đ I am not afraid
Ep 45: Making time for professional development, confidence men, and the power of naming your fears.
A Tip for the Modern Worker
Donât cram for your professional development. You set a goal for the year to learn some new things, right? Fast-forward to November and you may find youâve been âall work and no learnâ and canât show any progress. Create a professional development schedule for yourself. Set aside recurring time on your calendar to keep yourself accountable. This simple act should help you stay on track and make incremental progress.
This tip is one of 365 in my Handbook for the Modern Worker. Iâm seasonally good at this, allocating time to log into LinkedIn Learning and make progress on a course. When work gets really busy this can fall by the wayside, but thatâs to my own detriment. Learning can be a powerful tool for leveling up at work. Iâve seldom taken a course I wasnât able to immediately apply on the job.
#365DayDraw
I drew this and wrote the accompanying annotation as part of my #365DayDraw project 7 years ago today.
Of course I made my bed, just in my own special way. Put away my clothes, too.
Hey, Xander: I drew this one for you when you said with such confidence that youâd made your bed and this is what it looked like. Life inspires art! Your bedmaking skills have improved over the last 7 years.
Commentary
"Named must your fear be before banish it you can." â Yoda
Do you know who that is? Well, yeah, itâs a snake, but which one? I was quick to take this photo when I spotted this little guy in the rocks next to our front door during a recent sprint of landscaping. When I got close enough, it slithered under the shady recesses of our front porch steps. Iâd seen a similar snake in our front grove of trees and wondered if it was the same.
Snakes situationally give us the heebie-jeebies. The ones at the zoo, behind glass, are cute and non-threatening. Put one in the middle of the trail during a hike or a run and my heart rate will skyrocket, and some in my family will jump and scream. Itâs all rather dramatic and hilarious given the massive size difference between serpentes and homo sapiens.
I shared this news with my family and they were immediately grossed out by the prospect of a snake living under our porch. The next time we were out, he was curled up in the shade of a nearby barberry bush. The next time we saw him he was nestled between the cool concrete foundation and some irrigation pipe for the aforementioned landscaping. He wasnât hurting anyone and we all admitted that he was kind of cool, especially given the nearby molted skin and taking the chance to learn about how, when, and why snakes shed their skin.
We took to calling him Snaky. Weâre not very creative at naming things (we named our Tesla Tessie), but an interesting thing happened when we named him. We started actively looking for him, standing on the porch and looking left and right, hopeful to catch a glimpse. It reminded me of the science-based act of naming your fear to conquer it. Was it the moniker or was it appreciating another one of this worldâs creatures struggling to survive, as we all are? Whatever it is, we now have something to watch out for when we come and go, and itâs not for fear. Itâs because weâd love to give Snaky a friendly hello, just to say âWe see you, and weâre okay with that.â
Miscellanea
Well, we finally finished Succession. Hey, weâre slow. But what a series. And the soundtracks are so fabulous I was NOT surprised to see them all in Apple Music.
You know that feeling when you rearranged your room as a kid? Just rotating the bed, switching up what was on a shelf, or simply cleaning gave the space a new lease on life. As adults, weâre getting the same thrill as we switch up other rooms in the house. This oneâs from the top of our stairs, just outside my office. The couches are decades old at this point but we still love them. Itâs a very cozy place to hang out and talk, and all it took was a little reorganization.