Biggest morning tea

Today, many homes and workplaces around Australia celebrated Australia’s Biggest Morning Tea. My office was no exception and because everyone had to contribute something, I decided to bake chocolate chip cookies. They turned out okay – I’m a good cook but not a good baker – so, the cookies came out looking mediocre, though they smelt divine! They also tasted pretty good… There were lots of other yummy, more beautiful cupcakes and cakes made so my poor cookies didn’t stand too much of a chance. But at least I made the effort and made a contribution! It was all for charity anyway – the Cancer Council – such a great cause.

Lessons in life

It is so true what they say about how much you can learn from others. Sometimes all you need is someone else’s perspective to give you a little more perspective. I feel like I’ve learnt a lot more from the people around me this week than I ever have.

One of those learning experiences occurred this morning. But before I go on to that, I have to explain this for it to make sense – we’ve been extremely busy at work – in fact, hard to believe but we’ve got more work than we have capacity to complete the work. Yesterday, our manager called us all into a meeting and announced that they were going to run an incentive plan over the next couple of weeks – bottom line, we get paid a shit load to do the extra work, and that means late nights, 12 – 14 hour days plus weekends.

I love a good monetary incentive scheme. I know money isn’t everything and I truly believe that – but if you need the money – to help with a mortgage, to feed the family, so your kid can go to that expensive school camp – whatever it may be, extra money is always awesome. Needless to say I felt extremely interested in the incentive and considered participating. I could do with the money (weddings don’t come cheap!) and I love a good challenge.

But. I struggled to make the decision. Next week is my last working week before we fly to Malaysia to get married! This incentive has come at such a bad time for me – a time where I don’t have the extra time to work all those extra hours at the office or weekends. We still have so much to think about and to do before we fly off. Do I go ahead and do the incentive, work crazy hours, finalise plans for our wedding, run on little to no sleep, deal with wedding dramas and the added pressure at work? Or do I just take it easy over the next week or so? Relax my mind and rest my body before our big two weeks in Malaysia?

In the end I decided that I was not going to participate. The money, whilst good, isn’t everything. I went into work with the mindset that I was going to pass on the incentive but I was still unsure. A part of me still thought that I was making the wrong decision. But when I told my manager that I wasn’t going to participate, he was extremely supportive and then he said, “It’s completely okay. Put your marriage first. It’s a priority”. And that? That hit me. I had one of those moments where I realised that deep down I knew I was putting my well being and relationship first but it wasn’t until he said those words – put your marriage first – that I realised exactly what I was doing. I was doing just that. And it all reminded me just what a huge leap marriage is in life. You decide to get married and you exchange vows that you will need to stick to for the rest of your life no matter the circumstances. For better or worse. It reminded me of the importance of our relationship. Our soon to be marriage. And how from now on in? We are each other’s priority always.

I like learning from others. I like it when someone shows me something in a different light. I like it when someone makes me think about something that may never have crossed my mind.

How do I inspire people?

Me again!

I just wanted to write about this blog that I stumbled across – Marc and Angel Hack Life. I love it. It’s extremely motivating, thought-provoking and inspiring. And some days, when I’m in need of a little mood lifter or spirit booster, all I need to do is just read one of their posts. Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about productive living. Yes, we’re alive. Yes, we’re here and we try and make the most of it. But are we really? What exactly is it that we do on a day-to-day basis that says we’re making the most of life? I guess the thing that kind of sparked this for me was my recent one-on-one meeting with my manager at work.

We have mid-year reviews which is when our performance gets reviewed which in turn determines our half-year bonus. My meeting went well and I’m happy with the bonus that I’m getting. But my manager did bring up the topic of ‘inspiring people’. This is what I love about my manager. I don’t mean to sound like I’m a brown-noser, I’m hardly that at all. But I have such great respect in the way he manages people. Having had the opportunity to be in his manager shoes for a couple of weeks last month while he was away, I know just how hard and challenging it is to manage a team of people. So, I do respect what he does and his approach to managing our team. He believes in me and knows just how hard to push me so that I can achieve something that I think I may not be able to. He pretty much said to me that he’d like to see me ‘inspire people’ at work. That was going to be my next challenge.

How on earth do I inspire people? I don’t even have a clue. So here’s what I did – I googled ‘how to inspire people’… and this is what came up. The Marc and Angel Hack Life blog. And not does it only give me pointers on how to inspire people but it gives me a ton of other pointers on how to live a productive and fulfilled life! Of course it’s not a handbook to life. But I just love reading the different articles and blog posts. Some of my favourites are:

• 60 ways to make life simple again
• 30 things to start doing for yourself
• 20 things to start doing in your relationships

And the one I was looking for…

• 18 ways to inspire everyone around you

Check out this blog and let me know what you think :)

Green with envy

Yesterday as I left the office, I stopped by a colleague’s desk to say goodbye, to give her a hug and to wish her safe travels. It was her last day at the office before taking off on a belated five week honeymoon to the USA. Lucky duck!

She’d been planning this trip for weeks and weeks now and of course she came to me and only me for advice knowing that I too had spent five amazing weeks there not too long ago. When she first told me her itinerary for the five weeks, it surprised me on how similar it looked to mine! Like me, she will be spending time in LA, San Francisco, Vegas and New York. Despite my best efforts to lure her to Chicago, it didn’t quite work! I absolutely loved Chicago.

So I’ve been helping her plan her trip. And it’s been so, so exciting helping her with all the planning but boy has it hurt too. I remember exactly what it felt like the weeks leading up to ‘the day’ when it came time to leave. It mostly seems surreal that the moment you’ve been waiting for forever finally arrives.

I’m so thrilled for her though. I only assured her about a bajillion times that she would no doubt have the time of her life. I reminded her to soak it all in. To make the most of her time there. Because I did. And I swear when I say this, that there was nothing that we did do or didn’t do that we regretted. No regrets. And that’s exactly what made it a trip to remember. One for the memory bank, for life.

Yak Bar

Last night after work, most of my team headed out to dinner in the city. We decided to go Italian and tried Yak Bar. We of course had this planned at least a month in advance since my team has gotten so big! We had 30 people head to dinner last night and that wasn’t even all of us!

It was so nice to finish up work and head into the city with my work colleagues. I love that as soon as we’re out those giant revolving doors at work, we don’t even think about work. Instead we discuss bootcamp, unreliable boyfriends (completely on their part, not mine!), interior decorating and annoying bad habits.

Because we were in such a large group, we had to order the restaurant’s banquet meal which cost $35 each and gave us bread and olives to start, an antipasto plate which I loved and for mains there were two different types of pasta dishes – a beautiful tomato based gnocchi and a spaghetti ragu. They also served us salad and roasted potatoes on the side.

The taste and quality of the food was good, no complaints but I have to say that portion wise, it was a little disappointing! I’m not the only one that thought the portions were a little skimpy… So I’m sure I had a valid point. Nonetheless it was all good and fun :)

Office whiners

I was going to title this post ‘Office whingers’ but my predictive text came up with whiners instead. That’s ok, I’m happy with that, it’s pretty much the same thing.

I was a little annoyed at work today. You see, a couple of weeks ago, a secondment role was announced within my team and if anyone was interested, they were more than welcome to apply for the secondment. The role itself is a sidestep to my role at the moment and if anything is a positive one as it’s very different to my existing role and would only add to my skills and it would be another thing to add to the resume. However, I know for certain that it’s not a job I’m interested in and not something I see myself doing so it was a simple decision for me not to apply for the secondment.

Two of my colleagues, however, were interested in the role and I encouraged each of them to apply as I personally think they would both be good at the job (they are both in the same role as me right now). Today at lunch one of the said colleagues told me that the salary they were being offered for the secondment would mean taking a pay cut of at least $10,000. She then went on to say that knowing what the salary on offer is, that she is now not considering the role. Ok, fair enough. If you’re not prepared to take a pay cut then so be it, move on. She then commented on how she thought we get paid really well for our current roles. Which is true and I am in complete agreement with her. She mentioned that she loves getting paid what she gets paid, she couldn’t imagine not earning as much blah blah blah. Okay, I see your point but jeez shouldn’t we just be lucky to still have our jobs considering there have been a ton of redundancies in the banking sector over the last 6 – 9 months? But anyways.

Then the thing that annoyed me most was that she went from loving how much she loves her salary in this role to completely dissing our roles! Like completely shredding the role to pieces! I hate it, absolutely hate it when people do that. So… You like what you get paid but you hate the job. And you hate it so much to the point where you can’t say anything good about it (besides the pay!)… Why the f$*! are you even still here? Oh of course – the money. These are people who do the job for only the money. And I can play along with that – because let’s face it, money is a huge incentive and a huge motivating factor – but only to an extent – if you hate a job so much wouldn’t you get out of it? And if you don’t see the urgency in getting out of a job you hate, a job that you’re not proud of doing, a job that’s just sucking the life out of you as the rest of your life goes by – then freaking deal with it. Don’t whine about it!

Me? I love my job. I wouldn’t say I’m completely passionate about my job but I can say that I enjoy my job and that I am proud of what I do and achieve on a daily basis. I think it’s completely insensitive for someone to sit there in front of their work colleagues, who by the way have never mentioned a word about disliking their job, and speak so negatively, so openly without when considering the possibility that others may actually like what they do and take pride in what they do.

My strategy in handling situations like these are to never, ever agree with the person’s view and opinion when clearly I don’t agree and also it is just that – their view and their opinion. They’re entitled to it. I don’t make a big deal out of it and try and debate her argument because I’m mostly a non-confrontational person and also why should I waste energy on arguing a matter that is completely set in the other person’s mind. And lastly, I try and encourage a glass half full mentality. Jeez woman, you hate the job but come on, you show up everyday, you’re getting paid and if you hated it that much you wouldn’t be here now unless you’re just all talk and no action which is very likely the case!

Life’s too short to hate your job and if you do, go find something else to do which will make you happy. If not at least something that would make you happier. And I say keep going until you find it. There’s really no use on complaining about it. You’ll just be an office whiner.