OMG - You've Been Acked!

I thought I'd heard it all:

BTW, COB, PTO, FYI, TGIF, ASAP….

But every new assignment brings its own unique collections of alphabets which takes getting used to.

ROEs, NLRs, ORSs, KNAs, SIPs, TICs and what have you.

Initially it can be a challenge to have to deal with these new acronyms and to have to commit to memory what each of them means.

But if you're diligent, you'll soon find yourself tossing them around with your new co-workers like Frisbees.

After a while, you may GSUTI (Get So Used To It), you might find yourself considering a NFWA (Novel Filled With Acronyms).

One that’s packed with FE&A (Fun, Excitement and Adventure).

Of course, because I am an SBP (Super Busy Person) at the moment, the novel will have to wait and you will have to SFTP (Settle For This Post).

Which, I’ll have you know, is being typed by me AAFP (At A Furious Pace.)

Yes, I’ve been so TSOT (Terribly Short on Time) recently, I’ve had to belt out my posts AAFP.

Reason being, I am currently a DVTD (Daily Visitor To Dublin).

A DVTD? What's that?

Try 45MOW (45 Miles One Way).

AYTWWATEOTW! (And You Thought Whitefield Was At The End of the World!).

Ok, are you getting tired already? Is this post FYOSO (Freaking You Out Sort Of)?

Are you going - WUWM (What’s Up With Minothi?). Has she lost her marbles?

I'm JHF (Just Having Fun).

Just Trying to Make LOOL (Lemons Out of Lemonade).

Before I end this TAAN (Terrible And Abominable Nonsense), there is one last thing I HTS (Have To Say).

YBA.  (You’ve been Acked!).

P.S. AATFRADVA. As Always Thanks For Reading and Do Visit Again.

P.S. 2: DCB  AWFN (Do Come Back –A Week From Now).

P.S. 3: Phew! Thanks for letting me get that out of my system and have a great day.  Or as an acronym-happy person (or company) would say... "HAGD!"

Can a job hunting book show you the path back to yourself?

Yes, if it’s Richard Nelson Bolles’ What Color is Your Parachute?

If you’re a flower that thrives at 2000 ft above sea level, you will find out how to uproot yourself from the 200 ft level and plant new seeds where you will thrive.

If your interests run to psychiatry, carpentry and gardening, you will discover how to find the link between all three of your interests.

If you are going to an interview, you will learn to think of it as a blind date and improve both your interviewing skills and your dating skills.

You will never blow your chances at an interview again because of what Bolles calls mosquitoes - those tiny things which can instantly turn an interviewer off.

You will discover flower power after reading Parachute and find yourself writing Seven Stories About Yourself. You never know – you may even be able to start blogging after getting those down on paper.

If you’re tired or retired, faded or jaded, reinventing yourself will take some creative thinking.  Richard Nelson Bolles shows you how.

What Color is your Parachute? was full of ahas for me.

For instance, Bolles talks about how you should answer every interview question you are asked in under 2 minutes.

 “Aha,” I said to myself, remembering how I blew that one - at the one and only ad agency interview I got called to in the U.S.

I clearly violated the rule big time, because after wrapping up a good one and a half hours with me - the interviewer said to me (edge in the voice and all) “well, I don't believe you are what we need at this time. But best of luck with your job search. And here's a tip - try to be more conscious of the other person's time in the future. You were supposed to be here for half an hour!!!”

Ouch!

Good career planning starts with the person in the mirror rather than the opportunities in the job market.

You can get to know that person again with the help of Nelson Bolles’ book.

P.S.  As always thanks for reading and do visit again.

P.S. 2 :  If you are looking for resume tips, while What Color is Your Parachute? has plenty of them, you can also check out my post Resume Tips from Fortune 500 companies.

P.S. 3:  What Color is Your Parachute? contains several exercises to help you discover who you really are and what you really want.  You can prime yourself for those exercises by playing the Judge and Jury game suggested in my post How To Feel Good About Yourself When the Chips are Down.

P.S. 4:  Speaking of mosquitoes, there are bad mosquitoes which can blow your chances at interviews.  But there are also good mosquitoes which can make you a better person. I have written about some of those good mosquitoes in my post “You are a Mosquito in Somebody’s Room”.  You can read about those mosquitoes here.

What I think About When I Wear My Different Hats...

Triple Hatter

One Gal.  3 Hats.

I am an Incentive Compensation Management pro who does Commissions Administration and Implementations.

I am a Writer who writes advertising copy and a blog.

I am a Mother.

One Gal. 3 Hats.

So the question is…

….what do I think about when I wear my different hats?

I'll tell you.... 

What I Think About When I Wear My Incentive Compensation Management Hat...

With the grease still on my fingers from an implementations project, here’s what my thoughts have run to recently – which both users and business architects of Xactly Incent will relate to: 

Xactly Plan Design Object

1. I found myself wishing (not for the first time) that Xactly Incent wouldn’t take you back to Page 1 each time you saved a rule.  Given that an average implementation has 700 rules or more, life would be so much easier, if after one clicked "Save", the application would keep you at the same point rather than take you back to the first page of the Rules object.
2. I found myself also wishing the rules were numbered, so if I was making a change to only some of the rules, say Rules 280 to 400, (not an uncommon scenario), I could keep track of the ones I had already changed with the help of the numbers.

I have oodles of thoughts like these when I am working on implementations – these are just the most recent ones.

What I Think About When I Wear My ICM-2  Hat (Ideas for Change and Motivation)...

Here are 2 recent thoughts:

Water Usage

1. In the shower the other day, I thought back to when I lived in India and would use just one bucket of water for a bath. This got me thinking. Like the two minute timer on the electric toothbrush which beeps when 2 minutes are up, I wondered if shower heads couldn't come with a timer which would beep when you had used enough water for a bath (one bucket of water) and would beep again at the end of every extra bucket of water used and give you a read of the total number of buckets used when you turned off the shower.  If people knew by how many buckets they had exceeded the expected amount of water for a shower, would it motivate them to cut back a bit? I think so!

Public Service

1. I also had this idea the other day about getting people just out of school to sign up for Public Service. I wondered whether one could offer to give them student loans at a reduced interest rate or free higher education for one year after a specified number of years of public service.  Alternatively, if they were already through with college and had student loan debt, they could get some immediate loan forgiveness, or get their interest rate reduced - if they volunteered to do some accredited Public Service for the next 2 or 3 or 4 years.  The amount of reduction and forgiveness could be tiered – with the maximum accruing to work that was harder to do or required the longest commitment.

Of course, because I read a lot, it’s entirely possible that both these ideas are not new and I might have read them somewhere. But I thought I'd put it out there, anyway.

Moving on to my third hat...

What I Think About When I Wear My Mom Hat....

I recently thought about how I had morphed from Tiger Mom to Helicopter Mom to Hippie Mom and accepted several realities I could never have imagined myself doing before.  I have shared this in my post It’s Called Motherhood 2. 

Homework and Tests

Also, I recently thought about the fact that my daughter who has always been pretty good about her homework, has never been one to do so well on tests.  And then it dawned on me that life is more like homework than like tests.  Meaning, on the job, we are likely to utilize multiple resources to solve something – look it up on the internet, ask a friend, read the instructions several times, ask someone else to interpret the problems for us – these are all homework activities.  On a test, you can do none of these things. You are on your own, with just your head, a 2b pencil and a calculator – with the clock ticking.

Of course one can argue that if you have done your homework, you should be able to do well on any test - as my brother in law M argued when I shared this thought with him recently.

Please feel free to poke holes in my thinking likewise.

These are just some of the things I think about when I wear my different hats.   

What are some of the things that you think about when you wear your different hats? Do share your thoughts.

P.S.: If you are intrigued by my different hats and want to know more, you can check out the following posts:

My Day Job. Xactly.  More or Less

It's Called Motherhood -2

Or the post just before this one.... Dare to Share.

P.S.2:  As always, thanks for reading and do visit again. 

Dare to Share

(Picture taken from the cover of a book on quilting - available on Amazon)

Recently I read Richard Nelson Bolles’ What Color is Your Parachute?

More than job searching, I found myself doing some soul searching after reading it.

It led to me to accept myself in my entirety – my past, my present and my future - all the colors and threads which are the patchwork of my life.

I found myself compelled to write a “Dare to Share” piece about myself.

I had already Dared to Share about my personal life right here on this blog in posts such as "If Life is So Good, Why do I Feel so Sad?

Now I felt compelled to “Dare to Share” in my professional life. 

Triple Hatter (which you can read below) was the result.

I have already "Dared to Share" it once.

It made me feel so empowered.

I hope it will motivate you to read What Color is Your Parachute? (when you get a chance) but more importantly, to learn to accept who you are in your entirety (past, present and future)...

... and then to “Dare to Share” everything you are with the world.

My Dare to Share piece is below.  Read it.  Then go write yours. And start sharing it with the world.

Triple Hatter

One Gal.  3 Hats.

I am a Commissions Analyst who writes advertising copy and a blog.

I am a Copywriter who does Commissions Administrations and Implementations.

I am a Commissions Admin who does Xactly Implementations

You could call me a Triple Hatter.

One Gal. 3 Hats.

Solution Partners Inc, Los Gatos

This is where I picked up my Implementations Hat.

I said goodbye to fear and a regular paycheck when I signed up to be a contract Business Architect with Solution Partners and do Xactly Incent Implementations for different companies.

2 years and 4 projects later (including two 3-month stints at Salesforce Inc) – I am still entranced with the nuts and bolts of the Xactly Incent Commissions Machine.

And now I can’t wait to see what it’s like to work both sides of the equation – the administration side and the implementation side. 

Which company will provide me with the opportunity to put both these skills to work? It’s exciting to speculate and wonder.

Extreme Networks, Santa Clara

This is where the Commissions Admin Experience I had gained at Palm was put to the test.

And my ideas about my skills and traits.

Excel whiz. 

Good at picking up new software. 

Accurate.

Deadline Oriented.

Dependable.

I was there 5 years and had a fantastic relationship with my boss.

Need I say more? 

Palm Inc

This is where I got my training wheels as a Commissions Admin.

No sooner did my boss sign me on to assist with commissions, when she went out on Maternity Leave.

And never returned.

So I was Palm’s one-woman commissions team from that point on.

Of course, this meant I needed to take off my training wheels ASAP.

Staying up nights with multiple Excel books, I did.

It paid off.

Minoo Jha Life Strategies

My writing hat.

It’s my oldest hat.

Writing comes naturally.

As flying to a bird.

For a while, it looked like I had a broken wing.

But when in December of 2010, I started blogging, I knew I was back in the groove.

I write the Minoo Jha Life Strategies blog.

Posting regularly to it, inviting guest posts and promoting it via Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.

Triple Hatter.

That’s me.

P.S.  A link to one of my 2 career related posts is provided below:

http://minoojha-actionableideas.blogspot.com/2011/01/my-day-job-xactly-more-or-less.html

P.S.  Thanks for reading my Dare to Share piece and please visit Minoo Jha Life Strategies again. 

Before I let you go, I would like to mention one other hat to you - My Motherhood Hat.

I’ve covered some of the humorous sides of wearing this hat in my post It’s Called Motherhood -1 and in a second post It’s Called Motherhood-2.

P.S. How many hats do you wear?  What are your favorite hats?  How many hats have you worn before, some which you were sad to take off, some which you were glad to take off?  Dare to Share! Everything about you is precious.  All the colors and threads that have made up your life are uniquely yours. Don't be afraid to share it with the world.