It amazes me how often leaders – even longtime, experienced leaders – just totally miss the boat on the easiest employee engagement opportunities.  When employee engagement survey scores come back with opportunities listed, and then leaders willfully ignore the easy ways to make the connection that is desired, it speaks volumes to their lack of \”want to\” on the subject.

The organization I work for offers an online recognition program where all employees can recognize each other with cards and even with points that have dollar values associated with them.  Each year on an employee\’s anniversary with the company, an e-card becomes available to be shared around via email and signed with pictures and comments, offering congratulations and sometimes a hearty chuckle over a memory.  It is a great way to take a few minutes out of the day to connect with someone and these experiences we share together over the course of 40+ hours every week.

One of these emails was recently sent to a leader and I overheard this person remark, \”I never sign these cards.  I just delete them.\” 

Please don\’t cry about your employee engagement scores being low when you cannot be bothered to spend less than five minutes recognizing someone\’s commitment to this organization. 

Employee engagement goes beyond just making someone feel good in a random moment.  Employee engagement is an ongoing interaction between leaders and employees that results in an increased level of trust, an expression of desired values and behavior, and a shared commitment to creating an environment that inspires each person to bring their best work to the table each day.

It is not a false, \”omg I just love working with you!\”  It\’s a respect for that person as an individual, a sincere passion to work toward a goal together, to be successful individually and as part of an organization.

Those little moments where we can recognize someone\’s commitment to our teams or organizations take another small step forward in establishing that bond of trust and respect.  They show we are paying attention, that we see the effort and we appreciate it.  It opens the door for additional dialogue and team building. 

I question how someone could call themselves a leader and then so casually dismiss those opportunities.  That is not a leader.  That is someone who fundamentally does not understand the value of people.  Don\’t \”honey, sweetie, darling\” me while failing to see my true worth.

As I write this, I am bogged down between learning some new job functions and being in school full time and absorbed in projects.  If I think too hard about it, I feel overwhelmed and sad.  The busier I become in my life, the more I realize the importance of devoting time for myself, my health and my hobbies.  Without that balance, not only do I become less productive but life just sucks in general.

Between now and July, there will not be a single evening or weekend where I couldn\’t always be doing something \”more important.\”  If I am reading a book or watching TV, I could always think to myself, \”I really should be working on projects.\”  It is exactly because of this that I am not missing my workouts or my chances to goof around!

In the last few weeks, I have committed even more time to exercise, and have my weight bench set up in the garage and my husband is my designated spotter when the bar starts getting loaded up with weight.  When I am squatting, I am not thinking of my projects but rather of my screaming glutes, and that is exactly the sort of distraction I need most at times like this.

I read a quote that says, \”Do something every day that scares you.\”  I especially like this, and it is very challenging to even wrap your head around.  But when I am forcing my focus onto something that frightens me a little bit, the part of my head that is overwhelmed with working and school projects gets a much-needed break.  I am trying to think of things that intimidate me a little and try them, especially in these next weeks as I bear the weight of my obligations.

A friend of mine commented to me today via email, \”I don\’t know how you manage your workload.\”  However, there is a fact that is true for me and has always been true and I first realized it in high school, and that is this: the more I do, the more I can and want to do.  I can keep a fast pace almost indefinitely.  It is when life gets slow and laggy that I dread taking on new things. 

I think I find the challenge of a busy schedule exhilarating.  It makes me appreciate my friends and my family and my hobbies even more.  I sleep well at night and wake up each morning to a day that I know will be a lot of things, but boring isn\’t one of them.  It requires a lot of self-discipline, a skill I have been sharpening since I was homeschooled as a child, but it also affords me a level of energy and accomplishment. 

So tonight after a day of work and homework and thinking about tedious things, I am going to enjoy my husband\’s delicious leftovers, have my weekly \”friend date\” with a high school friend and play Canasta online, enjoy a challenging workout and a snack, and go to bed accomplished and content, and wake up refreshed and ready to do this all over again tomorrow.

I read something the other day that annoyed me.  I don\’t typically like to use this space as a place to vent about things I dislike, but this really struck a chord with me.  It was a story that showed up in my Google cards when I was reading the news.  I wish I hadn\’t clicked into the story at all.

It was this woman who had gone viral for sharing a nasty tweet about her ex-husband.  I refuse to share the story or too much detail, but it was one of those things that I alluded to recently in my post about women who say they are empowered but act very differently.  She made a tweet that said something to the effect of having moved on and all the pounds she\’d shed were him.

Initially, I didn\’t think much of her tweet.  People do that sort of passive-aggressive stuff all the time.  What really struck me was a woman who commented on it to say something like, \”You are such an inspiration when I see how far you\’ve come!\”

An inspiration?  How far she\’s come?  She is ranting and venting on the internet to shame someone she used to love.  She clearly hasn\’t come very far at all, because instead of making a positive post about herself, she makes a negative one about someone else.

And it\’s so troubling to me that other people find this inspirational!

I\’ve discussed before the merit of the saying \”the best revenge is living well.\”  While I can argue the value of that, there is a whole lot more to say about someone who moves on to live well and move forward, than there is about something who validates themselves by tearing someone else down.

If your value comes only from taking someone else down, it is a false value.  Because once that person is removed far enough from you that you cannot tear them down, you are left with only who you really are.

Why do people idolize people who shame others, seek revenge and tear others down?  There are so many great stories about forgiveness, about people moving on from bad situations to better themselves and to help others.  Those are the stories I find inspirational.

This lady who shamed her ex-husband on Twitter, I feel sorry for her.  I feel even more sorry for the people who rally to this false girl power, chanting \”you\’ve come so far.\”  These women wear a mask of self-worth to hide their deep insecurities.

I\’ve always bristled at being underestimated, which I frequently am.  I have to purposely focus on not being resentful when being second-guessed or passed over.  When I was younger, it created within me a belief that I needed to prove myself constantly.  My competitive nature insists on being a part of the contest, and being underestimated annoyed me to the point that it would alter my behavior.

I have recently learned different stories of people who had the opposite problem, they were overestimated.  The potential that people saw in them was like a hologram, more of an image than a thing of substance.  Whether it has been a question of their intelligence or talent, others saw in them a great success only to be disappointed when those prospects turned out to be false.  Contemplating this, it sounds like a nightmare.

I would be happier if people didn\’t make assumptions at all, but that isn\’t human nature.  It is a constant battle to fight against a world that imposes their perceptions on you.  I am seen as silly and goofy, overly cheerful perhaps, a troublemaker or prankster, and often mistaken as being much young than I am, and it\’s not that any of these things are not true.  The mistake lies in people thinking these traits preclude anything from existing beyond that.

Impressions are so subjective and a part of me wishes I could be judged based solely on my numbers.  You want to look at my GPA, my credit score, my IQ, my tenure, my body fat percentage, my minute per mile, or any other quantifiable measure, I am happy to let you make your assessment of me based on those numbers, good or bad.  To quote my least favorite and most overused idiom, it is what it is.

Instead, all my life, I have been perceived much differently than I am.  I am annoyed when people are surprised when I do something well, and I wonder what it is about me that makes them doubt.

Especially because I am so competitive and have, since I was a little girl, invested whatever effort necessary to compete with the very best around me, I find it egregious to be overlooked as a contender.  I can recall moments in my life, such as with that statistics professor in college who said it was unbelievable that someone like me could be so good, where I felt a fury burn within me at being underestimated.  Someone like me?  What does that mean?  Because I don\’t mope around with a serious expression or complain about the workload, does this mean I must be flakey or ditzy?  Is that not very lazy stereotyping?

But I have learned over time that it is my secret weapon. While it riles me to have anyone look at me as non-threatening (especially intellectually), there is a joy that builds within me when I see the look on someone\’s face when they realize they have misjudged me.  I love it when, without any effort, I can floor someone who didn\’t believe in me.  That is my vindication.

I may be the dark horse no one will bet on (and I would bet most people do not know where the phrase \”dark horse\” comes from, either), but I delight when the few who do see their reward when I come through for them.  That is a far better outcome than being overestimated for sure.

I am not a proponent at all of being purposefully ignorant.  I believe people should be engaged in their communities, aware of current events, and in a constant state of seeking to remove ignorant barriers and assumptions.

However, there have been many times in my life where my ignorance has given me the courage to face situations I may have otherwise hesitated to face, because I had no idea what the potential fallout could be, or how it might be perceived.  I was acting on my instincts and being myself, and it worked out far better than second guessing myself because of knowing \”facts.\”

The biggest incident I can recall around this was back a few years ago when I was a lead over my team at work.  We were going through some organizational changes and my team, which consisted of many very long-term employees who had seen many organizational changes, were unresponsive at best and disagreeable at worst regarding the change.  I had done everything internally I could think of aside from begging them to believe in me and nothing was working.  So, I took my plea to someone in a higher authority.

We had a vice president back then who truly modeled servant leadership and was engaged even with the newest members of the front line.  He often said if we had a struggle that he could assist with to reach out to him without hesitation.  He had a good rapport with the members of my team, and I knew if anyone could give them the locker room pep talk they needed to get the hell on board, it would be him.

I sought him out, naive about the protocol for doing so.  He asked to meet with me and I made my case, and if anything, he seemed impressed by my intentions, not put off by them.  I said, \”if you can even give my team fifteen or twenty minutes, just to show that the relationship between the goals and our behavior is important, that would be enough.\”  He said, \”I will do you one better.  I will come for an hour, and I will bring lunch.\”

And so, in the next meeting that I had with the team and as a total surprise to them, he arrived to discuss the changes and had pizza with him for forty people.  I was ignorant enough to ask for help from the top, and it paid off for me splendidly!  The team loved it!

My husband the other day was giving me a list of his favorite qualities about me, and among them he listed bravery, and I scoffed.  I am not a brave person.  He then went on to describe how I\’ll catch spiders and cockroaches with my bare hands without hesitation, especially at work (if for no other reason than to stop the ladies from behaving like a bunch of shrieking eels – try that Princess Bride reference on for size), and I said, \”Well, it\’s not like they are scary.\”  And he said, \”They bite!  And they can jump!\”  And I said, \”Cockroaches can jump!?\”  Had I known this, I might have hesitated in hunting them down!  My husband said there is no way he\’d grab one with his bare hands.  And I stated it was ignorance, rather than bravery, that has gotten me here.

We shouldn\’t hide in ignorance.  But in some ways, our ignorance gives us that same childlike innocence that can let us ask stupid questions, befriend unlikely people and take charge of things without hesitation because we don\’t know any better yet.  While we are looking to always further enlighten ourselves, we should appreciate those moments of ignorance that take us one step further than we might have gone otherwise.

It was through ignorance that I chose to get married, go to grad school, and pursue certain friendships.  And I am grateful for it!

I have to take issue with the way some women demonstrate their belief in women\’s empowerment.  I\’m not an expert in very many things, but I\’ve been a woman for a long time now and I reckon myself advanced in this field, and my belief is that they are doing it wrong!

I have noticed a lot more women\’s groups, blogs, communities, and pages dedicated to women\’s empowerment.  They proclaim that we, as women, are strong, independent, \”don\’t need no man,\” and so on, and yet many of the women in these communities continue to blame their situation on a man.  Their emotional instability is a man\’s fault.  Their station in life is a man\’s fault.  I even heard a woman not long ago say that her husband repeatedly tricked her into getting pregnant.  Please don\’t say stuff like that and call yourself an empowered woman.

I consider myself a modern woman, I believe in women\’s rights and true equality.  That is to say, real equality and not elevating women to be more equal.  I believe men and women are different but equally valuable, and if we want to be seen as being equally valuable then we need to start behaving like we value ourselves.  And we remove our own value when we fail to take responsibility for our choices and situations.  It is like saying, \”I am in this situation because of a man, because deep down I am a weak woman and incapable of making the choices necessary to move my life in the direction I wish to go.\”

I\’ve made plenty of bad choices in my life, but I\’m not in the habit of blaming someone else for those choices.  I won\’t say that someone conned, coerced or manipulated me into making decisions against my will.  I am woman enough to take responsibility for it and deal with it.

When women create and participate in these groups under the guise of female empowerment, but then go on to rant about how their past relationships have ruined them or made them bitter, they are enabling victimhood, they are not empowered.  They are proving the opposite of what they speak. 

True empowerment comes from the belief that we are responsible for our own choices.  It is based on the actions we take knowing that we are responsible for what we do, and don\’t make excuses of the things that happen to us.  I can lean on my husband and feel fully empowered; I can also take responsibility for my own choices without making laying the blame on him, or anyone else.  And truly empowered women don\’t sit idly while other women victimize themselves, they don\’t perpetuate and enable other women to stagnate in their self-pity or victimhood.

It takes a real woman to be empowered.

As I reflect on my sixteen year anniversary since moving to this wonderful southern state, I think back on the things that were sort of a culture shock to me.  Granted, I am an English speaking Caucasian by birth, so coming here was a lot less shocking than it probably is for people coming from other cultures, but nonetheless there were (and still are!) some things that really caught me off guard.  It\’s no wonder these folks down here think it\’s like it\’s own country!  I know northern Americans who come down here and experience culture shock as well!

Here are some things I learned when I moved down here:

• The phrase \”bless your heart\” is used often and it is not a compliment!  There\’s a Miranda Lambert song called \”Only Prettier\” that has a line that says, \”I don\’t have to be hateful, I can just say bless your heart.\”  The idiot neighbor you have that can\’t seem to find their ass with both hands?  Bless their heart.
• People can fake an accent, but it\’s the inflections and word choices that indicate whether someone is really a native to these here parts.  My husband can ask for a pen or a pin and it all sounds the same to me.  Where I come from, they call it \”in-SURE-ance.\”  Down here it\’s \”IN-shurance.\”  They do this with a lot of words.  My husband, way back before I had moved here, used to tease me because I\’d say stuff like, \”I will phone you later.\”  No one here would ever say that.  Down here, \”pop\” is either coke or soda, and down here if you order tea in a restaurant, you\’ll get iced tea.  And quite probably it is unsweetened.  That was very weird my first time.  If you order a side of gravy here, it will be white gravy…where I grew up I had no idea what this was.  
• I didn\’t have to go to high school here, but my siblings did.  In my high school back home, I had spare periods where I could go home early.  Open campuses for lunch.  I could skip class without being arrested!  Down here, that is all different.  Closed campus, truant officers.  It\’s quite an ordeal.
• Food is different here.  First of all, there is SO much of it.  So many options, so much variety.  So cheap!  They pair weird things together.  Chicken and waffles?  Sorry, I still haven\’t tried that yet.  Biscuits and gravy, chicken fried steak AND chicken fried chicken?  What the heck is going on here?  You can break out into a fight over what true chili should consist of, and to this day I still don\’t know.  My sister tells me real chili doesn\’t have beans, but forget that business.  My chili has kidney beans.
• The pace here is much slower.  This was a hard adjustment for me.  I walk fast, talk fast and I like to live my life at a fast pace.  Down here, people are leisurely.  They savor the moment.  I often, even now, feel frustrated that nothing is happening as fast as I would like.  I am sure to those around me, I seem wound up and frantic in comparison.
• I didn\’t really realize this until I went back home the first time, but service people here will fall all over themselves to give you a pleasant experience.  They work hard for their tips, and Americans are great tippers when the service is good.  When I went home the first time, I was appalled at the service I got almost everywhere and it was then I realized how spoiled I had gotten.
• People here say \”sir\” and \”ma\’am\” ALL THE TIME.  Kids in school are reprimanded for not saying it.  My own husband will say \”yes ma\’am\” if I ask him to do me a favor. I was too old when I got here to get into this except in a funny way.  Also, people will call others Miss/Mister whatever their first name is.  Miss Brenda or Mister Steve.  These might be your neighbors or your coworkers.  Especially for children to call adult acquaintances, but many of my coworkers do this as well.  At first, I found this very weird and off-putting, but now I find it charming!

I was thinking about an experience I had a few years ago when I was a lead on a billing team.  Management and leadership in that group were dismal at best and often absent, so the team often felt like they lacked support and direction.

When I took the role, all I had was a logical mind.  I didn\’t have the technical skill to use the system yet or understand the processes.  My first day as the lead over one particular team I spent most of the day trying not to get repeatedly locked out of the billing system.  I had no idea what I was doing, but I knew if I sat around waiting for guidance or permission I\’d wait forever.

I am a fairly intuitive person.  I can see what needs to be done and in what priority.  Through some frustrating self-training, I quickly mastered the system and started combing through tens of thousands of lines of data, identifying the problems and slowly, finding solutions.

I made a lot of positive changes when I was on that team.  The month-end numbers we had to report to corporate were the best we ever had while I was leading that team.  My supervisor was hostile and for most of the time we had no manager, our director was located in another state.  I had no example of leadership, no help, and no one to ask.  My supervisor was never in support of my initiatives but I did them anyway.  They were the right thing to do, and unless she would outright forbid me, I just moved forward with them.

I worked on that team for a few years in different capacities, and made a positive impact that isn\’t just opinion, it can be backed up with dollars and cents.  One of my projects saved our business unit $1.25 million dollars in one calendar year.  I came up with new and faster ways to sort and identify work in order to get it processed more timely and we could close with better numbers.

I didn\’t get a lot of recognition; in fact, often times my supervisor attempted to minimize my efforts.  But I wasn\’t doing it for the recognition.  I wasn\’t doing it only if they would support and mentor me.  I did it because I got a paycheck to be there and the team was counting on me.  And because of them, I didn\’t do it alone, either.  I empowered them to make decisions and give helpful feedback and with their help, during my time there, operations ran smoothly.

Had I spent the hours in my days seeking guidance or validation, asking permission or demanding recognition, nothing would have ever gotten done.  I was underpaid compared to my peers, and my supervisor gave me a lot of really non-sensical feedback that frustrated me, I fell back always on some of the advice my mom gave me on my first day.  She said, \”fake it until you make it.\”  Though I knew nothing, I knew I was capable.  Though I didn\’t yet have the respect of my team, I was determined to earn it.

I may not have gotten accolades or recognition, but I earned the experience of triumphing over the situation and that is not something that can be had any other way.  I learned it is better to ask for forgiveness than permission.  I moved forward on my intuition and ideas, even in the face of opposition from my so-called leaders.  I didn\’t wait for a pat on the back (and that rarely happened) or for someone else to take responsibility for me or my success.  And in doing so, I learned so much that has helped me in every job I\’ve had since then.

There is an episode of Frasier where he has to go inside Daphne\’s room to fetch something that belongs to him.  She is not home and he enters her room and idle curiosity overtakes him.  He retrieves his book but is soon looking at all her knick-knacks, reading the labels on her prescriptions and so on.  She walks in and catches him, and after a series of events, twice where he ends up repeating this same disgraceful act, she threatens to quit and move out.  Frasier ends up buying her a car to demonstrate his remorse.

Going through other people\’s things is shameful.  Especially when multiple adults are living in the same home together.  If you live with another adult and feel the need to snoop through their belongings, no doubt as what you see as a well-intentioned concern for them, then you have trust issues that go far beyond anything that can be resolved by snooping.  Whether you find something or nothing, the cancerous distrust that exists will remain.

My sister and her husband love to travel, and they also have pets.  I am frequently trusted with the responsibility of taking care of their pets while they are out of town as they live very nearby.  They actually do have other, closeby relatives as well, but they have chosen me to place their trust in because they know that I will respect their privacy.  I respect it because I love them, but also because my own character deeply values personal property.  How much more egregious to have your loved ones snooping through your personal property than the government?!

When I am in my sister\’s home, I feed and play with her pets, and with her permission, I occasionally watch TV.  If I am there for an extended period of time in order to allow the pets additional playtime and socializing, I may order food and whatnot, but I make no assumptions about their belongings.  I bring their mail in, but I do not even flip through it to see what they are getting.  Once, she called me and asked me to go into her bedroom to find something and I felt very awkward going in there.  The master bedroom of a homeowner is their sanctuary.  That is the last place I want to find myself!

Even in my own home, I have never gone through my husband\’s things.  We have separate joint bank accounts, but I have never accessed his, nor he mine.  We never open each other\’s mail (except admittedly this one time I thought it said my name and I opened it and it was a Christmas gift he ordered for me and I felt so bad!).  He has his own collections, friends, and hobbies that he spends his time on and I never snoop through it.  I cannot imagine his disappointment in me if he were to discover that I didn\’t respect his privacy.  Every person, even married people, are entitled to their own space and the respect of their own privacy.

If I invited someone into my home and discovered they were snooping through my belongings, they would no longer be welcome there, regardless of their relationship to me.  Some say, \”well, I have nothing to hide.\”  That doesn\’t matter.  It is the principle.  As adults, we have the right to expect and demand the respect of our privacy, especially from the people we love.

\”If you read someone else\’s diary, you get what you deserve.\” – David Sedaris

I write about Frasier a lot.  In fact, I talk about it a lot in general conversation.  Very recently, I quoted Martin saying, \”I thought this was America.  Oh wait, it is!\”  Frasier has a line for every situation, and I don\’t hesitate to use them generously. 

But I rarely write about Frasier in terms of what the show is actually about, despite its brilliant writing.  It is often just something I allude to as I think of a real-life story that parallels a scene.  Few television shows can match the writing of Frasier.  From Frasier and Niles\’ pompous diatribes to Daphne\’s homespun wisdom and Martin\’s ornery responses, everything is authentic.

The numerous themes woven throughout Frasier make each episode a delight in and of themselves but ties the larger story together as characters change and grow as people, as situations mature, and problems become resolved.  Some of the more prominent themes include Frasier\’s search for lasting love, Niles\’ relationship with the never-seen Maris, Daphne and Martin\’s comical relationship that becomes truly familial, and eventually, the romance between Niles and Daphne coming together after his long quest for her. 

However, what I have always taken as the true theme of Frasier is the relationship between Frasier and Martin.  To begin with, the relationship is tense at best.  Martin resents his new limitations, Frasier wants to be \”the good son\” and take him in but resents the new constraints on his personal life.  The entire eleven seasons witnesses the evolution of this dysfunctional father-son relationship, through it\’s various trials, many of them hilarious, including Frasier throwing Martin\’s chair over the balcony, scaring him almost to death dressed as a deranged clown, twice being passed over by a woman for his own father, and Martin learning to conform to Frasier\’s persnickety routines. 

By the series\’ end, Frasier and Martin have a warm relationship.  They have learned to say they love one another.  In one episode, where Martin signs himself up at a retirement home so he can hustle the residents there at poker, Frasier tells his father he\’s not ready for him to move out on him yet.  The series\’ finale depicts all the main characters about to embark on new and somewhat disparate journies, Frasier himself leaving Seattle to find the same joy everyone else has found.  His parting with Martin is far different from the greeting they shared in the first episode, a testament to the growth they have experienced.

I love that Frasier isn\’t just about one failed romance after another or comical endeavors that fail.  These things give it memorable moments, but the resounding lesson we can learn from Frasier is that people can change and grow, but it doesn\’t happen overnight.  It usually doesn\’t happen without some major setbacks.  Sometimes people get discouraged, are on the verge of giving up, make grievous missteps (like Niles marrying Mel), and sometimes it takes a full decade or more, but if we are willing to invest the effort into relationships, in the end, it can pay off in tremendous ways.