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.

This week I want to profile Laura Flanders, a woman doing extraordinarily important work in the field of alternative journalism. I call the sort of work she does “alternative” because you won’t find it on any of the big-name, mainstream network outlets. Instead, she hosts GRITtv and GRITradio, two viewer-supported news-talk shows that can be seen and heard in a variety of formats and places, including via several online venues.

Actually, I discovered Flanders when I saw a clip of GRITtv on YouTube. I immediately liked her interview style. She was brassy and insightful. I decided, right then and there, to find out more about her and discovered that she’s obviously a very busy woman who’s got her finger in about twenty-five different pies at any given moment (see lauraflanders.com). In addition to her GRIT work, she is a best-selling author and has been interviewed, on TV, by every big name under the sun. In my opinion, though, her biggest contribution is the work she does for the GRIT network of programs.

The GRITtv site describes Flanders as someone who has “built a reputation for presenting new perspectives on national and international issues, and for introducing non-traditional ‘experts’ into the conventional political debate.” That mission, to give a platform to the type of voices one doesn’t normally hear on mainstream TV, is vital. One of my great frustrations when I’m home in the States comes as I watch what passes for debate on CNN or some such place. I get tired of hearing the same old senators and military commanders and think tankers and et cetera champion the same old tired views. What I crave is the unique perspective, the outside-the-box rationale! For those with similar frustrations and desires, Laura Flanders and GRITtv will be your antidote.

To give you a little taste of Flanders’ style and the show itself, I’ve included a brief clip. If you like what you see, have a longer look and remember that GRITtv accepts viewer contributions.