Month: October 2011 (Page 2 of 5)

in a day’s work

October 26, 2011 / Michele Minehart

Despite being at home with sick and whiny children, noses laden with thick, green mucus, I felt a sense of accomplishment more than once. And not in the typical housemom-all-the-laundry-is-folded sense. Get this: it was through good conversation (shocking, I know! Me? Chatting?). With people. Neither of them wore diapers or asked me to blow on their food to cool it down.

First, a friend asked me to read through an email before sending it off to prevent regrets. I totally get this and wish I would initiate a similar policy for at least 3/4 of the emails I compose or conversations I have. I’m sure there were others more adept in corporate culture that could’ve been asked, and perhaps they would have offered different advice. So I’m hopeful that I pointed him in the right direction.

Then, I enjoyed naptime in conversation with one of my favorite young people, discussing the pros, cons and everything in between about selecting an appropriate major in light of career aspirations. It was a delightful time, mostly filled with me asking a bunch of questions and her even having real answers. She knows what she wants to do, and now she’s figuring out how to get there.

I’m more often asking myself what I want to be when I grow up. My job is a good one for our current situation, my employer is good to me and my work has enough challenges to make it satisfying. But never having been a “career gal”, I flounder a bit in the area of living out calling. Mostly because I wrongly believe that my vocation and my place of employment must be synonymous. Silly girl.

Nope, I think my place in this life is to have a lot of conversations. To listen (better than what I do, I must add. Perhaps this will make the list for 2012). To ask questions. To even weigh in with an opinion when invited (because when people ask, they really are looking for more than just questions. But don’t jump there too fast).

Excuse me while I find that in a job description on Monster.

a few simple rules

October 25, 2011 / Michele Minehart

Poorly written books make me angry because as I see them, in paperback, on my coffee table I think, “I could’ve done that.” However, I didn’t do it. I just sat around and complained about the outcome, which puts me in a different category of pathetic.

The content of the bad books is terrific. Wonderful points. Just poorly written. I couldn’t decide what made it so bad, but here’s what I’ve come up with.

1. Depend on words to express the strength of your feeling, not punctuation. If you have to put an exclamation point at the end of every other sentence to emphasize your thought, you’re not using enough of the right words.

2. Write your piece. Then go through and get rid of 90% of the times you see the words is, are, was, were, am. They‘re passive, and 90% of the time passive is boring. Like that last sentence. No action. You wish that I would delete it.

3. Write your piece. Then rewrite the introduction, eliminating 60% of the introduction. The entire train of thought isn’t necessary, just something a bit exiting to tell me why I should read it. I really should lecture myself on this point.

4. On this note, get to the point. Read Seth Godin’s blog, he sets a great example. And he probably put much more thought and has deeper understanding as to why he writes the way he does.

5. Catch phrases fit better on a tshirt or a bumper sticker or a Pinterest pin. Not a book. Draw me a mental picture, don’t sell me words.

6. In the words of Tina Fey, oftentimes “when it’s true, it doesn’t need to be said.” Know the baseline understanding of your audience.

7. Avoid stupid adjectives. Anything that goes on a commercial probably shouldn’t fit into prose, such as excellent, best, all-new, exciting…

8. On that note, avoid the ends of the spectrum when making claims: always, never, all, none. At least 70% of current readers live in a generation of authoritative doubt. We don’t believe at least a fraction of what you say, so don’t give us reason to doubt the rest. When you paint with too wide a brush it serves as an excuse to dismiss the entire message.

9. Percentages serve as a best friend and a worst enemy. You can find a stat to match any point you try to make – this post serves as proof, as I’ve not actually looked up a single one. “Over 75% of the people sitting on the board for the FDA, to decide the “Healthy Food Pyramid” – work for leading processed food providers & pharmaceutical companies. Sure…sure…they are making decisions based on what is good for you….” (a quote from my FB friend)

I’m sure there’s more to the story, but that stat works. Any of the stats mentioned in this post are 42% useless.

10. The rule of authority: find someone who lives outside the same 60 mile radius of you to say the same thing you’re trying to say. For some reason, we don’t trust figures from our own zipcodes. But if they traveled to say it (and expenses the gas), then clearly they know what they’re talking about. Those of you who live more than one county away from Miami County, Ohio, I’m available for a nominal fee.

11. Proofread. Proof of how badly you must do this: I’m not going to proofread because I’ve got to run. Count the mistakes yourself.

weekend sabbath

October 23, 2011 / Michele Minehart

For two consecutive weekends we’ve arrived to Friday without plans. We each had separate goals or hopes in terms of achievements, but an itinerary did not exist. A “free weekend” is pretty rare concept in our life as we frequently have some sort of engagement to attend to, be it family gatherings, tickets to an event or even plans to go to a lakehouse or two. Since moving in, these past few weeks have been the most “free” as we’ve ever experienced, and in many ways they were more rich with blessing than if we would’ve tried to cram something in.

A call from one of the Husband’s cousins resulted in a spontaneous dinner visit, which was splendid. I enjoy conversation with her, and when not pressed within a larger family setting, we got to hear so much more of what is going on in their lives.

This morning we were graced by the children with an extra hour’s sleep before heading off to church, in the company of one of my favorite people in town. After doing a bit of work in the kitchen, I took dinner down to my cousin and his wife and new baby and ended up staying for some delightful conversation. Truly, we live much too close to not see each other more often.

These seem like relatively simple and small things for weekend life. But oftentimes when we cram our calendar with visits and stopping here, there and everywhere along the way, the entire 48 hours flies by and we arrive at 8pm on Sunday simply exhausted. But this weekend we saw more people who aren’t in our current rotations than the previous 10 months combined. And the kids made it to bed on time and we got to sleep in.

I love order and reason, so I’m a believer in schedules and calendars. But I think perhaps we need to implement a weekend sabbatical rule. Once every 7 weekends we plan to plan nothing, and allow things to spontaneously rise to the top. Even if it’s painting the shutters, going to the park or even staying in our jammies most of the day while enjoying a movie and baking cookies – plenty of small joys are festering below the surface, just waiting for us to clear a space for them to bloom.

There are some things, like a date with KLR, that if we don’t put it into the calendars, they won’t happen. But there are other things that never go into the calendar and will never happen if we don’t clear it. Fortunately for me, this week includes a bit of both.

Month: October 2011 (Page 2 of 5)

in a day’s work

a few simple rules

weekend sabbath

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