Rhythm and regularity
Hi folks! Here are the first, second and third editions of this newsletter in case you missed it. If you are seeing this for the first time, it's very possible that the first few emails were automatically filtered to junk. THANK YOU to my Product Manager friends for all of your site fix suggestions, there have been a bunch of changes to the copy, content (FAQs), and functionality of my site (that pesky "Testimonial" lozenge has now been fixed)! As always, if you no longer want to receive these emails, the unsubscribe button is at the bottom of this message.
September is a strange month. After 20 years of living in New York, I finally uncovered a predictable rhythm to it. Labor Day would always herald the coming of the race to the finish line for all of the year end activities and... the inevitable question.
After the lazy days of August and those honeyed, quiet evenings on the beach; finding myself at my brightly lit desk would trigger a regular existential crisis: is this the work I really want to be doing? If my inbound inquiries are anything to go by, it seems like that experience was not isolated to me...
In North America, September is the start of the Harvest Season. After I started picking jobs using my WANT list, that is actually how it felt in my career. I was able to look at the work my team and I had successfully achieved and then focus on what we needed to do close out the year successfully. It's because I wasn't wasting any effort wondering if I was even doing the right thing. Just as well, because on my compensation team, where our calendar and financial years lined up, there was no time or energy to waste on anything that didn't involve getting to the right answer for 20,000+ people in 40 countries.
Take this as a reminder from your friendly former HR professional: planning for your year-end performance reviews and compensation conversations starts NOW. While you are in the build-up to the full out sprint between mid-October and the end of November, make time to write down on a piece of paper: 3 things you helped your manager accomplish this year, 2 ways you plan to grow to help your manager achieve their big goals in the year ahead, and 1 thing where you could have done better in the last year.
Simply thinking about these now and in this way will change how you engage with your manager over the next few weeks. If you do not know how they feel about what they've accomplished, now you will, and you can use that frame to think about how you write your self-evaluation.
As for me?
My last email indicated the breadth of things I have done this year. But I want to share two from September that I am particularly proud of.
First: September marks the first time that I have been able to pay all of my monthly expenses exclusively from my career consulting work. Thank you to every single person who has sent a prospect my way. As always: can you think of 1-2 people in your network (maybe your friends / acquaintances who have hated being back at their desks since the end of summer) who need my help?
Next: I have always loved being a regular. In New York, I went to the same place for brunch on most Saturdays for more than 15 years. When folks have visited me, I have instinctively taken them to a restaurant in Malasaña. In July I took my childhood bestie there to celebrate making my move. In August, I limped in on my broken foot to take my mum to a place I considered special. Our bartender, a petite, energetic, perfectly-put-together Venezuelan woman switched to perfectly rendered English when it became clear that I was going to subject her to halting, mangled Spanish. It was a mercy for everyone involved. Really. In September, I took some friends to dinner there. It was only after we had ordered and I had answered all my beautiful bartender's questions about how my mother was doing (wonderfully, btw), that she mentioned (approvingly) that I had completed the entire conversation in Spanish. I have become a regular!
I am being coy about this place because I want you to visit so I can take you there.
I know I said I'd have an update on my Spanish visa this month, but I underestimated the bureaucratic hunger for more and increasingly rarefied documents. Hopefully I will have more to share in next month's newsletter about it. That said - next month is looking packed: I return to my old stomping grounds. I will be in New York for the entire month seeing clients and enjoying the best month of the year in New York City (fight me).
As always, I want to hear from you, thank you for staying to the end. I hope everyone's last quarter of the year if off to a good start.
