KCSpeaks

With each passing year, I get more contemplative at the holidays. It seems I woke up in January, blinked, and boom New Years’ Eve is on my doorstep. My year of dedicated #uncertainty lived up to the name I titled it. I rode the emotional roller coaster of news with everyone else.   From Covid, to social justice, political uprisings, and humanitarian issues, 2021 gave us a little bit of everything. I think I am tired of news, bad news, in particular. My words may express my exhaustion here, but for so many all this world uncertainty has taken its toll.   I attribute some of these exhaustive feelings to the reasons why so many people are choosing to not work. Vaccination has arrived and working in the world with other people is not only possible, but necessary. Yet still some are choosing to not work. I would like to believe the reason people can make this choice is because they can afford to. While the flexibility of work is available to some, for others financial comfort is ...

The past couple of years now has dramatically changed life as we know it due to the global pandemic and all the consequences of having to slow down or stop our daily lives in some cases and now people are looking at work differently. The live to work mentality is dead and now people work to live. For many folks, the priority has shifted to self, health, and family. People have chosen to find jobs fitting their desired lifestyles.   No longer are people willing to sacrifice the non-work values to make a living. This is evident with the change in attitude about what jobs people are willing to take and for what wages. With the cost of living on the rise, an abundance of available opportunities, and more people feeling entrepreneurial, people are looking at their current work situation to determine their satisfaction level. People are all levels are seeking a sense of satisfaction from work. How to people become satisfied with their work environment? Is it just wages and benefits or ...

Autumn has arrived and for many people this means enjoying the colors of the trees, picking pumpkins, and enjoying football fun. Yet as you sip your pumpkin spice latte, you are suddenly reminded we are in the last quarter of another year. The year 2021 has slipped by. Our year of uncertainty is still alive and kicking and most people are just trying to figure out which end is up still.   Each of us walked into 2021 with a vision and expectation for what we wanted from life and had to change our expectation in some way. Welcome to the equation - the power of compromise. Many people think of compromise just between two individuals in a disagreement yet it applies to so much of our new life. This year, I have had to engage in a lot of compromise in my day to day existence. In shopping for anything, I have had to either make product substitutions. I have also had to make a compromise into how I visit places and people due to Covid. I have had to compromise on my expectations over an...

An engaging book club discussion about email, how we work, and also just how we as people manage our lives. The more we talked the more I started to realize that essentially project management is essentially a life skill everyone needs to master to be successful. If we simplify Project Management down to the easiest way of explain it and applying, we can define it as taking a big end goal and break it down to smaller goals, figuring out the tasks with each smaller goal, and then allocating lots of resources along the way. Ultimately at the core of project management is planning and organizing, but communication is really at the heart of it all. A project may be big, like building a bridge, creating and implementing software, or it can be as small as figuring out what to make for dinner. Along the way to said goal, every step needs to be clear and everyone needs to communicate about all the said steps along the way. Sounds easy, but apparently it is not so simple. One would think ev...

The past couple of years has been nothing but one surprise after another and just when I think we have heard it all, we have the new space race to spice up our lives. Just when we have had enough of plague, politics, and all the ills of sadness on the news our newsfeeds are filled with the newest thing, space tourism.   Space was once a land of scientists and military personnel, yet as I write this two billionaires have visited a place so few in the world have ever witnessed with their own eyes. My goal today is not to blog a science fiction novel about what life is going to be like when we are all living between earth and space. Instead I want to focus on the new and innovative possibilities that may be created for workforce professionals. The first question is if the billionaire space race will eliminate jobs or create jobs. I am of the position the race will ultimately create jobs. Looking at the history of fun, innovation, and anything new and exciting, the wealthy have alw...

There are moments of joy, sadness, anger, and everything in between when someone is on journey to self-improvement, new success, or anything new and different and sometimes in the year of #uncertainty, the tears begin. I can’t think of anyone who has not witnessed the tears of another in his/her personal or professional life.   The tears I am speaking of are not the excited and happy tears, rather the tears of anger, sadness, frustration, and anxiety. For those of us on the receiving end of tears, we are receiving an amazing gift, someone being real vulnerable, and authentic. We are receiving an opportunity with an individual. At the moment of tears, this individual is showing his/her hopes and fears, real feelings not sugar coated or analyzed. This is a pivotal moment with someone. How you react can make or break a relationship both personally and professionally. Some people struggle with the tears of another and may dismiss or downplay them. This is a lost opportunity for a b...

I t occurred to me that I had not really had a post about what was on my mind recently. Like so many people, I have been so busy just getting through the day and navigating life somewhere between new normal, old normal, and what exactly is normal now. As I talk to people, I think everyone is existing somewhere in that plain with feelings of being not really sure about anything anymore. Life is just making up the rules for most people and individuals are just trying to play the game.   Every day is just another fun day in #Uncertainty2021. All of this applies to the world of work just as much as it applies to a trip to the grocery store. Here are some thoughts: Handshaking – In American society, we used handshaking at work, when meeting people, and as an overall polite gesture. Pandemic life called for us to avoid touching people due to germs. We learned to fist bump, elbow poke, waving, and the “air hug arm gesture” while not actually hugging or touching anyone. Now that the p...

Which came first the chicken or the egg? This is the age old question. You cannot have an egg without a chicken or a chicken without an egg. This ongoing debate has people constantly arguing over the possibilities, both are right, and both are wrong.   If that feeling of neither here nor there and both in and out are real for you right now, you may be uncertain. You may also be in a transition in your life. There are different kinds of transitional periods in your life. Some are personal and some are professional. Sometimes they are growth moments and sometimes they are life readjustment moments. Either way, everyone experiences them at some point. In the workplace, we transition from job to job, change companies, change industries, and just move into and out of the world of work. Since people are not stagnant, they move and transition in many ways. For example, jobs change and people change.   Anyone who works with people in any capacity know that people do not change overn...

I was watching a show on a streaming service about people with rare medical conditions and their desperation to find diagnoses and treatment. One episode featured a mother with a little girl around five or six years old. The mother was in distress because the little girl was diagnosed with a rare medical condition causing uncontrollable seizures. The child had hundreds of seizures daily halting any resemblance of normal life for someone her age. The only known treatment was to have a brain surgery resulting in the child most likely being unable to walk or talk for the rest of her life. The distressed mother was seeking alternative treatment. Every day the child went without surgery was a day closer to when it would ultimately lead to death or paralysis through seizure alone. Watching this show, my heart went out to the family and the child. In one of the interviews, the mother was asked about why she was hesitant on the surgery. The mother said, “How do you change your expectations of ...

We made it to 2021 and just when we thought we had left the craziness of 2020 behind, I think everyone realized rather quickly we were not out of the woods. From social unrest to the new Covid -19 variants, and the realization that anything really can happen, I think everyone has taken a moment to pause. Even in all my years in the blog-o-sphere, I decided to take a minute to rest, wait, and see. I am not alone in my thoughts. I heard rather than weight loss, people made resolutions to wear pants this year. So much has changed. In trying to determine the best path forward for 2021, I came to realization the word of 2021 is “uncertainty.”   Welcome to 2021, the year of #uncertainty. This means that ultimately all of us need to just roll with the punches. If you are still working towards achievement, great. Just do it. Go for it and remember you will have to be flexible.   Looking for work? Deciding on a career? Amazing. Go for it. Do it. Right now though, you may need to pi...