work/life balance

The Five Best Things About Being a Working Mom

Jan Brown on January 17, 2012

work/life balance, working moms Comment

Jan Brown recently left corporate life to work as a life and career coach. She blogs for The Hired Guns about ways that working moms can achieve balance in their life, and also about methods that stay-at-home moms can use the reenter the workplace effectively. Before heading out on her own, Jan advised Fortune 500 companies on philanthropy.

If you are a working mom like me, you already know what’s hard about it. And pretty much every portrayal of a working mom on TV and in movies and magazines depicts the stressed-out, crazy nature of it.

I’m not saying it ain’t so. But just as there are so many things I love about being a parent, there are also many things I like — sometimes even love — about working outside the home. To kick off the New Year, I want to spend some time celebrating a few of my favorite things about working.

To Achieve Goals in 2012, You Need to Plan for the Obstacles, Too

Todd Henry on January 10, 2012

Accidental Creative, New Year's Resolutions, planning, work/liife balance Comment

Todd Henry runs The Accidental Creative, a speaking and consulting firm that helps teams do their best work consistently, not haphazardly. His book of the same name, about “how to be brilliant at a moment’s notice,” is out now.

It’s the time of year when many of us dream about what the new year holds in store. For many of us, this means setting goals and trying to decide which new ventures we’ll take on, which objectives we’ll set, and how we’ll engage life and work in the coming twelve months.

In other words, it’s a time of renewal. Renewal of expectations, renewal of action, renewal of hope. Hope is critical for the creative spirit. Without hope, we have no expectancy. Without expectancy, we have no reason to create.

Making Healthy New Year’s Resolutions That You Can Keep

Brooke Alpert on January 3, 2012

New Year's Resolutions, nutrition, work/life balance Comment

It’s that time of year again, when we start making promises to ourselves to live a better life. According to various polls throughout the years, 40 to 45% of adult Americans make resolutions each New Year’s. The top resolutions tend to be about weight loss, exercise regimes, and quitting smoking. But it’s hard to make these good intentions stick: a 2002 study in the Journal of Clinical Psychology found that less than half of those who resolved to do something were able to maintain their resolutions six months later.

Going by all the blogging, tweeting, and Facebooking of my colleagues and other health professionals, lots of them say that resolutions can set you up for failure and that you should focus on a healthy lifestyle year-round instead. While I don’t disagree with these sentiments, I’m still in favor of resolutions. I love the idea that we can get a fresh start each year — as long as it doesn’t set us up for failure or postpone what could we could have started today. Here are some of my B Nutritious tips for healthy resolutions:

Bullet Points: Happy 2012!

The Hired Guns on December 29, 2011

bullet points, innovation, productivity Comment

Michael Wolf believes that 2012 will be the year of artist-entrepreneurs, who can cut out the middleman through spunk, digital knowledge, and much easier ways of getting goods to consumers.
It’s too late to use this advice for Christmas, but it’s not too late to use it to make your resume more winning: “What Clever Advertising Can Teach Us About Buying Gifts.” As Jordan Weissmann writes, “The trick for a good gift-giver, or good marketer, is to think like the person they’re trying to connect with. In one of the experiments, subjects told to think about the big picture when putting together a resume abandoned the more is more approach, and instead focused on a few appealing accomplishments. It worked.”
New York’s American Museum of Natural History has begun a fully paid Master of Arts in Teaching program for aspiring science teachers. An open house for the program will be held on Saturday, 7 January.
If there was one previously admired work habit that took a beating in 2011, it was the energy-sapping habit of multitasking. But even if you’ve already stopped trying to do a dozen things at a time, there’s always room for improvement in other areas: “7 Things Highly Productive People Do“. [Inc.]

And from The Hired Guns blog:

New Year, Old You: Resisting Change, Innovation, and Self-Improvement

Todd Tarpley on December 28, 2011

how not to succeed, New Year's Resolutions Comment

For many people, the new year is a time to reflect. That’s because they still cling to the quaint belief that they can become happier and more productive. Enlightened managers like you know that self-reflection is like 10,000-mile maintenance: if the wheels haven’t come off yet, just keep driving.

Here are five ways to avoid thinking too much about the future, so that you can concentrate on repeating the same mistakes year after year:

1. Don’t make a plan for what you’d like to be doing in one, five, and ten years. Those things are so embarrassing to look at later on, when you’ve failed miserably. Better to not even think about it. Then, ten years from now when you’re selling batteries at Radio Shack, you can claim success and say, “Yeah, I planned it this way.”

How Not to Succeed: Making a Lasting Impression at Your Holiday Party

Todd Tarpley on December 7, 2011

holiday parties, how not to succeed, work/life balance Comment

You’ve worked hard all year. Now it’s your time to make a total ass of yourself in front of everyone who could possibly be beneficial to your career. So relax and let your true personality shine. Here are some tips to make the most of the situation:

Working Moms — How Do You Handle the Guilt?

Jan Brown on December 5, 2011

work/life balance, working moms Comment

We’d like to welcome to the blog Jan Brown, a life and career coach who will be blogging for us about working mothers and the unique challenges they sometimes face. As she does in her workshops and coaching sessions, she’ll cover ways that working moms can make their lives more fulfilling and a lot less stressful; she’ll also be providing guidance for stay-at-home moms who are thinking about going back to working outside the home. Before heading out on her own, Jan served as a consultant for Fortune 500 companies, advising them on their philanthropic giving.

I have a lot to say about guilt this week — recently, my six-year-old daughter declared that she “wished there were no babysitters. Only mommies and daddies to take care of their kids.” This was after I explained that she was about to start swimming lessons (yay!) and that her after-school babysitter would be taking her instead of me (boo!).

I am no stranger to guilt. There was a period from when my daughter was 1 ½ to 2 ½ when I swear every single morning when I left for work, she would literally cling to me — my leg, torso, bag, whatever she could reach — and sob “Mommy don’t go!!!! Staaaayy with me.” Our nanny would have to physically remove her from me. I would then cheerfully say goodbye and head to the subway platform to cry. Every. Single. Morning. It was rough. So what to do about guilt?

Stop Worrying: Why “Holiday Weight Gain” Is (Mostly) a Myth

Brooke Alpert on November 17, 2011

diet, holiday parties, nutrition Comment

Every year around this time, my clients start stressing about the holidays and the weight gain that supposedly always happens. People always quote the statistic that the average American inevitably gains at least five pounds during the holiday season, but I have some good news here folks, it hasn’t been proven.

There have only been a few studies that even examine holiday weight gain in Americans. The most well-known one, which was published in The New England Journal of Medicine, found that most people only gained a single pound during the holiday season. One pound, not so bad, right? The problem with this single pound is that the study also found that this weight gain wasn’t corrected for afterwards, leading to adults gaining at least one pound each year. After 10 years, that weight is more than just a little issue.

Bullet Points: When Twitter’s More Trouble Than It’s Worth

The Hired Guns on November 16, 2011

bullet points, Twitter Comment

“[My] habit started to feel less like a rush and more like a burden. Instead of tweeting to reflect on my life, tweeting had become my life. I began to think seriously about giving it up.”
Could a company force a departing employee to hand over the personal Twitter account he used on the job? Probably not, but it’s a grey area….
A survey of 72,000 people, conducted by TNS Digital Life, found that consumers’ feelings about interacting with company brands on social networks varied widely by country. Those in developed markets, including North America and Europe, had the most “resistance to both buying and engaging with brands” on Twitter, Facebook, and the like. You can find out more tidbits from the survey in The Next Web and in the teaser video below.

In the News: Top Gun Allison Hemming Talks About YouTube’s “Joey Quits”

The Hired Guns on October 25, 2011

Joey DeFrancesco, quitting, unemployment, work/life balance Comment

Yesterday Top Gun Allison Hemming spoke to CNN.com about employees announcing that they are quitting in increasingly creative, if not downright showoffy, ways.

The splashiest recent example is Joey DeFrancesco. The 24-year-old’s video of himself quitting his hotel job with the noisy help of his bandmates in the What Cheer? Brigade, a hipster brass band, got nearly 2.5 million views after it was uploaded to YouTube on 12 October.

As Allison said to CNN, “Joey is the hero of all downtrodden workers because he is the embodiment of ‘take this job and shove it.’ He’s living out the fantasies of countless workers who also hate their bosses.”

But since the internet is forever, does this mean that Joey risks being a victim of unemployment for the rest of his life? Find out what Allison and other experts had to say about his chances:
‘Joey’ becomes recession hero after using marching band to quit job

And if you’re contemplating having What Cheer? brighten up your workplace, here’s a taste:

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