Savvy Women

It’s mid-August and that can only mean one thing: Soon—too soon—I’ll be heading back to work and into the classroom.

One of the perks of being an educator is that I get a lot of time off. But there’s a dark cloud to that silver lining. Frequent and extended vacations have a tendency to make me soft. After so much time away from my job, it’s hard to readjust to the rigors and stresses of being a teacher once everything gets going again.

The video I’ve decided to blog this week is about working and the workplace. It’s an interview with Tony Schwartz, author of The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working. Based upon what I was able to glean from the clip, Schwartz’s book is a collection of strategies that workers can use to keep themselves from burning out or going postal. Take a look…

I listened with interest at what the author had to say and found a lot of good there. I noticed, however, that he seemed to be focusing on techniques that employees could use to dial it back once things had already gotten out of hand. I didn’t hear a lot of proactive advice about steps people could take to avoid getting to the breaking point in the first place, so I’d like to put on my advice-giving hat once again and add to what Schwartz had to say.

First of all, it’s important to remember that the average person is going to spend roughly forty years working during the course of her lifetime. That’s a long time. To use an analogy, that makes having a career a lot like running a marathon. A person has to pace herself during such a long race to ensure that she makes it to the “finish line.” A person who takes off in a sprint is likely to become prematurely exhausted and demoralized. It’s all about establishing a winning pace at the workplace that can be maintained over the long haul. I’m certainly not advising people to become slackers. I am suggesting that they should work smarter and more efficiently.

Secondly, it’s important to set some ground rules and then stick to them. In my own case, I decided some years ago not to work at nights and on the weekends unless it was absolutely necessary for me to do so. Luckily, to date, I’ve managed to hold firm to this conviction. As a result, I am able to separate my work life from the rest of my life. Now, when I am “at work,” I am fully there, and vice versa. If I allowed work activities to regularly encroach upon my free time, I’m sure I’d be fed up in no time at all and then my job performance would drop dramatically.

Bottom line: You’ve only been given one life to live, so try to enjoy it.

I knew the moment I watched this CNN video that I’d have to blog it. It’s a story that resonates with me on many different levels.

First of all, Sibahle Tshibika, the video’s protagonist, has a very strong presence in the film despite being so soft-spoken. When I look at her, I see a deep-seated sadness (or world weariness) in her eyes, but, while watching her dance, I can’t help but feel that she’s learned to use her emotionality as a kind of fuel, one that will take her far in life (it has already carried her across a vast ocean) even if she doesn’t end up being a professional performer. Rosemary Ringer, the viewer who felt compelled to contact Atlanta Ballet after watching the HBO documentary, mentions, when discussing Tshibika’s early life, that our dancer grew up in impoverished surroundings. After taking a look at this very interesting site about the township where our aspirant was born and had her formative experiences, it’s easy to see that Ringer was perhaps being a bit generous in her assessment of the place.

As a student of the arts, I have often been fascinated by creative endeavors done by “outsiders,” meaning people who are not part of the cultural elite. These artists are often called “self-taught” and the work that they do is sometimes referred to as “naïve.” I would say that Sibahle falls into this category. I would also say that it would be a misnomer to call her (or her dancing) naïve, at least in the more pejorative sense of what that word can mean. (An aside: one of my favorite women “outsider” writers is Tillie Olsen, profiled here.)

Now, getting back to the CNN video. I found the message to be a powerful one: When one door closes, another one always opens. I have discovered this to be true in my own life. I can’t think of many times when I didn’t get a second chance at something after the first one came and went.

To use another metaphor, there really is truth to the old saying that every cloud has a silver lining.