The following is about someone very near and dear to my heart.  Join me.  I think you’ll like it and be able to relate!

She feels like she could take on the world today or any day for that matter.  A fluff of her hair, a good suit and a single coat of lipstick can take her very far.  She has worked hard to arrive at where she is professionally and you better take her seriously because she knows her stuff.  The executive coaching/organizational development world to a hot blond female in it is no joking matter.  The PhD, late nights, fights to prove she is smarter than her hair color would lead anyone to believe, years of OJT and unsolicited advances from clients or co-workers have brought her to where she is now.  Struggling to make a name for herself – just slightly short of ,and much more serious than, a very well known Dr. Phil!  (It doesn’t hurt to dream, right?)

She is a talented seller-got that from her dad.  It isn’t what she considers selling.  It simply comes naturally and she doesn’t even think about it or consider it a skill.  She sees herself as a problem solver and her clients appreciate that.  They don’t feel like they’ve been sold to or even pitched.  She is simply the solution to their problem and they simply thank her for it-sometimes handsomely!

Her client list is extensive and recognizable: Clif Bar, Microsoft, Kaiser Permanente, Colgate Palmolive, Fuji Hunt, Loves Travel Stops, Oklahoma State University, Aggreko, Eisai, Interwoven, Wrigley, just to name a few.  Problems from long-term executive coaching assignments to succession planning fall under her expertise.  She was never one to shy away from the usual team building or life coaching, and can even list a staff position at a nationally recognized nursing college to her list of “at a girls.”

Her days are filled with the meat of her operations: coaching calls, content development, research, meetings with clients, and local events.  But then there are the other things.  The messy ones.  Not that she isn’t good at them, if she applies herself.  The travel plans, email interactions for numerous things (participant lists, reminders, booking confirmations, assessment instructions, and the like), organizing the research, editing materials for workshops, rescheduling appointments for no-show client phone calls-none of which she minds doing.

Then there is the list of things she does in the wee hours of the morning at the absolutely last possible second she can get it done: compiling materials, boxing for shipping, updating her social networks, typing a blog post, sending thank you notes to clients, organizing expense reports from workshop trips, RFP research and submissions, proofing quotes and getting them to clients and, basically, ordering more pens for God’s sake!

It isn’t unusual for her clients to get emails from her at 3 in the morning, a most likely time for her to be up and working, and the least likely time for her phone to be ringing.  If she could only figure out how to download and print assessment results, while she packed boxes and her suite case and slept at the same time life would be so much easier!  Just last week she found herself sitting in a taxi in New York traffic headed for her next keynote speaker event while doing a coaching call she inadvertently forgot to move the following week’s call because of her trip to Dallas.  Details, details, details.  The client never knew she wasn’t at her desk but she had yet to realize she wouldn’t have time to type her notes up for the clients boss before their debrief the following week.

This week, today, right now, she is standing in line for an overbooked flight from Chicago with limited cell reception and her flight confirmation no where to be found-if she even remembered to pack the darn thing.  The last time she checked the big picture wasn’t the problem!  It was the crease in the napkin on the linen tablecloth of the buffet in the dinning room of the big picture that was driving her crazy.  The details of her consulting career hadn’t cost her a client yet and hopefully they wouldn’t, but she did know the details were costing her new ones.  She just didn’t have the time or energy to return half the phone calls she was receiving or follow up on any of the referrals piling up in her inbox.

Can you identify with this?

Did any of that mirror yourself?

If you answered yes to either question please click and fill out the swank form at the bottom of my About page.  That is all you need to do!

Nibbling away -

Sundi

PS – oh my goodness! If you need more encouragement then read this.

I came across Nicholas Carr’s Is Google Making Us Stupid?  last spring.  Since then I’ve been paying close attention to the reading behavior of my 11-year-old.

I’m an avid reader.  It started when I was in elementary school.  Into adulthood I’ve continued to read several authors over the decades and can go through books at an almost alarming rate - which actually makes me prefer a series to a single book.

Although I know there are several places you can read books online I tend to not like sitting in one spot, especially a desk chair or even up-right period, and scrolling while I read.  Although I typically get books from the library a UPS delivery of an Amazon box at our house is just this side of Christmas morning.  The only thing better than the crack of a new spine and the smell of a new book is the sweetness of a newborn baby.

My oldest son seems to have picked up this love.  He has read some of my old favorites and shared some of his favorites with me.  Even the second of my 7-year-old twins seems to be following in our path.  The first-born twin, not so much.

The concerns which Carr outlines have not come to pass in my family yet; however, it won’t surprise me if they do.  The best I can do is pass my love of reading on to my children.  Honestly, shouldn’t every parent be doing that anyway?  And if they aren’t maybe we digressed way before the internet became the norm.  Shall we face it…some people just don’t have a love for reading.

With that I say, Thank you Mr. Internet.  I think we should rejoice for every vehicle we use to get any generation to consume information.  Fortunately, I realize my children will do it differently.  “It” being almost everything I’ve ever done in my past!

Actually, I wonder if history is only repeating itself.  When remote controls for televisions came out did someone say we would never view television the same again?  Did they say the networks were doomed because viewers would never stay on a station through the commercials?  Just to make it clear – I am old enough to remember NOT having remote controls but NOT old enough to remember what the “experts” thought about them.

Even if the book industry is doomed I have some books on hold for me at the library so I need go.

Nibbling away -

Sundi

Being a farmers wife, she put substantial meals on the table three times a day, the first one being before sane people rollover in the morning, let alone actually get out of bed.  She kept a garden, did the laundry – which was line-dried, performed typical farm chores like milking the cows, raised two kids, had a strawberry patch bigger than her house and was one of the craftiest people I knew (as in made cool things by hand).

I’m sure some of that seems standard to a house wife today – except in my memories it was 35 years ago!

Without a lawn service she tended multiple flower beds around the house and mowed the yard…most likely because her husband was tending the fields and didn’t care how tall the grass was.

The garden was in a pasture far from the house and she didn’t have a sprinkler system.  In fact, I recall filling buckets and barrels full of water and trucking them to the garden.

By the way, the line dried clothes were by choice.  She actually did own a dryer.

Not one stitch of food on her table came from the freezer, save the meat, which was most likely a product of the farm and kept in a deep freeze in a building detached from the farm house.

The can goods were kept in the cellar along with bushels of potatoes.  I can’t think of a single canned fruit or vegetable she didn’t have down there.  When I say canned I don’t mean off the shelf of the grocery store.  I’m actually talking about jars which is called canned when you do it yourself.

The meals she created weren’t just for her family of four – especially during planting and harvesting.  I remember spending almost as long packing up the food as we did cooking it.  We’d truck it out to the fields too.  I remember the fresh baked Monster Cookies – chunky peanut butter, oatmeal, M&Ms, raisins AND chocolate chips.  I still have that recipe somewhere…

Over the years she accumulated eight grandchildren.  One of them was me.

All that just to tell you my mother was born and raised on a farm.  She named me Sundi (pronounced sun, like our star, plus de as in details) because Sunday was her favorite day of the week.  It was her favorite because she got to spend it with her dad.  Go figure.

Sometimes I wonder if I could have pulled off a Carol or Maxine – after my grandmother.

Nibbling away -

Sundi