The Career Clinic Blog

If you're going to take a meeting, take a meeting. Advice from Dave Fleming, who turned eighteen years in corporate America into--what else?--a comedy career. Dave doesn't think a BlackBerry deserves a place at your conference room table--unless your work is truly a matter of life, death, or national security. You're meeting in person for a reason. Right? Deal with that and with each other, not your screens. The faster you do, Dave points out, the faster people can get back to, well, their screens.

And by the way, your employees might wish meetings lasted longer if you traded that conference table for a picnic table once in a while. You wouldn't believe the happiness boost you'll get, Dave says, from something as simple as moving a meeting outdoors.

Would someone please pass the lemonade?

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The Happiness Project is getting a lot of play these days, and I couldn't be happier for author Gretchen Rubin. Gretchen invited readers to help her compile a list of happiness-boosting blogs, and mine made the cut. Okay granted, that's because I added it--but with Gretchen's encouragement. She apparently doesn’t relish asking friends to nominate her for things, either. It's enough to make you (or rather, me) want to stay anonymous.

When I first heard about Gretchen's blog I was enchanted by the title, by the paradox. Though with apologies to my agent, I wouldn't have attempted a project like this. I don't think happiness is the point. I think having a point is the point. Happiness is, to me, a byproduct.

The proof is in the way it just sort of sneaks up on you. You get up, you have your coffee, you try to make something happen. And suddenly you're brushing snow off your car windows and you think, "Oh! This is what happiness feels like!" Enjoy that while it lasts, because right around the bend there's a bus coming straight at you.

Good thing. Easy is boring. Isn't it?

Perhaps the writer EL Konigsburg said it best: "Happiness is excitement that has found a settling-down place, but there's always a little corner that keeps flapping around."

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Happiness in this World is a blog by Dr. Alex Lickerman and it's subtitled "Reflections of a Buddhist Physician." Part of the reason I admire Alex is the example he sets for his patients. I almost typed "patience" just now, which is eerie, because that's one way Buddhism informs Alex's practice. By paying attention to how he feels, he can see his patients not as whiners but as people with problems. It reminds me what flight attendants tell parents: "In the event of an emergency, put your oxygen mask on first." Taking care of yourself enables you to take care of others.

But how does someone like Alex, who practices medicine and teaches and blogs and spends time with his family and on and on, find time for all of it? One word, he says: boundaries. He knows what's important, and says no to the rest.

You may know people--and I used to be one of them--who have difficulty saying no because they want others to like them. Then they get overwhelmed, and don't like themselves.

I've decided it's more important to be genuine than it is to be liked, though ironically (or not) people will find you more likeable if you're genuine.

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The Happiness Project is a blog I started reading because I couldn’t resist the title. I kept going back for gems like this, a quote from Academy Award-winning film editor and sound designer Walter Murch: “As I’ve gone through life, I’ve found that your chances for happiness are increased if you wind up doing something that is a reflection of what you loved most when you were somewhere between nine and eleven years old.”

When I look back on my childhood, I see a deliriously happy eleven-year-old in front of a pile of index cards and magic markers. I was making notes for a speech contest, and I was in heaven. The topic was conserving our natural resources, and I wrote a song for my introduction: “Fish gotta swim and birds gotta fly. But they don’t last long if they try…”

It gets worse. I sang those words when I delivered the speech to an assembly of the whole school, because if there was anything I liked better than magic markers it was a microphone--and I was fearless. The judges rewarded my courage with a first-place trophy, and even the cool kids shook my hand afterward.

I was hooked on storytelling, so naturally I gravitated toward a career in…engineering? How does that happen? Voiceover artist Joan Baker has a guess, and I’ll share it in the next post.

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What do you do when you hate your job but aren't ready to quit? I'll answer with my old standby: "I don't know. But here's what I did..."

I took a feature writing class given by Vince Staten, then a columnist for a newspaper in Louisville. Our task for the semester was to sell an article to a magazine. What a novel idea, if you'll forgive me: a class where the point was to get a job.

Vince gave me an A- on my first assignment--a piece about telemarketing--and lots of constructive criticism. "The lead is, I'm sure, appropriate for the audience," he wrote in part, "but it still is kind of dull." He had to leave early the evening he returned our papers, but told us to stay behind and read what the rest of the class had written. The university choir was practicing down the hall and the music felt like the soundtrack to a movie, my movie. Getting published had been a lifelong dream. To finally be going for it was almost too much happiness to process.

From then on, everything revolved around that one evening a week. I sang in the car all the way to and from class.

And the boring day job? What day job? I sailed through another few years in a cubicle, daydreaming about the next article, the book I was helping Vince with (oops! getting ahead of myself here!), and the big plans I had for myself. Suddenly I wasn’t stuck in a cube, I had chosen to be there--while I saved money, plotted my escape from corporate life, and inched closer toward the life I felt born to live.

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The secret to happiness is to use your gifts. That’s according to What Color Is Your Parachute? author Dick Bolles. Your gifts have a kind of energy, Dick says, and if you don’t let that out you’ll go crazy.

Dick spent a lot of time in the workshop I attended talking about gifts. He had us write seven stories about things we’d done that we felt really, really good about. Then he put us in groups of three, and had us pick those stories apart. We decided what skills we most loved to use and where we’d most love to use them.

One night the guy sitting next to me wanted to know what my dream job was. I couldn’t even say it out loud, it seemed so out of reach. I just scribbled r-a-d-i-o in his notebook. “Oh you’d be perfect for radio!” he exclaimed, and then told me why.

Until the workshop I’d never thought of myself as a person with gifts. I mean, who does? Yet here we were, on what felt like a Christmas morning that lasted two whole weeks, unwrapping those gifts and comparing notes: “What do you think of this one? I’m going to love using this…”

Being with Dick is like gazing at the Manhattan skyline from the Staten Island Ferry. Everything else just sort of falls away, except for this. Are you doing what you came here to do, or not? Are you using your gifts, or not?

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