the job opportunities I can find, but I just need the city to be a part of it. If I'm going to be away from all of my family and friends, then I need something else to hold on to.
3) I do love Austin. That's not going to change because it's my hometown, I grew up there, plus I went to college there and had a wide range of experiences as well as meeting some of the greatest people I know. No one can take that away from me.
I've always thought that I would go away for a while and then circle back around to be closer to my family. I feel like someday I will move back to Austin. But how do I know that Austin is the best place for me? How do I know that I won't love some other place equally or for different kinds of reasons that would make me want to settle there, start a family, or pursue other career options?
I guess it's as grandiose as saying there's a whole wide world out there that I want to see and experience, but sometimes I'm afraid. I don't want to feel like I'll fail...I guess that brings me to my next point.
4) I feel like I have experienced failure here...and I feel like that is a really good thing for me personally. I know that sounds strange. And they're not big failures by any means. It's also not that I don't think I've experienced little failures like this before. But I guess I feel that it's different now in that this time the failures are really only getting dealt with by me. Do I ask my friends, coworkers, and family for advice? Of course. But I'm starting to realize that the decisions made on these things are more than ever mine and mine alone. I take other's opinions and weigh them carefully, but my decisions have either made me succeed or have made me stumble a bit. It's fairly cliche to say that this has made me a stronger person, but I will say that and add to it that I am understanding how I function a little better. I still think I have a lot to learn about myself, actually I don't think the learning will ever stop, but I'm so glad that it's happening.
These failures are harder to deal with for me in that they aren't just a poor grade or a conflict with a classmate that I really never had to resolve because the project was over. The real world makes everything interconnected and makes those little failures matter a lot more. If I have a hard day at work, it affects my home life. If things seem unorganized and frazzled at home, that translates to my job. It's no longer the division of school and summer, or even of school and the real world. Now it's just continuous - the real world and nothing comes after that. There is no definite timeline or boundaries. It just is what it is.
So I've learned that these failures, and being scared, and crying, and having to push myself in new ways to master things that I already thought I had mastered are all just ways of getting to know myself better and clearly defining the person that I am and who I want to be.
5) Real life stinks sometimes. ;) Why is it challenging me so and why do I have to fail in order to learn? And the answer that keeps coming back to me from everyone is...
If it wasn't hard it wouldn't be worth it.
I feel late in developing this, my full person, but I'm glad that I'm getting here, even if I have to go through an obstacle course like this.
There are many many more things that I have learned about myself through this experience but I want to keep it simple.
There's a lot to think about and some decisions need to be made about my future. I'm kind of looking forward to the challenge.
Monday, May 26, 2008
Literally Dancing 'Til Your Shoes Melt
I love a man that can dance...but I would be dancing with him. ;)
Thursday, May 22, 2008
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
2 Weeks Of Greatness
Wow, I haven't updated in quite a bit...but for good reason.
I feel a shift at work and I'm pushing for it. More responsibility - check, new role - getting there, redefining how I get work - it's all kind of moving around.
I've wanted this for a while on my own account but I didn't think much about getting in to this role simply by helping one of the other planners out. So there was too much work on one of our clients going down all at once - it's called '09 Planning - and I was in the right place, asking for the right things, at the right time.
Before I knew it, an entire brand was handed over to me, research on another brand was conducted, and I was full-on planner in an instant. I reviewed client direction, did some searching on the target, and wrote a brief. That in itself was wonderful and I was appreciative of the experience. My brief was received very well as written, and only minor adjustments were made before I got to brief creatives.
Okay, so my first brief writing experiences weren't great. I was very disappointed but what could I do? The time was over and had left the building. But all of the sudden I got to redeem my "first" experiences by doing a creative briefing all on my own. Now that was a first that went very well and renewed my faith in my abilities as a planner. I had a great first briefing experience! Woo!
So I got to write a whole brief, do a briefing - wow, thank you! Wait, there's more??
Planning for the next year is like a sped-up version of what we do all year long. It goes from client briefing, to research on the target and creative brief, then the briefing, creative development and internal review, and a final presentation deck. But they're big, broad overarching communications platforms that will direct the work done for next year. Oh, did I mention this all occurs within about a 2-week period? Yeah, crazy!
So my last two weeks have been packed solid with meetings, brainstorms, conference calls, researching, idea formation, strategic feedback, and deck writing. I have not stopped since 3 Friday's ago when I was sitting in a fellow planner's office talking about wanting more responsibility and more opportunities to do plannerly work.
And here I am on the other side just so thankful that I got the opportunity to work on such a cool project. I learned so much about what I should do at certain times in the process as a planner, but also got to put that learning to the test as I was at that instant also supposed to do what I was learning.
The other great thing about this whole experience was that I was working for a team that LOVES having a planner. And they were extra excited because they got the help of TWO planners during this process. They wanted me to be involved, they invited me to every meeting, they valued my feedback and considered it a very important part of what we were doing. I was asked questions, people looked to me for the important solutions, and I became a planner.
I know I talk a lot about not quite feeling like a planner, having moments where I kinda feel like a planner, and I've been told that I am a planner, but I needed to see it to believe it and I also needed to be able to live it. And I was. :) So it's official - I'm a planner.
Going forward, I will be this same planner. My tasks will change but I should come at it with that same confidence every time. That's part of what I was lacking.
I will stress the importance of becoming more involved and I intend on that happening.
It's a new day, the emergence of a new role, and I'm very excited about the possibilities.
I feel a shift at work and I'm pushing for it. More responsibility - check, new role - getting there, redefining how I get work - it's all kind of moving around.
I've wanted this for a while on my own account but I didn't think much about getting in to this role simply by helping one of the other planners out. So there was too much work on one of our clients going down all at once - it's called '09 Planning - and I was in the right place, asking for the right things, at the right time.
Before I knew it, an entire brand was handed over to me, research on another brand was conducted, and I was full-on planner in an instant. I reviewed client direction, did some searching on the target, and wrote a brief. That in itself was wonderful and I was appreciative of the experience. My brief was received very well as written, and only minor adjustments were made before I got to brief creatives.
Okay, so my first brief writing experiences weren't great. I was very disappointed but what could I do? The time was over and had left the building. But all of the sudden I got to redeem my "first" experiences by doing a creative briefing all on my own. Now that was a first that went very well and renewed my faith in my abilities as a planner. I had a great first briefing experience! Woo!
So I got to write a whole brief, do a briefing - wow, thank you! Wait, there's more??
Planning for the next year is like a sped-up version of what we do all year long. It goes from client briefing, to research on the target and creative brief, then the briefing, creative development and internal review, and a final presentation deck. But they're big, broad overarching communications platforms that will direct the work done for next year. Oh, did I mention this all occurs within about a 2-week period? Yeah, crazy!
So my last two weeks have been packed solid with meetings, brainstorms, conference calls, researching, idea formation, strategic feedback, and deck writing. I have not stopped since 3 Friday's ago when I was sitting in a fellow planner's office talking about wanting more responsibility and more opportunities to do plannerly work.
And here I am on the other side just so thankful that I got the opportunity to work on such a cool project. I learned so much about what I should do at certain times in the process as a planner, but also got to put that learning to the test as I was at that instant also supposed to do what I was learning.
The other great thing about this whole experience was that I was working for a team that LOVES having a planner. And they were extra excited because they got the help of TWO planners during this process. They wanted me to be involved, they invited me to every meeting, they valued my feedback and considered it a very important part of what we were doing. I was asked questions, people looked to me for the important solutions, and I became a planner.
I know I talk a lot about not quite feeling like a planner, having moments where I kinda feel like a planner, and I've been told that I am a planner, but I needed to see it to believe it and I also needed to be able to live it. And I was. :) So it's official - I'm a planner.
Going forward, I will be this same planner. My tasks will change but I should come at it with that same confidence every time. That's part of what I was lacking.
I will stress the importance of becoming more involved and I intend on that happening.
It's a new day, the emergence of a new role, and I'm very excited about the possibilities.
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
My First Puppy
A very sad phone call from my mom on this night...
Our first family dog, Ginger, died today. :(
She was a beautiful dog.
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
Recruiter
Ahh, one last little tidbit I forgot to mention...
I got my first ever message from a recruiter today. She's based out of NY and found my information on LinkedIn.
It's crazy because it makes me think back to my first couple of months when my coworkers told me they get a couple of messages per day. It's just kinda weird, but slightly amusing. On the other hand, it gets so busy that having that many people call and sifting through those messages could get annoying.
*I count that as another point in time I felt like a real live planner. :p
I got my first ever message from a recruiter today. She's based out of NY and found my information on LinkedIn.
It's crazy because it makes me think back to my first couple of months when my coworkers told me they get a couple of messages per day. It's just kinda weird, but slightly amusing. On the other hand, it gets so busy that having that many people call and sifting through those messages could get annoying.
*I count that as another point in time I felt like a real live planner. :p
Briefing
I meant to blog so much more tonight, but that's how it goes - I just wanted to make sure to touch on a few things.
So I got sick last week after a difficult week at work. Some nasty bug has been floating around our office and I picked it up big time. I was out for three days which is very uncommon of me and I still seem to be carrying something around in the back of my throat - yuck. Not only did it make me miss out on some focus groups one day, but it messed up a trip to Austin that was planned for more research. I really wanted to go because I haven't seen in-homes done up close and personal, and that's what I missed out on. Besides, it's my hometown so I had set up to see several friends and stay the weekend to see my family. I was so excited and that all just fell apart when I got sick. :(
The hard week at work was due to a lot of things, and it's hard to elaborate. It's more on the personal side of things and so is hard to talk about. I don't think I always paint the most honest picture of work here in my blog because I try to talk about specific things I did and usually it's something I was really excited to be able to do. But there are a lot of things at work I do that aren't as glamorous - not a surprise - and I just don't have a lot to write about. Or if it's something really hard or upsetting, I don't feel like taking more time to dwell over it and just bitch. Then there are things at work that are bad but I haven't figured out that balance of writing about my life, writing about work, and sharing things for all to see. It's still my job and I may affect people that I work with in my writing so I want to be sensitive to that. Just because it's a frustration of mine doesn't mean I should hurt others by being brutally honest. It's just something to keep in mind - the work is certainly not always fresh, new, and exciting.
I will say that the difficult week was ended on a particularly bad note when a bit of miscommunication made things crazy with my team again. It was somewhat similar to my frustrations from my first brief writing, and I felt it was adding on a layer of not good to what I had experienced before. Though I got my supervisor involved, she really doesn't know the whole story and so it ended up not being that helpful. Let's just say that absolute clear communication is needed from everyone so that responsibilities, limitations, and deadlines are all put on the table. A lot of the time I feel like I am reaching out enough and it ends up that there are questions I didn't ask which really would have helped. Then again, I can't anticipate every waking need or desire - I need to be met in the middle.
Grueling week, week of sickness...when I did get back to work, I needed to catch up with everyone and ended talking my voice down to a grating scraggle. It still has a hint of that which is frustrating. Frustrating - that's the word that pretty much sums up a lot of my feelings about several things going on right now and for the past several weeks.
What was a refreshing spot in all of this was last weekend (in between the hard week and the being sick week) - I had one lovely day before I fell to my sick bed. I started with a little Mary Kay action with friends from work, went to the Dallas zoo, went out with friends to a great Mexican food place Chuy's (a place I know from Austin, and apparently there's just one in Dallas), relaxed, and capped off the day with meeting my cousin at a movie. That was great times and definitely something I needed. Unfortunately, my throat had hurt since the morning and decided to turn into full blown blah by the next day.
Okay, well I guess I'm gonna go ahead and write everything out though it's late. Another frustration - not feeling like I'm getting enough done in my evenings and staying up too late.
Alright, this week meant new beginnings. My department moved into their new offices last week and I finally followed by moving away from my first real world cube home...to my second real world cube home. ;) It has been called Strategy Island, the name I like the most thus far, because it's just two cubes together surrounded by window offices. Other cubes are further away. I think I have a temporary neighbor next door but it doesn't really look like anyone's in there. That is, until we bring on a new junior which we're in the process of doing now. So it's a bit isolated in one respect but it is right next to a kitchen area so I'm kind of in the middle of everything at the same time. The reason we moved was to be with the creatives. I think that's a great idea and I like being closer to them, so I just need to settle down into my new place...and decorate a bit more so it's not so gloomy. I liked my old cube so it will be missed.
On to this week, there has been a new light. One of the planners pulled me onto a fast-moving, multidimensional project on one of our brands. Several products are planning for 2009 so it's a renewal of everything - objectives, briefs, creative ideas. On top of that, our new agency mission is coming on strong so that needs to be incorporated into everything. (As a side note, I have a new project that is solely for our agency mission and it has just bubbled up a little but will need some attention - ohhh, tomorrow! Lots going on.) So one of the planners, being stretched fairly thin on everything, brought me on to this project in a big way. He just up and handed over a whole product and I spent time (quickly!) getting acquainted with the target, wrote a creative brief, and (tadah!!) had my first BRIEFING today!! Exciting.
I was a bit nervous, and it was in and amongst a lot of other things going on - including a fun and one-day-late Cinco de Mayo festival, but I think that I spoke in an honest, clear, and knowledgeable way about my product. Oh listen to me - MY product. But it was a proud moment and one of those gleaming moments where I felt like a planner for a minute.
Those moments - feeling like a planner - are more important than ever to me right now. I want to do much much more that leads me toward feeling like a real planner. And soon, I want to BE a real planner. This is a time in my career where I'm feeling a bit of an angsty teenage struggle to be more, do more, learn more, and not necessarily be what I have been thus far to the agency. The reason there is friction is obvious - I'm wanting and acting on moving forward and the jobs I get don't always lend to that. The more cool stuff I get to work on gets challenged by some of the more basic things that I routinely need to get done. It's a balancing act that I haven't quite figured out.
But in the meantime, I am going to latch onto my assignment and go at it with full force. If it is one of the few opportunities I will get to show what I'm made of, I really want to lay it all out there on the table. It's that whole reaching straight into my chest, removing my heart, and laying it on the table. People can definitely take advantage of that and try to smash my little heart, or they can have a little respect for the fact that I'm crazy enough to do that.
We'll see what happens. ;)
So I got sick last week after a difficult week at work. Some nasty bug has been floating around our office and I picked it up big time. I was out for three days which is very uncommon of me and I still seem to be carrying something around in the back of my throat - yuck. Not only did it make me miss out on some focus groups one day, but it messed up a trip to Austin that was planned for more research. I really wanted to go because I haven't seen in-homes done up close and personal, and that's what I missed out on. Besides, it's my hometown so I had set up to see several friends and stay the weekend to see my family. I was so excited and that all just fell apart when I got sick. :(
The hard week at work was due to a lot of things, and it's hard to elaborate. It's more on the personal side of things and so is hard to talk about. I don't think I always paint the most honest picture of work here in my blog because I try to talk about specific things I did and usually it's something I was really excited to be able to do. But there are a lot of things at work I do that aren't as glamorous - not a surprise - and I just don't have a lot to write about. Or if it's something really hard or upsetting, I don't feel like taking more time to dwell over it and just bitch. Then there are things at work that are bad but I haven't figured out that balance of writing about my life, writing about work, and sharing things for all to see. It's still my job and I may affect people that I work with in my writing so I want to be sensitive to that. Just because it's a frustration of mine doesn't mean I should hurt others by being brutally honest. It's just something to keep in mind - the work is certainly not always fresh, new, and exciting.
I will say that the difficult week was ended on a particularly bad note when a bit of miscommunication made things crazy with my team again. It was somewhat similar to my frustrations from my first brief writing, and I felt it was adding on a layer of not good to what I had experienced before. Though I got my supervisor involved, she really doesn't know the whole story and so it ended up not being that helpful. Let's just say that absolute clear communication is needed from everyone so that responsibilities, limitations, and deadlines are all put on the table. A lot of the time I feel like I am reaching out enough and it ends up that there are questions I didn't ask which really would have helped. Then again, I can't anticipate every waking need or desire - I need to be met in the middle.
Grueling week, week of sickness...when I did get back to work, I needed to catch up with everyone and ended talking my voice down to a grating scraggle. It still has a hint of that which is frustrating. Frustrating - that's the word that pretty much sums up a lot of my feelings about several things going on right now and for the past several weeks.
What was a refreshing spot in all of this was last weekend (in between the hard week and the being sick week) - I had one lovely day before I fell to my sick bed. I started with a little Mary Kay action with friends from work, went to the Dallas zoo, went out with friends to a great Mexican food place Chuy's (a place I know from Austin, and apparently there's just one in Dallas), relaxed, and capped off the day with meeting my cousin at a movie. That was great times and definitely something I needed. Unfortunately, my throat had hurt since the morning and decided to turn into full blown blah by the next day.
Okay, well I guess I'm gonna go ahead and write everything out though it's late. Another frustration - not feeling like I'm getting enough done in my evenings and staying up too late.
Alright, this week meant new beginnings. My department moved into their new offices last week and I finally followed by moving away from my first real world cube home...to my second real world cube home. ;) It has been called Strategy Island, the name I like the most thus far, because it's just two cubes together surrounded by window offices. Other cubes are further away. I think I have a temporary neighbor next door but it doesn't really look like anyone's in there. That is, until we bring on a new junior which we're in the process of doing now. So it's a bit isolated in one respect but it is right next to a kitchen area so I'm kind of in the middle of everything at the same time. The reason we moved was to be with the creatives. I think that's a great idea and I like being closer to them, so I just need to settle down into my new place...and decorate a bit more so it's not so gloomy. I liked my old cube so it will be missed.
On to this week, there has been a new light. One of the planners pulled me onto a fast-moving, multidimensional project on one of our brands. Several products are planning for 2009 so it's a renewal of everything - objectives, briefs, creative ideas. On top of that, our new agency mission is coming on strong so that needs to be incorporated into everything. (As a side note, I have a new project that is solely for our agency mission and it has just bubbled up a little but will need some attention - ohhh, tomorrow! Lots going on.) So one of the planners, being stretched fairly thin on everything, brought me on to this project in a big way. He just up and handed over a whole product and I spent time (quickly!) getting acquainted with the target, wrote a creative brief, and (tadah!!) had my first BRIEFING today!! Exciting.
I was a bit nervous, and it was in and amongst a lot of other things going on - including a fun and one-day-late Cinco de Mayo festival, but I think that I spoke in an honest, clear, and knowledgeable way about my product. Oh listen to me - MY product. But it was a proud moment and one of those gleaming moments where I felt like a planner for a minute.
Those moments - feeling like a planner - are more important than ever to me right now. I want to do much much more that leads me toward feeling like a real planner. And soon, I want to BE a real planner. This is a time in my career where I'm feeling a bit of an angsty teenage struggle to be more, do more, learn more, and not necessarily be what I have been thus far to the agency. The reason there is friction is obvious - I'm wanting and acting on moving forward and the jobs I get don't always lend to that. The more cool stuff I get to work on gets challenged by some of the more basic things that I routinely need to get done. It's a balancing act that I haven't quite figured out.
But in the meantime, I am going to latch onto my assignment and go at it with full force. If it is one of the few opportunities I will get to show what I'm made of, I really want to lay it all out there on the table. It's that whole reaching straight into my chest, removing my heart, and laying it on the table. People can definitely take advantage of that and try to smash my little heart, or they can have a little respect for the fact that I'm crazy enough to do that.
We'll see what happens. ;)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)