I know that you share my assessment that it has been a long and busy winter in higher education student service! I have spoken with many of you at conferences or workshops over the past few months, and we have shared concerns about the amount of work that has been on our plates and in our calendars. Now, that said, we are all very grateful to be busy and working, myself included, but there has been a greater pressure all around for us to “do more than ever with lots less than usual”, and it has caused us to be constantly running to catch up to our “to do” lists, right?
I want to share a personal story with you that really brought it all home for me this past week. My consulting business is a lean mean company with only a couple of us sharing all the work. Whether the writing, administration, or delivering training, certification or consulting, it’s mainly two of us doing it all. Now, we are blessed with four consultants who can sometimes help in a pinch but who actually have other full-time jobs and lives.
This year, we planned to grow our company offerings, so we embarked on a project to put one of our certificates, the Gold for Managing and Measuring Customer Service, online for licensure. So since fall, there have been many extra hours and days full of negotiations, implementing new software, creating storyboards, and taping the 15 hours in a studio. Phew!
All sounds very exciting, but where does the time come from when we take on a new project? If we cannot backfill responsibilities, some things have to suffer, right? Although blessed with more requests for writing and speaking this year, it meant that my own blog suffered so the regular posts here or in LinkedIn didn’t appear on schedule. Now these are fixable things, these are things that you can’t change looking back, but you can change moving forward.
Peter Senge tells us that if you want to innovate, you have to let go of some things that you do all the time. Planned Abandonment he calls it, and I have successfully used that method when I managed a large central administration university office. But I think the key and powerful word here is “Planned”, and I learned this week that if you are not careful, you can abandon things in unplanned ways that are not fixable.
Always busy throughout my life, now in retirement, I stay even busier. After the holidays, with my New Year’s Resolutions, I wrote to some of my family and friends, personal notes not email, expressing how I wanted to stay in better touch with them. I wanted to reprioritize my life, make sure that I didn’t fill up all the spaces on my calendar with work, but added time for play, for reflection and especially time for those that I loved.
One note went to my BFF from my youth, a lady who was my roommate when I was in my late 20’s, a single parent, contemplating graduate school. She taught me so much about being compassionate, empathetic and supportive to friends and family. Plus working beside her, she taught me so much about customer service, which she felt came from that same compassionate empathetic place. As I wrote my note, I realized that I had let a few years go by, and that I had lost connection with her as I moved and transitioned over the past four years. When I didn’t hear back, and was wondering whether to write again, or try to call, as she may have been upset with me, but I put it off as I was busy.
Coming back home from working on the road this week, I got a note from her husband, a sympathy card actually. Thrilled to hear from me, he was so sorry to be the bearer of bad news. My friend passed away, three and a half years ago. Upset, sad, I was so sorry that I had neglected such an important person in my life. It can happen so easily, as we get so busy with things. And it was too late to fix this.
After a long hard reflection, I realized that she was teaching me still, mentoring me even in her death, to be more mindful, more in the moment, to be careful how I spent all my time and what I invested value in.
I had been toying offering a company scholarship for our certification trainings to offer women who do not have professional development money a way to gain skills in service delivery and management. There will be a new scholarship on our website soon named after my friend, Gwyn, who was such a compassionate friend, teacher and mentor to me. I learned empathy and compassion from her, but most of all, I learned, don’t wait!
Balance your life with work and play, projects and people because time can’t be redone. Please leave me your feedback here. I’d love to hear your stories about the things in your life that you’ll make time for now.