|
I am a pair of black pumps’ worst nightmare: wearing them to work and wearing them out at night leads to me wearing them down to nothingness. It is only a short matter of time until I completely ruin them. I’d like to ask my fellow heel-wearing friends: what brand do you turn to for your trusty black pumps? How long do these last? The following is a post from one of my favorite people I have met since moving to Texas. Joel is a great guy who is definitely going to great places. He recently accepted a position working in China, and I’ve asked him to contribute to Trina Left Iowa with his experiences. He is another Midwesterner [...] We all dread hearing, “Company X has been acquired by Company Y,” especially when Company X is your current employer. In my mind, the word “acquisition” conjures up images of a company’s logo on a billboard being dramatically taken down and a new one unveiled in its place, hordes of men in suits marching arrogantly down their newly acquired corridors and worker bees spending their entire days speculating on what this new deal means to their jobs. That quote and the last of those images have never been a reality for me until this morning. In between 6am alarm snoozes, I noticed some new text messages on my iPhone. They were tweets from my boss (yes, I have my boss’s tweets texted to my phone…) saying that our big company had been acquired by an even bigger company for X amount of dollars. Now, if that doesn’t make a person wake up, I don’t know what does!! I fired up my laptop and read the news via email from our CEO, various links on twitter and our official press releases. We have all known a bully, been a bully or been bullied at one point in our lives. Learning to deal with bullies is an unpleasant but essential part of growing up. As we enter the real world, we are hopeful this sort of traumatic treatment is over. Unfortunately, bullies are as alive in corporate America as they are on the grammar school playground, only now they come in the form of leaders and managers. There’s always a tough decision ahead when opportunity comes knocking: is this really the right thing for me to do at this time?? I’ve designed my twenties to be convenient for seizing opportunities, and it’s hard to know what the best move is when you’re completely open. That being the case, it’s best to look at opportunities from a realistic standpoint without letting fear of the details scare you away. Most people imagine the life of a travelling associate is a glamorous one. Although there are perks, it is pretty far from attractive a lot of the time. Dragging a controversially large carry-on suitcase around an airport at 5:30 on Monday mornings, sitting in an oddly-smelling rental car in Humidville, FL, eating overly-priced, mediocre room service by yourself, working long hours and spending several hours of your week sitting next to strangers on an MD-80 airplane is reality. Recently, a few posts on Brazen Careerist about work-life balance have caught my attention. Many people have strong opinions on the matter. Jake on Jobs is of the “work now, play later” mindset. He says, “…Work/Life balance is not something 20-somethings should be worried about. Instead, my suggestion is to work your butt off until you find a job that doesn’t feel like work.” Whereas Jenny Blake talks about looking at your overall quality of life, “…part of the reason I was feeling so tired was that I let work completely take over my life…the more I let things that energize me fall out of my routine, the more tired I become, and the less able I am to perform high-quality work.” My stance: I don’t think you can get to a place where it doesn’t feel like work unless you have a good quality of life. In other words, good personal life is complementary to good work life. Many of us millennials are focusing our twenties on our careers, and I am definitely one of them. I push myself at work and am looking to grow myself in my free time. I have designed my lifestyle to be conducive to work my buns off (I wish that were literal…): I live alone, I am far away from my family, I’m educated, I’m single, I have an open schedule and I dress for success every single day (I truly love the way I look in a suit). However, I’ve realized that focusing my twenties only on work is no way to live. This post is one I wrote for Leading Associates in April 2009. I’m proud of the posts I wrote for LA, and I wanted to include them here at Trina Left Iowa. I’m an emotional person, and I have accepted that. Perhaps I got it from my grandmother, who announces, “Here come the waterworks,” when [...] |
||
|
Copyright © 2010 Trina Left Iowa - All Rights Reserved |
||