Jana Says

5 work lessons from sorority rush

December 12, 2012 by Jana 8 Comments

Sometimes, the parts of a situation we hate the most are the ones that teach us some of the most valuable life lessons. This is the case for me and sorority rush.

sorority — “Fabulous” is a bit of a stretch.

I hated rush. Like really, really hated it. It sucked, it was tedious, it was exhausting and once, it even prompted me to refuse to talk for an entire night (I think my husband still has the sign I wrote declaring that I was done speaking). Unfortunately for me, though, I was good at rush. This meant I often had to take the lead spots in the receiving line, help other girls who had a difficult time making small talk, and walk new sisters through the process. Kind of like a rush mentor.

Then I started thinking about how similar those tasks are to leadership roles at work. This thinking meandered down the river of too much time on my hands and led me to the island of other work lessons I learned from rush:

Work when you don’t want to. For reasons that none of us could explain, our first rush party (which was dictated by the Panhellenic Council, so we had no say in the matter) was always, every year, without fail, on Valentine’s Day. The timing was pretty amazing, actually. Those of us with boyfriends clearly hated this unfortunate circumstance, and the girls without boyfriends weren’t too pleased either. But we had to attend, especially if we wanted to keep the rush chair off our backs and not pay a fine for missing a rush party. So even though I would have rather spent the night with my boyfriend, I showed up.

The same goes for work. There will be times when you really, really don’t want to work. You’re hungover or it’s a beautiful day and you’d rather go to the park or it’s rainy and you’d rather stay in bed and watch movies or the idea of work in general makes you want to throw up. And maybe on some of those days you take a vacation day or a mental health day. You can’t always do that, though. For starters, it’s looks bad to constantly call out and two, it’s a good way to burn through your time. So, most times, you need to show up at your job even when you don’t feel like it. It’s part of having a job and being a good employee. And also keeping a job.

Show up on time. Or deal with the consequences. I wasn’t alone in the fact that I hated rush. Most of the girls in my chapter hated it. Those 4 nights were, at times, akin to torture. We’d leave the parties hoarse, exhausted, frustrated, and sometimes kind of sad. Not really incentive to show up the next night. But we did, and we did so on time. Because if we didn’t, there were consequences like fines and a really annoying lecture from the rush chair. No one wanted that. So we used those potential consequences as incentive to show up on time (even early!).

For as difficult as it may be, you need to show up to work on time. Not only is punctuality most often a job requirements but it’s part of conducting yourself professionally. It’s how a responsible employee acts, even if your boss or supervisor is chronically late. You need to be better than that. Because if you’re not, you will get into trouble in some manner, even if that manner is passive aggressive monitoring from a nosy co-worker. It’s best just to adjust your schedule, either at home or at work, to ensure that you arrive on time. [Read more…]

6 ways to succeed at your first job

December 10, 2012 by Jana 4 Comments

This is a guest post from the author behind Gen Y Finance Journey. Gen Y Finance Journey is a marketing professional in her 20’s. A former shopaholic, she’s navigating her way through adulthood learning about frugality, investing, and healthy living. Follow her on Twitter at @GenY_Finance.

Your first job out of college can be very scary. Your responsibilities may not align with what you studied in college and you’ll likely be expected to learn a lot of new skills. Some employers have structured training programs, while others don’t. You may be joining with a whole crop of recent graduates, or you may be the youngest employee. One thing is for certain though: you want to be successful at your first job.

You only get one chance to apply for jobs and not be judged for a lack of work experience, so you want to make the most of that first job. When it comes time to apply for your next job, you’ll want to have great references and a demonstrated commitment to excellence. The raises and promotions you receive in your first job will influence the types of jobs you’ll be eligible for later on and the level of compensation you can request.

Here are six things you can do to almost guarantee success at your first job and put you in a position for a great career.

DON’T SAY NO

You might have been hired for a specific job, but as a recent graduate, you need to build up your skill set, and that means accepting projects that may not be in your job description. A willingness to take on new projects will prove to your boss that you’re motivated and dedicated to your job. It conveys a desire to grow within the company and will set you up nicely for raises and promotions. Supervisors really like people who are willing to go above and beyond the call of duty.

Taking on new projects will also help you build your resume for when it comes time to look for a new job. To increase your skill set, you could take courses, but that requires you to pay course fees and put in extra hours outside of work. When you learn new skills on the job, you’re getting paid for your time.

When your boss asks if you’d like to take on a new project, unless you’re already completely swamped with existing projects, you should say yes.

IT’S OK TO MAKE MISTAKES…

We had a recent graduate join our department a few months ago. He was joining us three weeks before our biggest conference of the year. We have a huge, ornate booth and throw a big party at this conference. It requires a lot of planning. We drafted him to help us prepare all of our shipments and take a carload of boxes to our shipment center. He then stayed back at home while the other three of us went to the conference, where we realized upon unpacking that one of the boxes was missing. We figured that either he left the box at the office or the shipment center forgot to send it. I said to my boss, “I hope the shipment center finds it, I would hate for the new kid to have made such a big mistake in his first month. He’ll feel awful!” To which my boss replied, “I hope he was the one who made the mistake, because it will be a really good learning experience for him and he’ll figure out early on how important it is to double check everything.”

When you’re 22, nobody expects you to be perfect. If you make a mistake, don’t try to shirk responsibility or pretend the mistake never happened. Own up to the mistake. Your boss will appreciate your honesty and will trust you more in the future. Imagine you’re a manager and one of your team members made a mistake. Wouldn’t you want to know what happened so you could figure out a resolution? It will be scary the first time you realize you made a mistake and have to tell your boss about it, but it will be a great learning experience and will hopefully strengthen your relationship with your boss.

On the other hand, if your boss reacts negatively and makes you feel terrible about making a mistake, that’s a good indication that you might not want to stay in this position for too long. You’ll keep making occasional mistakes throughout your career, and you don’t want to have a boss who is going to make you feel awful about every single one of them.

[Read more…]

It’s all in the words we choose

December 7, 2012 by Jana 11 Comments

Shameless plug: When you’re done reading this post, check out the program description (if you haven’t already) for Bloggers Helping Bloggers, the mentoring program I founded a few months ago. The pilot phase just finished earlier this week and, with the help of J. Money at Budgets Are Sexy, I’m revamping the program for the next round (scheduled to begin in January 2013). We’ve got a lot of fun things planned and I hope you’ll join us, along with the other mentors and mentees already on board!

Every night, before I go to bed, I take a 20 mg pill of Celexa. I do it so I can function as a normal, non-depressed, slightly less anxious, and productive person. Deciding that I needed medication was not easy; I didn’t want to become dependent on it and I really wanted to overcome my depression without the aid of pills. But, when several months of therapy and only part-time work, failed to show improvement, I knew I needed to do something else. Even if that method was my last, and completely undesirable, resort. So I went to my doctor (my therapist cannot prescribe medication) and obtained my prescription.

And I’ll tell you what. It’s made all the difference. Within a few days, I started feeling like myself again. Everyone close to me could see it, too, because many of them commented on the change in my personality. I could see, mainly in my ability to write and work and function as a wife and mother and friend. Eventually I had to admit, that yes, the medication did help and I had to admit that I needed it (for the record, this is the third time I’ve been on medication for depression. The other two times, the medication made my depression worse so I stopped taking it. I know now I was on the wrong meds).

It is for this reason that blog posts encouraging people to “choose happiness” bother me. It’s not like picking a breakfast cereal or a car; for many of us, it’s not that easy to just choose, no matter how much we may want it. We can follow all the advice in those posts and books perfectly yet something doesn’t click. And, believe it or not, when you’re trying to choose happiness and it doesn’t work, it just makes the depression worse. No one wants to be depressed (well, maybe some people do. I don’t know) and when we dispense advice that essentially dismisses the fact that there’s something chemically wrong with a person, telling them that they’re just making bad choices, it doesn’t help their situation.

Please trust me on that one.

But what the hell does this have to do with money?

As personal finance bloggers, we tend to overlook the fact that people might not have the skills to just get a job or create a budget or even open a bank account. We take for granted the knowledge we’ve acquired and assume that everyone has that same foundation. They don’t. I worked for years with people who barely knew how to pay their bills, obtain a non-driver’s license ID, or even how to dress properly for court, let alone a job interview. It was frustrating, exhausting, and even maddening to see their lack of skills. But sadly, it’s just a fact.

We have a responsibility to those people, to those who don’t have our knowledge and experience, to give them information they can use without assuming they have even an inkling about where to start. We can’t just tell them “create a budget” or “get a part-time job” or “pay your bills on time”. We have to tell them how and, if we can’t explain it, we need to point them to resources that can. It’s also important that remind them that at one point, we didn’t have that information either. But we learned it through hard work and asking questions and researching and learning. And we must encourage them to do the same.

So, before you dispense generic advice and commands, remember the people who might not have an easy time following them for whatever reason. It might not make a difference in what you say but it might make a difference in how you say it.

And that can be just as impactful.

7 money lessons from NaNoWriMo

December 5, 2012 by Jana 13 Comments

Last month, I decided to participate in NaNoWriMo. For those of you who don’t know, NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. It’s a month long “contest” to write a 50,000 word novel in just those 30 days. It can be the crappiest novel ever written, making 50 Shades of Gray look like a Shakespearean masterpiece, but the point is just to write. Get your ideas on metaphorical or literal paper. And if you win, you get a cool looking badge like this:

That’s right. I won! I actually finished my novel on November 28 after a marathon day of writing approximately 7000 words. I went into the contest having already written about 9100 words but in the spirit of being honest, I wrote 50,000 on top of that. And then some which brought my grand total to around 61,000 words. I still have a long way to go but at least the framework is there. I have a place to start.

Which feels really, really good.

Of course this got me thinking about how completing NaNo was really no different than paying down debt or getting your finances on track. While the end goal is different, the process is really the same.

Make a commitment. I tried for years (seriously, years. Like 4 of them) to participate in NaNo. But it was always a half-hearted attempt. Since my heart wasn’t in it, the end result was nonexistent. This year, though, I decided to go for it. All in. No holds barred. And I won! I made a commitment to myself that I would finish Money application: When it comes to taking control of your finances, you need to do the same. One day, you just decide “today’s the day” and you never look back. [Read more…]

The year I made a difference (reposted)

December 3, 2012 by Jana 11 Comments

This post was originally published on November 30, 2011. But I felt that it needed sharing again, just as a reminder that we all have the ability to make a small impact on someone’s life.

Now that holiday season is in full swing, there’s no shortage of people asking for money. I’ve already discussed how I manage the holiday creep. But this story is a little different. This is a story about how I, along with 3 friends, changed Christmas for one family. We didn’t do it because we wanted anything in return. We didn’t do it because we felt overwhelmed with the holiday spirit. We didn’t do it because we needed a year-end tax break. No, we did it because this was a hardworking, kind family with 2 parents doing all they could to provide for their kids and Christmas wasn’t in the budget. There was no way we were going to allow this family to forgo Christmas. So we changed it.

First, a little background about the family. At this time, they were a married couple with 4 children (they’ve since added one more). For years, she was a stay at home mom and he worked in a hospital as an X-ray tech I believe. They owned a modest house in rural Indiana and were doing fine. Then he lost his job. The family had to obtain food stamps and Medicaid (if I remember correctly). They worked themselves into debt trying to pay bills on his new salary as a fast food worker. She gave up being a SAHM and went to work in a school cafeteria. The money was enough to keep them afloat but it didn’t leave a lot of room for extras.

She took to a money forum to learn how to control her spending, pay down debt and manage their finances. Watching her progress in her thought process and money management skills was incredible. She came so far in such a short time that it broke my heart reading the desperation in her words when she would talk about Christmas. She wanted to so much to provide for her kids but in her heart of hearts, she knew she couldn’t. Enter me.

Having been in a situation where I didn’t know how I was going to provide Christmas and/or Hanukkah gifts for my child, I couldn’t bear the thought of someone else being in that position. So I got the idea that I would adopt her family. Except I couldn’t do it myself. I enlisted 3 other women from our forum and together, the 4 of us adopted this family. Since there were 4 kids, we each became Santa’s little helper for 1 of them. And because the parents worked so damn hard, we gifted the couple with something. I also snuck a little gift for the mom into my package.

At first it seemed like it would be a daunting task. I wasn’t sure that the other women would agree to do it but sure enough, they did. Once I had the crew assembled, I contacted the mom to let her know what was going on. I didn’t want to insult her and I was so worried that I might. To my sheer delight, she was not only not insulted, she tried to convince me that they didn’t deserve it (guess who won that debate?). From there, we were able to collect a list of the children’s likes and interests and clothing sizes. We each used our own judgment and budget guidelines when selecting the gifts, and we tried to stagger the arrival of the packages so nothing seemed conspicuous to the kids (2 of them were roughly preteen age at the time).

To make sure that the parents didn’t feel totally left out, we made sure to leave all the gifts unwrapped. By letting them wrap the gifts, it gave them that sense that they could still do something for the kids (also, it let them preview the gifts so that they were not totally surprised and they could screen for anything they might not approve of). When she sent me the email that all of the packages had arrived, I breathed a sigh of relief that everything had gone smoothly and as planned.

The words of gratitude that I received after Christmas reinforced to me that not only had we done a good thing, but that we had picked a very deserving family. Working in the field that I work in, it’s easy to see families fail to appreciate what it done for them. They feel almost entitled to it. But not this family. To this day, she still feels that they weren’t deserving of what we did. Let me put that to rest. They were. They absolutely were. And she still tells me what a difference we made to their family that year and how that gesture continued to give them hope and reassurance that things were bound to get better.

I know what we did was not a grand gesture or elaborate or even that expensive. But knowing it made a difference to that family, even for just one year, was absolutely worth it. And, if given the chance, I’d do it all over again.