by Heather Plett | Sep 16, 2010 | Uncategorized
Well hello there! Long time no talk! I didn’t expect to be silent so long, but I’ve been on this whirlwind farewell tour to Toronto and I’ve barely had a chance to catch my breath, let alone blog.
On the work side of it, I’ve had a great time zooming all over the Greater Toronto Area meeting with a bunch of associates and wrapping up my work relationship with them and introducing them to one of my key staff members. Many of these associates have become friends, so it feels like a nice bonus to get to hang out with them on the edge of this transition.
But then there’s been the really fun, non-work stuff. I’ve spent a lot of time in Toronto over the past 6 years, so it’s become like a second home. Plus I have a lot of friends here. So I’ve been saying “see you later” to the city in my own way, and I’ve packed as many friend connections in as possible. So far, I’ve:
- enjoyed a lovely home-cooked meal with my dear forever-friend Laurel, whom I’ve known since we were both in diapers. (She’s the one pictured above.)
- had lunch and an amazing heart-to-heart conversation with my friend Barb.
- enjoyed some quiet me-time, wandering on the boardwalk at The Beaches.
- made a quick pit-stop at The Distillery for some of my favourite milk chocolate, chai flavoured cashews.
- went to see a TIFF film with my dear friend Stephanie (where we got to see Ed Harris, Jennifer Connelly, Amy Madigan, and a bunch of other Hollywood types in person) and enjoyed drinks and snacks afterward.
- did a little wandering in my favourite neighbourhood.
I’ve got more meetings today, and then I get to hang out with the amazing Jamie Ridler (who many of you know and love). Tomorrow, a few more meetings, and then a flight home.
It’s been surprisingly good. I’m trying not to feel guilty about getting so much fun out of a business trip, especially since my dear husband is not having as much fun at home with his father getting closer and closer to the end of his life. Last weekend, when he got called to the hospital in the middle of the night, I didn’t think I’d be making this trip after all. But things seem to have stabelized (at least temporarily), so I’m making the best of it and hoping my family at home forgives me.
Gotta run! Talk to you soon.
by Heather Plett | Sep 10, 2010 | Uncategorized
Today is World Suicide Prevention Day, and all I can think to say is HE DIDN’T DIE!
He tried once, and tried again, but OH MY GOD I’m so glad it didn’t work. He is alive and well and still with me and our children and together we get another chance to carry on each day trying to find hope and happiness and a reason to go on living.
And that thought is enough to remind me of all of the happy, easy moments we have had together in the short months since that day he could have died. Walking on the beach and marveling at the crazy crashing waves. All those many hours curled up on our bed together, reading our books, talking about our kids. Getting cozy in a hotel room on our anniversary. Watching our daughters play endless soccer games. Fishing with our nieces and nephews. Enjoying a crepe breakfast with our friends. Going out for chai latte and coffee on a regular basis, now that our kids are old enough to be left alone.
None of those are monumental moments in a marriage, but they are monumental in OUR marriage, because they almost didn’t happen.
I love you buddy, and I thank God you didn’t die.
For rushing out this morning, a little ticked off and a little impatient, I apologize. I will never be perfect, and I will never treat you perfectly, because I am human, but I love you and I want to grow old with you and I am thankful EVERY SINGLE DAY that you didn’t die.
by Heather Plett | Sep 9, 2010 | Uncategorized
I’ve got a grinning plastic monkey leaning on my computer screen. It was a gift from my friend and former colleague Kelly (hi Kelly!) seven years ago when we were the two (very busy) communicators at the big federal lab in our city (the only Level 4 lab in the country) and we had to bust our butts to develop a communication plan for how to tell the public that our scientists were going to begin injecting monkeys with the scary SARS virus. Though most people want scientists to develop vaccines to protect us from viruses, few of us are happy to know that monkeys have to be sacrificed in the process. Needless to say, it wasn’t a pleasant story to release to the media, and we were all rather nervous about what the animal rights groups might do in reaction.
That cute little monkey has represented several things for me in the past seven years. First of all, in a “make light of a difficult situation” way, it represented the monkeys who were giving their lives for the cause of science. But more than that, for Kelly and me it represented the HUGE challenge we had trying to convince the political and bureaucratic powers-that-be that we had a responsibility to release the information to the public and that we shouldn’t just sneak the monkeys in under the cover of darkness. (Don’t even get me started on the other challenges that year, like the fact that we were the centre of a big media storm over both SARS and Mad Cow Disease coming to Canada. I’m exhausted just thinking about it.) You’ve heard about “getting the monkeys off our backs”? Well, the heavyweights we were dealing with at the time certainly felt like big powerful monkeys, sometimes trying to cloy our vocal cords out.
A few years ago, my boss at my current job (which I came to after near burnout at the lab), passed around an article to all of the managers about getting better at “getting the monkeys off our backs”. This time the monkey analogy represented the extra duties and baggage we as managers sometimes take on. The article was about learning to delegate tasks and make staff take responsibility for their own projects rather than having everything end up on our shoulders.
It seems monkeys are forever getting a bad rap. If it’s not the “monkey on your back” then it’s the “monkey mind” that the Buddhists talk about when they’re referring to the way our distractable brains jump from one thought to the next and seldom come to rest on one tree.
With all these bad connotations, I wondered if it was time to retire that cute little monkey now that I won’t have the “monkeys” of senior management on my back, or even the opportunity to offload “monkeys” onto my staff.
But instead, I decided to redeem the monkey. It’s time for a little monkey love, I say!
I’m rather fond of that googly-eyed grinning monkey, so from now on, he’s only going to represent GOOD things. Like the fact that my new consulting career will allow me to jump from one tree limb to the next and never get bored because I’m stuck in the same old tree. And the fact that my diverse interests in different ideas and settings is a blessing instead of a curse. And the fact that my monkey mind is a thing of beauty in the way that it helps me adapt to the world.
Yup, I can identify with that monkey. He suits me just fine. I want to check out every tree instead of settling on just one! I want to travel through the jungle with a joie de vivre that the animals stuck on the ground can’t quite understand. I want to chatter with glee when I find new discoveries that I think other people should get excited about. I want to relish the joy of swinging just for the sake of swinging.
Grin on, plastic monkey!
by Heather Plett | Sep 7, 2010 | Uncategorized
What with summer drawing to a close and long weekends and a quick trip across the border for a little return-to-school shopping and a day of fishing with a bunch of family members and a brain that is over-full with all of what this transition means, I have not really been in a writing mode lately. I was wracking my brain trying to think of something witty or wise to say this morning, but it all seemed a little scrambled, so I thought I’d just stick with a random list of some of the things you might be interested in knowing:
- I have just over 3 weeks of work left before I jump into self-employment.
- I am feeling relaxed, energized, and happier than I can remember feeling for quite some time.
- I only have minor moments when I stress out – like when I begin to think about details like medical insurance (which is – thankfully – a fairly minor issue in Canada – I just need to figure out how we’ll pay for dental expenses and prescription drugs).
- Speaking of possibilities, I’m rather excited to report that I’ve already been offered a few contracts – even before I started to look for them. Some are fairly small, but they all add up to a pretty decent way to start a consulting career.
- Just moments ago, I negotiated one of those contracts, and said “I believe I’m worth more to you than you’re offering and I want to work less days.” They agreed. Simple as that. I’m feeling pretty jazzed about that.
- Next week, I’l be going on my last business trip in this job.
- I just counted, and I’ve gone on 53 business trips since I started this job 6 years ago. About half of those have been to Toronto (where I’m going next week). I expect I went on nearly the same number in my career before this job, so I’ve probably been on about 100 business trips all told. Travel never gets old for me.
- Speaking of travel, I just bought a funky purple suitcase, because I KNOW that I will figure out how to incorporate travel into this new career, and I wanted something that will stand out on the airport onveyor belt when all the boring black suitcases roll past.
- Speaking of transitions, my oldest daughter starts high school tomorrow. HIGH frickin’ SCHOOL! How did that happen?
- In case you’re wondering how the running is going, I’m still doing it! And still enjoying it! Plus I’m still biking to work, which means I feel a little like a super-athlete this summer. No, it doesn’t mean I’ve lost significant weight (I think my post 40 year old body just likes being this size), but it does mean that I’m feeling pretty good physically.
- On the weekend I had a conversation with a runner friend about how to prepare for winter running because I want to try it. You can feel free to ask me about it in the middle of January. 🙂
- What with the kids going back to school and the leaves showing signs of the changing season, I’d say that I picked the perfect month for this transition.
- I’m looking for some way to mark this transition (like getting my nose pierced when I turned 40). Any ideas?
by Heather Plett | Sep 2, 2010 | Uncategorized
I’m in transition mode, preparing to leap into the unknown world of self-employment. As I wrestle with how to promote myself, how to negotiate contracts, what to focus my business on, etc., etc., I sometimes find myself getting tied in knots.
It’s time to slow down a bit and focus on what the transition is teaching (and re-teaching) me:
by Heather Plett | Aug 31, 2010 | Uncategorized, Wisdom
Emergency rooms make me cranky.
Lack of sleep makes me even more cranky.
So… after 5 hours in the emergency room in the middle of the night with Julie, who broke the growth plate in her wrist (the part of the bone that’s busy growing in adolescents) in yet another soccer-related injury, I’m not exactly a barrel of laughs today.
Here’s the thing… why oh WHY has nobody figured out how to make an emergency room (and especially the waiting room) a reasonably pleasant (or at least comfortable and somewhat soothing) space to wait in? There are a lot of creative people in this world – why haven’t we invested some of that creative energy into better designs for emergency rooms and hospitals in general?
Basically everyone sitting in an emergency room is under some kind of stress. Nobody WANTS to sit in a crowded uncomfortable room for five hours, waiting to spend five minutes with an over-worked doctor who’s just trying to survive until the end of the shift. Nobody wants to sit in those uncomfortable, straight-backed vinyl-covered chairs, staring at non-descript white walls plastered with ugly stop-smoking posters five years past their prime, craning their necks to see the tiny TV dangling somewhere close to the ceiling in the farthest corner of the room.
And while I’m venting – what’s up with the system that treats a patient like one of the cattle, shuffled through a corral shute from one nursing station to the next, answering the very same list of questions to three different people? Is there no more efficient, people-centred system than that? Last year, I sat with my mother-in-law and father-in-law in the emergency room, after my father-in-law had made a few dozen visits to the same ER in less than a month’s time, and I wanted to scream when I saw the look of pure exhaustion on my mother-in-law’s face when she had to answer the same questions she’d answered the other countless times she’d been there. You have a frickin’ computer sitting right in front of you, people! WHY didn’t anyone record the answers the last hundred times they were asked? It’s not rocket science and it doesn’t take a Phd in human psychology to know that too many questions when you’re under stress can tip you over the edge.
Here’s my theory on the whole thing. We have let the industrial revolution shape too many of our spaces and our systems and we’re still a little lost trying to figure out how to dig ourselves out from underneath the frameworks that have turned us into consumers and producers and forms and problems-to-be-solved rather than people.
We have designed hospitals like factories, thinking more about production, efficiency, and TQM (don’t even get me started on that) than about people and families and humanity. We have developed health care systems that are less about health than they are about medicine; less about people than they are about systems; less about healing than they are about bandaids. We make decisions based on what costs less, what will pacify the most number of voters, what appears the most efficient to our funders, and what will push the highest number of people through the conveyor belt that is our public services. (I could go on a similar rant about the education system, but I’ll spare you that one.)
I think it’s time to rise up, people. I think it’s time to stop the conveyor belt. I think it’s time to stop and look around at the victims of these flawed systems and figure out what’s best for THEM rather than what’s best for the clunky machinery of our systems. I think it’s time for compassion, intuitive thinking, people-centred decision-making, and LOVE.
I think it’s time to apply a bit more of our Sophia wisdom to all of this! Do I hear an amen?
