The Career Clinic Blog

“One of my favorite things is seeing who signed off on packing slips. Signatures range from crayon to pen…”

That’s one happy Goat Milk Stuff customer, commenting on my latest Huffington Post post about a business I couldn’t wait to spread the word about.

There’s a lot of silliness at the click of your fingers--fake news, singing goats, whatever.

I’ll take real goats, please--milked by real kids, and turned into real soap that helps real people who have real problems with their skin.

I mean, really.

Isn’t this the most enchanting family?

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If someone tells you how he’s feeling, say “I understand” at your own risk.

How can you possibly understand what someone else is going through? Even if you’ve had the same problem, you haven’t brought his life experience to it--so you’re still in the dark.

If that person is suffering, saying “I’m sorry” is almost never a bad move. Unless you’ve contributed to that suffering! In that case “I’m sorry”--if offered too soon--might feel like, “Can we get this over with? I messed up, I’m sorry, why can’t you move on?”

I don’t know about you, but I’m not on a mission to collect apologies. A lot of problems can’t be solved. What I want most is the feeling that I’m not alone in my grief.

And when I’m getting grief from someone? I try to tell myself criticism is a gift. It isn’t good news or bad news.

It’s just information.

Use it or don’t use it--but thank your lucky stars you’re surrounded by people who tell you the truth.

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“A statistic doesn’t have anything to do with you, and it never will.”

The career consultant Michael Bryant is quick to offer his clients reassurance like this, when they’re in danger of buckling under the weight of so much gloom in the news.

I suggest you try it yourself.

Watch any twenty-four hour news channel for--what?--twenty minutes, then ask yourself a few questions.

Is there anything I can do to stop the collapse of (insert cherished institution here)? Is there anything I can do to better my own financial situation? What, exactly, is stopping me?

Perhaps what’s stopping you is you.

Well then.

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Katie wasn’t due for a couple of weeks, but the program director at the radio station where I used to work wanted to know what my plans were when “it” was born. I smiled. “Keep working!” I said, brightly. He didn’t press me for details, and I didn’t offer any.

When Kate arrived I took all of a week off before I went into the station to do the talk show. Slowly I resumed my news-gathering duties, with a twist. I gave Dad--whose office by then was in our home--daily breaks to do his own work, from about nine to eleven and again from one to about four-thirty.

At the ripe old age of two weeks, Katie started making my news rounds with me. I’d set her little seat on the floor and rock her with my foot while I got accident reports from the police department. The gals in the sheriff’s office practically fought over her while I surveyed their reports. And the gals in the court administrator’s office took their turns cooing over her while I found out how various cases were proceeding.

One day, when one of the other reporters seemed annoyed that I was--what? pulling this off?--I made the rounds a second time, and asked the people I worked with if it was a problem for them that Katie came with me. Did they mind?

“Are you kidding?” they all said. “The only thing that would bother us is if you ever showed up without her!”

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How did you hear about the planes crashing into the World Trade Center?

I heard it on the radio after dropping Katie off at school. A guy I used to work with was interviewing the Minnesota-based parent of a New York City resident.

Heather Armstrong was in Los Angeles.

Michelle Ward was in New York City.

Darrell and I spent much of the rest of the week glued to the ABC News coverage anchored by Peter Jennings, a big reason he’s the only celebrity whose death has made me cry. Katie, then in first grade, weighed in. “It’s like the whole world’s been turned upside down,” she said, “and changed from good to bad.”

I’ve always been haunted by what the people who knew they were going to die were thinking before they did. That’s why I’ve taken such comfort in another short but bittersweet story of 9/11. It’s a trailer for a new book, and I’ll share that in my last post this week.

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There's no good news, no bad news. There's just...news.

Ever heard that?

Gretchen Rubin from The Happiness Project makes a compelling case for it, I think.

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“So. How’s Potpourri?”

That’s what my uncle wondered at a family gathering many years ago.

Potpourri?

Did he mean…Hodgepodge?

Yes! Hodgepodge. That was the name of my first radio talk show. Thirty minutes of bliss (well, for me anyway) Monday through Friday--talking to everyone from city council members to middle schoolers to even former University of Indiana head basketball coach Bobby Knight.

The price? Being a small-town radio news reporter.

Sold.

I worked long hours, once in a while around the clock--telling stories about fires (and fire drills), car accidents (and bicycle accidents)…and the wildest, most contentious meeting I’d ever seen, about whether to change the name of the Detroit Country Club to the Detroit Lakes Country Club (motion defeated).

One of my favorites was about a roadkill deer propped up in the stall in a school bathroom: “There was a girl in the boys’ bathroom all right. But this time the girl was a doe, a deer, a female deer…”

There was a kid who got broccoli in his trick-or-treat bag, and an elderly woman who got stuck in an elevator at a local nursing home--but didn’t panic because she’s “not the kind of person who gets scared in small spaces.”

I wrote sparkling leads. When government officials were inspecting roads I filed a live report: “It’s 8:08. Do you know where your county commissioners are?”

I’d rush into the studio from covering the latest and try to ad-lib my way through a newscast I didn’t have time to write. That’s how KDLM listeners learned someone had won an award for the photograph of a cow jumping off of a dock (it was a dog).

I was in my thirties, hadn’t made this little money since in my teens, and was deliriously happy.

But I couldn’t get the folks in law enforcement to give me any scoops.

One day, tired of hearing what a great news director Darrell Anderson had been, I called him to suggest coffee. “I don’t know how to get through to these people,” I told him. “They trusted you. Would you mind giving me some pointers?” He offered to be my guest on Hodgepodge, I accepted, we started talking and haven’t stopped, and yep--that’s where he proposed. On the air, in the same tiny radio studio where we’d met.

It’s been seventeen years--on a Friday, November 26th--and we stop talking long enough to sleep. Or…not. Most nights we’re joking around way past when we should go to sleep. This after working side by side all day in an office only slightly bigger than that Hodgepodge studio.

Yeah I know.

I’ve jinxed everything.

Bring it.

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A group of leading historians held a press conference recently at the National Geographic Society to announce they had "entirely fabricated" ancient Greece. Don't take my word for it. Take it from the folks at The Onion.

If you're getting all your news from reliable sources, maybe it's time to lighten up.

And have a good weekend!

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Think of the last time you got some good news. I mean, really really really good news. Now do something motivational speaker Mark Jeffries suggests. Think of what you were doing the day before you got that good news.

It kind of changes how you look at today, doesn't it?

You never know what delights may be just around the corner.

Have a good day. Have a good weekend. Have a good life!

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Once upon a time I was a reporter at a small-town radio station and got a request--no, make that a demand--to run a certain story during the five o’clock news. I was so put off by how rudely the request was worded I couldn’t see right away that it was, in fact, news. Later I apologized to the person who’d made the submission. “I let my feelings get in the way of doing the right thing,” I told him, “and I’m sorry.”

I suggested next time he put it to me something like, “This might be a good story.” You know, fax it over as a suggestion. “You’d probably get so much coverage you’d be sorry you brought it up,” I teased him. He flashed me the biggest smile and told me he could use a class in interpersonal skills. We were pals after that, and worked really well together.

The person I confided in about this, whose news judgment I respected above all others (okay, Darrell) (this is how we met, but that’s another story), said he probably would’ve done whatever he wanted with the story and let the guy think whatever he wanted. “Your way was better,” he told me. “Honest, sincere, classy.”

Whatever it was, it worked.

Consultant Richard Gallagher wouldn’t be surprised. He says you can never successfully criticize anyone for anything. I’d accidentally followed Richard’s advice, long before I knew about it. Instead of lashing out at the man, I shared how one approach had made me feel--and how a slightly different one would have given him everything he wanted, maybe more.

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