I was introduced to napping at work when I interned for a syndication company. The business had a large nap room people could use when they needed to take some time.

I was floored and obsessed by this perk. Sadly, I’ve not seen this offered at any other business. But this no-nap policy isn’t surprising, considering America’s 24-hour-a-day work norm. But it turns out, a company-wide nap policy actually may benefit employers, profits, and most certainly, employees.

Nap rooms

Major companies, such as the Huffington Post, have nap rooms employees can use to rest their eyes, or take power naps.

Similarly, Zappos, the online shoe retailer known for fully subsidized employee health insurance, has had a nap room at its Las Vegas, Nevada, headquarters since it launched.

“It was born from our focus on employee happiness and wellness,” a Zappos representative, says.

“We know how much sleep impacts well-being.”

“Furnished with a couch, two recliners, a beanbag chair, and more, the rooms are available 24/7, and are especially frequented by those on staff who work overnight shifts,” CNN adds.

Naps for all

Naps aren’t just for people who work odd hours or overnight shifts—they’re beneficial to every worker. The trick to napping, though, is getting the perfect amount of shuteye while on the clock… or at lunch.

Sleep experts say that effective power naps last 20 minutes. If you nap longer than 20 minutes, you could wake feeling groggy and tired. That grogginess is brought on by your body entering its REM cycle.

But if you’re seriously lacking in the sleep department, experts suggest sleeping 90 minutes to accumulate restorative sleep.

Although you can’t catch 90 minutes of rest on the clock, a weekend afternoon is great for pulling the blinds and zonking out.

No nap room, no problem

If you’re one of the lucky American employees who works in an office that applauds reasonable napping on the clock, take advantage of downtime.

If you have an office, shut your door, turn off electronic devices, turn down the heat to 65 degrees F and dim lights.

Don’t have an office? Sneak away to a quiet place in the building, head out to your car, or book a conference room that rarely gets used.

And don’t forget to make your nap extra special. Have a dedicated pillow, blanket, and eye mask you keep at work. These items will help set the mood for shuteye.

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We all want to feel successful, but how that looks is changing. Do happiness and success go hand in hand?

It is commonplace these days for business owners and those looking to climb the corporate ladder to hire a business coach. But this looks a lot different today than even a decade ago. Rather than simply focusing on tactics that can get you more views, sales, likes, or subscribers, coaches these days are sharing a new viewpoint.

Happiness and joy in what you do is at the forefront of modern business coaching. Our priorities are definitely shifting and bringing a different view of success along for the ride. What we used to deem a successful life (good job, family, house, car, vacations, retirement) now looks more like health, fulfillment, and happiness. How you define that happiness is up to you.

The move toward a more holistic way of thinking and living has almost made “success” a bad word. Many business/life coaches steer clients away from using the term because of its vague and negative bottom line implications.

Is money, renown, and lots of cool stuff the equivalent of success? Sounds pretty great, right? But what if you are miserable at your job every single day of your life in exchange for these things? This may not feel successful even if it looks that way on the outside.

For example, would you feel truly successful as a dentist because it makes your father happy, when you’d really like to become a writer? Dentists make pretty good money. You’d likely be able to afford a nice house and live a more than decent lifestyle. You’d also garner the respect that goes along with being a doctor. But you absolutely cannot stand working on people’s teeth and miss the satisfaction you get from writing. Success? Maybe. Feeling successful? Not so much.

As Alain de Botton explains in his TEDTalk on this modern day conundrum, the true feeling of success boils down to one thing. And that one thing can only be determined by you. What is important to you?

Business and life coaching guru Marie Forleo says what you do for work doesn’t equal your worth, it comes from who you are as a human being. Aha! Check out the video for the rest of Marie’s steps on defining your own personal version of success.

So it seems modern day success looks a lot more like happiness and peace of mind. Not only does a higher measure of personal happiness make you feel more successful, it may actually rub off on a larger scale. Corporate happiness, or a more positive work environment, can mean greater business success organization wide.

As author, Paulo Coelho, puts it “What is success? It is being able to go to bed each night with your soul at peace.”

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Working in a male-dominated field taught me a lot about leadership, culture and success. Now, as a career coach, I have some advice for women.

After 20 years coaching both women and men through career advancement and transitions, I have learned a lot about how women are holding themselves back at work—especially in male-dominated fields, because that’s where I started my career.

I was one of the first female traders on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. When it comes to career, it would have been hard to choose a more aggressive, male-dominated field—especially in the ‘80s when I was starting out.

I faced many double standards in the workplace. At the time, there were no real laws or standards governing sexual harassment and politically incorrect behavior. I simply accepted this for what it was, as I believe most women did in that era. Whether it was projected or real, it always felt like I needed to be twice as good as the men. I loved the competition and believed if I produced the same results I would get the same monetary rewards and opportunities for advancement. Repeatedly, I found that was not the case.

After 15 years in that testosterone-driven environment, I made a change. It was fueled by a desire to wake up every morning and love what I was doing—to help people become more effective leaders, create transformational change personally and professionally, and embrace and foster accountability.

Based on my own experience and listening to the stories of more than a thousand leaders, from aspiring to world-class, here is my advice for women who want to thrive in the corporate world.

Know the Difference Between Truth and Perception

First, it’s important to remember that words and actions are filtered, received and assessed differently by men and women. If you are a powerful, decisive, assertive female leader, you are often perceived as a ball-buster, or worse. This is a cultural nuance and not always conscious—even a very enlightened man might not realize that he’s experiencing and processing men and women differently and not necessarily equally. It’s the soup of our culture but remember, an assessment is merely an assessment—it’s not the truth.

Increase Your Emotional Intelligence

Research shows that raising your emotional intelligence will take you further personally and professionally than anything else you can do. We’re often blind to ourselves and we don’t accurately perceive how we’re being experienced by others. We’re not aware that the impact of what we say and do is often wildly different than our intent. Read up on emotional intelligence, learn how to read a room or engage in individual coaching to accelerate your growth in this area.

It’s Not About “Acting Like a Man”

We lose our authentic selves when we try to model what the male version of power looks like. Yes, women need to get comfortable with confrontation, stand strong in convictions and make decisions quickly, but those are not exclusively male traits. It’s a stereotype that women make emotional decisions and men make analytical decisions. In reality, we all work with three brains. We actually have brain cells in our hearts, stomachs, too. Don’t diminish the power of your instincts—a recent study shows that when it comes to decision-making, instinct may even trump analytics.

Manage Your Emotions

There is no more important leadership skill than the ability to manage yourself. Dave Ulrich, a thought leader in management, once believed that the most important skill for a leader was the ability to inspire teams. But, he found that the self-management of one’s thoughts and mood states was actually more important. Controlling your inner world makes the biggest difference in executive leadership. Women may be more emotionally based; couple that with low self-esteem, a problem many women face, and it’s a career-threatening combination.

Build Your Confidence

If self-confidence is an issue, tackle it. For me, sports made the biggest impact on my ability to succeed in a male-dominated field. I felt like I had an edge because I was fearless and competitive in a way most women were not. All great leaders possess authentic confidence. One of the best ways for women to build confidence is by setting a goal they think is out of their reach and then achieving it. Improv classes are a great way to practice discomfort and learn to think on your feet while building self-esteem.

Toot Your Own Horn

In contrast to men, women are less comfortable showcasing their accomplishments and do less to promote and strategize their personal brand. This has a domino effect because women are not only more humble, they discount their talent and success, while men tend to accentuate their talents. The divide between what an employer thinks an equally qualified man and woman are worth starts with how they present and value themselves in the interview process. Look for opportunities to strategically highlight your achievements.

Stop Being Too Nice

As women, we tend toward being nice and accommodating. You will never be seen as a leader if your primary mode of engagement in the workplace is caretaking. One of my favorite books on this subject is “Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office”—every woman will identify with at least one of its eye-opening lessons.

Control the Conversation

Leadership occurs every time there is a conversation, and each conversation offers the opportunity for impact and influence. Your words hold the possibility for building your self-esteem or destroying it. In fact, your leadership, your future, your success—and even what’s possible for you and not possible for you—they are all created by these conversational moments. How aware are you of these moments? Words are the building blocks to creating the life you want. Choose them carefully.

The most powerful and transformational shift you can make is in how you perceive your environment, respond to your environment and move through hard times.

At the end of the day, find your voice and nurture your strengths—be fearless and be bold.

 Jody Michael is a Chicago-based career coach. Get more leadership advice on her blog.

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Should more of us be working from home? Probably.

For those of us who don’t work at home, the chance to email in your pajamas may seem tempting, but as anyone working from home will tell you, that’s not what it’s all about. In fact, many people, whether in their pajamas or not, find that working at home makes them more productive. There are of course obstacles – like that pile of dishes you feel like you should get to – but ultimately, there are many benefits to working from home, and not just for personal reasons.

From environmental to economic, there is a long list of benefits to working from home, and in a day and age where more companies and jobs aren’t restricted by having to have a physical presence, a lot of us are in positions where working remotely could be an option. So why don’t more companies get behind having their employees work at home? Because there is an idea that to gauge productivity you have to see it taking place – an idea that if we are going to transform how we work, may need to change. “If managers would just establish goals, rhythms of communication and metrics, than they would actually know whether someone was being productive or not, regardless of where the person was physically sitting,” Kevin Kruse wrote in Forbes.

That policy goes for the self-employed worker as well; if you don’t set up goals, metrics and methods for being productive, then an entire day can easily go to waste. But the reason people are committed to setting up processes that keep them productive is that the benefits to working from home are many. That doesn’t mean that you should drop everything and telecommute all the time – working from home comes with the good and the bad  – but if we think about the environment, economics and time management, there is certainly an argument to be made for allowing people to work from home, at least part of the time.

1. It’s good for the environment

That hour and a half traffic jam that you sat in this morning? Imagine if 10 percent of the commuters on a daily basis started telecommuting instead. What if it was 20 percent? What if it was 50 percent? There are certain jobs that require a physical presence, but there are many jobs that can easily be done remotely. Some argue that the environmental benefits aren’t always clean cut – there are a lot of factors like how energy efficient your home is compared to your office – but one thing is for sure: less time spent in a car commuting is a good thing, both for you and the environment.

2. There are no geographic boundaries for talent

Fostering a culture that allows people to be working from home allows employers to not be limited by geography. If top talent is on the other side of the country, if the employer is able to set up an efficient and productive way for employees to work remotely, there’s nothing stopping them from hiring someone who is based elsewhere.

3. The office is not always a space of productivity

As author, speaker and digital guru Paul Boag says, “phone calls, meetings, colleagues, noise and other distractions make the office a far worse place to focus than home.” Just because you’re in the same space as your colleagues doesn’t mean that you’re getting things done. Many people need a quite space to be productive, and working at home allows you to get rid of the normal distractions linked to a traditional office environment.

4. You can get the benefits of co-working

The beauty of working from home? It makes you flexible to take advantage of co-working opportunities and shared workspaces. Because let’s be honest, sometimes you want to get out of your house and be in an office environment. But a co-working space is different than being stuck to the same office day in and day out. The flexibility to take advantage of a variety of shared spaces whenever you want to allows you to meet new people and decide when and where you want your office environment.

5. A few days at home are better than none

Even just a few days a week of working at home can be a good thing, both for the employer and the employee. “More research needs to be done on creative work and teamwork, but the evidence still suggests that with most jobs, a good rule of thumb is to let employees have one to two days a week at home. It’s hugely beneficial to their well-being, helps you attract talent, and lowers attrition,” says Stanford Professor of Economics Nicholas Bloom.

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Image: 55Laney69

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If the American Dream has turned into a nightmare, how do we redefine success?

A friend posted an article recently titled “Welcome’ to the Sharing Economy – Also Known as the Collapse of the American Dream.” The author, Steven Strauss of Harvard Kennedy School, was criticizing the growth of “micro-entrepreneurs” (a word used by Thomas Friedman in an article praising the benefits of this type of system), the clearest example being Airbnb. Why go full entrepreneur and open a hotel if you can just rent out your room and be a micro-entrepreneur?  Friedman argues that this type of economy is the way of the future, but for Strauss, it’s the demise of the one thing that we’re all taught to go after: The American Dream.

But what is the American Dream?

While we all have an idea of what the American Dream is and represents, for the actual definition we go back to 1930, when writer and historian James Truslow Adams penned “The Epic of America.” In this book he defines the American Dream as the “dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement.”

While we may not learn the term right away, we are quickly taught the iconic symbols: a house with a white picket fence, a smiling family, a hardworking individual that starts with barely anything and works his or her way up. Success. Respect. Riches. That’s Strauss’ world. The one he is so afraid a collaborative economy will detract from.

But step back to look at the American Dream and it’s easy to see that much of it is more of an illusion than reality. Be born into a well-to-do family and your chances of being well-to-do yourself are much higher than those around you. Get stuck with a low paying job and these days, you might be hard pressed to ever get out of it. We’re stressed, we’re depressed and we’re overweight. Is that what we dream of? Not to be cliche or anything, but isn’t this a nightmare?

It’s time we redefined the American Dream. A “dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone” doesn’t have to mean that everyone should aspire to be CEOs of large corporations. We know exactly the impact that those large corporations have on the general public and environment. No, we need a new understanding of “better and richer and fuller,” one that takes into consideration our actual happiness and the health of our community.

Maybe it’s time we redefined our visions of success. In this new economy, where we aim to support each other, collaborate, and leave a better world for our children, here are seven different ways to redefine success.

1. Building Your Own Tiny Home

Take up less space, live off the grid and have more time for your friends and family. Yes, please.

2. Being Flexible

Stuck in an office from 9-to-5 is out, working long hours when you want to, for a cause you believe in, is in. Traditionalists may view this as inefficient slacking. Modernists will see this as the new way of getting things done, finding a balance between work and personal life that isn’t defined by a certain time of day.

3. Becoming More Self Sufficient

In an industrialized world, we have forgotten most of the tangible skills of our forefathers, all in the name of efficiency. Baking your own bread, mending your own clothes, coming together and taking care of a neighborhood vegetable garden – this isn’t vintage, this is the way of the future.

4. Considering Others and Building Community

We have cultivated a culture of poverty, and unless we take a serious step back to address steps to fix it, we can expect to continue to live in a world of haves and have-nots. The world isn’t about stepping on other people’s shoulders to make your own way tot the top, it’s about banding together to ensure that we’re all healthy and happy. Because a community loves, nurtures and supports. It’s time to accept that we can’t do it all alone.

5. Publishing Your Own Book

I don’t mean sending off proposals and waiting for huge publishers to call. I mean bleeding sweat and tears to do it all yourself. Fifty years ago this would have been unimaginable. Today, you’re only limited by your own determination.

6. Maintaining Your Health

You have one task every single day: keep yourself alive. Most of us however are literally killing ourselves with our diets and our sedentary lifestyles. It’s a privilege to be able to be active. Use your body and treat it well.

7. (Really) Enjoying Life

Why is it that we commend those around us for being busy, for working 90 hour weeks, for cramming in a salad in between meetings, while we scoff at the French and their two hour lunches and wonder how in God’s name those Europeans with their long vacations ever get anything done? Reality check people: a job is supposed to give you the means to live your life, not the other way around. Take a step back, slow down, enjoy the little things.

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The post The New American Dream: 7 Different Definitions of Success appeared first on EcoSalon.

Is it ever appropriate to work for free? Even if you’re a freelancer?

If you’re a creative, there is a 99.9 percent chance that you have at one point or another worked for free. Sure, you were “paid” in coffee or some other barter system, but there was no cash transaction. And even if you have never worked for free, it’s 99.99 percent certain that you have worked for less money then you deserved to earn.

It has been said that we are the slaves of the internet, and in a culture of content creation, the value of content has gone down. The market is saturated, and when there are so many wanting to make it and offering up their services for free, the chance that you will get paid for your content goes down.

Of course this is an oversimplification of a problem that ultimately comes down to a vicious cycle: individuals undervalue their own work, which in turn makes other people undervalue it as well. If you want your work to be seen as valuable, then you have to see it as valuable first, especially if you’re embarking on a career as a freelancer.

Should you work for free?

No. Well, sometimes yes. But, no, really you should always try to say no. Except for in those situations where you should say yes.

You can see why this is complicated.

Working for free sets a precedent, and while you may just want to get your name out there, if you’re trying to build a client list and a respectable reputation, taking jobs that don’t pay anything doesn’t help you do that.

On the other hand, sometimes doing something for free isn’t necessarily about the payment, it’s about the promotion, or about spreading a certain idea.

As marketing expert and author Seth Godin says, “The more generous you are with your ideas, and the more they spread, the more likely it is your perceived value goes up.” This means, however, that you need to gauge the level at which your ideas are being spread. Free work for www.noonehaseverbeentothiswebsite.com is one thing, and an opinion piece in a nationally acclaimed newspaper, is quite another.

Need some direction in establishing whether or not you should work for free? Illustrator Jessica Hische designed the Should I Work for Free? flow chart. It’s a bit tongue in cheek and yet I have found myself referencing it regularly. In a nutshell: your mother deserves your free labor, but the established business that promises you “a good portfolio piece” doesn’t.

Talk to anyone that works in the freelance business and the likelihood is that at some point during their career they assessed a situation to evaluate whether or not they should work for free. Often times, when people have weighed the pros and cons, and know what the potential benefits of free work will be, they will go ahead and do it. Everyone has a “well, I did this for free, and then it lead to this and then it lead to this and now I am doing this other great paying project.”

And unfortunately, we live in a society where money equals success.

As Tim Kreider points out in The New York Times, “Practicalities aside, money is also how our culture defines value, and being told that what you do is of no ($0.00) value to the society you live in is, frankly, demoralizing. Even sort of insulting. And of course when you live in a culture that treats your work as frivolous you can’t help but internalize some of that devaluation and think of yourself as something less than a bona fide grown-up.”

Ultimately, it comes down to the value question: do you truly feel that your own work is being valued? And to add on the that question, have you thought about the value of the work of other people in your industry, and are you helping or hindering it?

Decide your value and do your best so that others understand that value as well.

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ColumnGraduating in the ’90s has defined my career.

Last month, I reached a huge milestone. I have kept the same full-time job for two years. Two whole years! For most 36-years-olds this would not be an accomplishment, but I have quit 10 jobs since graduating from college.

Mostly when I write about work here, I talk about wage disparities, lady CEOs and issues related to being a woman in a workplace. But, work is personal. It’s where most of us spend at least eight hours a day. So when I think about issues related to work, I think about how I got here—here being my full-time position with a healthcare startup in Chicago.

My journey starts with beer, or rather, the promise of beer. I graduated from college in the winter of 1999. I wasn’t worried about getting a job, and I had little reason to be. It was the ’90s. Armed with an English degree, so-so grades from a great school, good internship experience, and a special interest in Romantic poetry, I figured I was good. It took me about two weeks to land my first job.

I was in college during the sweet spot—after Kurt Cobain’s suicide and before Clinton didn’t have sex with that woman. During freshman year, I was told I had something called an email address and that I could go to the library to use it. I never bothered. By the time I graduated, I had a laptop with an Ethernet connection in my dorm room. Things were happening really fast and everything seemed possible.

It was the start of the dot com boom, and my generation was going to do the work thing differently. Every article I read promised me a cool office culture with a keg in the kitchen and ping pong table in the break room. I’d work hard and play hard, wear jeans every day and be surrounded by super-talented people lounging in brightly colored plastic chairs. Work was going to kick so much ass!

My first job was an entry level writing position in the marketing department of a magazine publisher in Washington, D.C. I would make enough to afford a roach-occupied (not all the way to infested) studio apartment in DuPont Circle. Signing that lease was the first of many times I incorrectly thought: I have arrived.

What I failed to take into account as I envisioned my career unfolding is that even if you are lucky enough to get a job with the makings of a cool culture, just beneath the exposed brick walls there are other factors that can totally mess things up. Some of these are: creepy co-workers, abusive bosses, absent bosses, bounced paychecks, shit commutes, weird buildings without real windows, boring work, too much work, not enough work. The possibilities for disappointment are literally endless. And those disappointments are why I kept chasing the job that the ’90s promised.

While there have been times I’ve been drunk at work, and I did once work in a loft office that had a pool table, 13 years and 10 jobs later, work has not lived up to the hype. As I am the only obvious common factor in all of the jobs that I have had, I could blame myself. But I don’t. I blame the promise of the ’90s, and most of all, I blame Fast Company magazine.

Talking about my experience with other people, I get a few reactions:

1. Oh totally, I feel the same way! We were duped. (Form the 35ish crowd)
2. Ha ha. Why the fuck would you think that? (From the 45ish crowd)
3. Wow. That would have been amazing, it took me a year to find a job and it’s not really in my field. Oh, and I lived with my parents for a while. (From the under 30s)

There are a few reasons that I have made it the two-year mark: some great co-workers, access to natural light, the ability to wear jeans, CEOs who don’t refer to me as “girl” (or worse—and yes, that has happened), fair wages, health insurance and work that I am interested in for a mission I believe in. But the biggest reason is that I finally stopped chasing the ping pong ball and gave up on the idea that I want to be surrounded by drunk people in the office.

The dream of the ’90s is alive and well in Portlandia. But here in Chicago, I’m good with life in 2013. I have learned to assess jobs for their realities, both good and bad. I have started to understand that my job doesn’t need to be perfect, and that there’s probably no such thing. I have built space for myself to do what I love (you’re reading it now) outside of my normal workday. And yes, when those Best Places to Work stories come out with photos of yoga rooms, days free of designated work hours and vegetarian snack bars—today’s version of ping pong and beer—I get a twinge of… Oh! Maybe! But then I remember what I have learned and resist applying for job number 11.

Image: Tommytoy

The post That Happened: I Was Told There Would Be Beer appeared first on EcoSalon.

By Monday morning, most of us are already longing for the weekend. Could shrinking the work week help us to be more relaxed, and thus more productive?

As a culture, America is obsessed with work. We go on fewer vacations than almost any other nationality, with millions of hourly workers without any paid time off at all. Even when we’re not physically at work, we’re scanning emails or practicing presentations. We’d like to think that a 60-hour work week brings us that much closer to success, but some research suggests being on-call 24/7 is doing just the opposite.

British architect Irena Bauman recently told BD Online that she’s closing her offices on Friday and shifting the firm to a four-day work week. “We are working a “five days in four” week because how we live as individuals has consequences for everyone else,” Bauman said. “We are not waiting for anyone else to resolve our problems. We are looking instead for how we can make our own small changes, which, if made by others too, could have a significant socially and economically beneficial impact. One of these small changes is to alter the balance between work and private life.”

Lots of companies talk about wanting employees to have a good balance between professional and personal activities, but few of them actually go the extra step by giving you more time to yourself. But forcing workers to juggle too many responsibilities within the tight parameters of a 40-hour work week almost always means a decrease in productivity, not the other way around. While counter-intuitive, businesses looking to get the best from their employees all eight hours of the day might want to consider shrinking the work week.

A new and growing body of multidisciplinary research shows that strategic renewal — including more time away from the office and longer, more frequent vacations — boosts productivity, job performance and, of course, health, according to the New York Times. “Spending more hours at work often leads to less time for sleep and insufficient sleep takes a substantial toll on performance, writes Tony Schwartz. “In a study of nearly 400 employees, published last year, researchers found that sleeping too little — defined as less than six hours each night — was one of the best predictors of on-the-job burn-out. A recent Harvard study estimated that sleep deprivation costs American companies $63.2 billion a year in lost productivity.”

Adventurous bosses like Bauman hope downsizing from a five day work week will push employees into using office time more efficiently. If you have a deadline looming, but don’t want to sacrifice any of your “Friday free time” you’re more likely to find a way to get it done by Thursday. Likewise, the dangling carrot of a three-day weekend every week is more in tune with the way humans are programmed to operate. As Schwartz explains, “Human beings aren’t designed to expend energy continuously. Rather, we’re meant to pulse between spending and recovering energy.” More time to recover means the ability to give full effort when it’s time to perform, rather than constantly operating at half-steam.

Have you ever worked for a company that utilized a shorter work week? Tell us about it in the comments!

Image: Glen_Wright

The post Could A Four-Day Work Week Make Us More Productive? appeared first on EcoSalon.

Because most of these words are dumb so we should have fun with them.

1. Can you assist me with this insertion order?
2. I make small cubicles fun.
3. I would be happy to be your human resource.
4. You won’t be needing an expense report tonight.
5. I would like to put your consulting expertise to good use.
6. Are you interested in managing my account?
7. I’d like to make you my feature PowerPoint presentation.
8. Can you help me figure out my operating system?
9. Where else can you employ that analytical ability?
10. Hard cover briefcases are so much better.
11. Your eyes are as intriguing as a good biz dev strategy.
12. My account is totally receivable.
13. Let’s get out from under this fluorescent lighting and find somewhere more comfortable.
14. I can tell you’re a team player.
15. If we went on a date, what do you think our profit and loss would be?
16. I don’t believe in automation, I am all hands on.
17. Your customer interface is impressive.
18. I would wager that two self-starters like ourselves would have a good time together.
19. Is that low-hanging fruit or are you just happy to see me?
20. You don’t need a high level of core competency to know that you’re a catch.
21. Let’s give you a skills analysis.
22. Any chance you’d be interested in drilling down with me?
23. I don’t think you and I will need any troubleshooting.
24. You’ve been running through my invoices all night.
25. I was thinking about you during that entire conference call.
26. I’m not into cold-call sales, but I’d love to have your number.
27. Can I see the inside of your cubicle?
28. Who needs a financial analysis when I know exactly where to put my money.
29. Forecasting is for people who can’t live in the moment.
30. Instead of all these policies and procedures, let’s visit the idea of free will.
31. Enterprise this.
32. Want to play a little document distribution strip poker?
33. All this corporate giving is getting me hot under the collar-you?
34. There’s nothing like a little file maintenance to keep you on your toes.
35. All this problem solving has me wanting to create problems.
36. Let’s do this, but in real time.
37. Your methodology is so smooth and deliberate.
38. Realizing we’re working on a timeline, how much time do we have to get to know each other?
39. The best part of this acquisition is you.
40. In all the power meetings I’ve ever been to, this room is one of the hottest…for real, it’s hot.
41. Don’t feel like you have to go this alone, we can tag team.
42. Should we debrief?
43. Performance evaluations are my favorite day of the year.
44. I am feeling this burn rate in many places.
45. Sometimes you just have to ask yourself, “Am I a profit or a loss?” Now which one are you?
46. Now, when you say “team building retreats,” what does that mean to you?
47. Risk management just sounds like something so clandestine!
48. You say accelerated growth, I just say hot.
49. You say there is little margin for errors but I disagree.
50. The first time I saw you, there was only word that came to mind-benchmark.

Image: mark sebastian

Conversion Rate Optimization Glossary

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An interview with Christine Gilbert, co-creator of the upcoming documentary “The Wireless Generation.”

Want to travel? Is work keeping you doing it? How would that change if you could work from anywhere? As we featured last week, that’s the lifestyle Christine & Drew Gilbert have crafted for themselves, and it’s the subject of their upcoming documentary The Wireless Generation that they’re funding the release of with a public-backed Kickstarter campaign, ending this Wednesday.

We managed to catch a moment with Christine to ask her about the surprises, challenges and popular misconceptions surrounding a career on the road – and how budding digital nomads might take those first few steps towards doing it themselves…

1. What’s the biggest pleasant surprise you’ve encountered in shifting to a nomadic lifestyle – something you never saw coming during the planning stages?

It came when I had my son, after about two years of being nomadic. Having two stay-at-home parents has been a gift. It’s made everything so much better. When he was little and I felt tied to him all day long, we’d just travel around and I’d carry him in a sling. If he was up all night, it was okay, we just slept in the next day. It made that first year an absolute joy – between the support of having my husband there and getting to continue to travel with a very small child – we loved it. It’s an absolute luxury that most people don’t get to experience and we made a lot of sacrifices to get it. We live frugally, we work hard on our businesses, we own very little stuff. But to us, it’s the best part of having a completely flexible lifestyle.

2. What’s the biggest misconception you’re hearing about working on the road, from people who haven’t tried it?

I think a lot of people assume that we live out of suitcases all year long. My husband and I love to travel but we get burned out on moving around and will pick a place to settle down, renting an apartment, unpacking our things, buying kitchen gadgets. We’ll spend as much time in a place until we get that “feeling” again and decide it’s time to try some new adventure. I know people who travel very hard and others who have been expats in the same place for years. It’s not so much about being a nomad, but the flexibility that comes with that, even if that means heading back home and doing something completely different. It’s about choice not necessarily how or where you travel.

3. How has filming this documentary made you feel about the nature of the traditional corporate model of working, in an office or cubicle?

Before I left my job, I worked at GE as a manager, overseeing software installs and we worked with mostly virtual teams – meaning we would install the software remotely, have all of our meetings over voice or video conference and sometimes we’d even do our training via video. GE did that because, I think, they realized that it was cheaper for them and the client. The client didn’t mind once they realized they didn’t have to pay to fly out a dozen consultants and pay for us to eat reheated eggs at the Hampton Inn.

So I came into this with a strong feeling that the only thing holding back most companies was fear. Mostly it’s managers who think they can’t manage without face-to-face time (it does take practice but you can absolutely do it). During the documentary I heard the same thing, they tried to work with their boss but it was an uphill battle and one person, a professor at a university was let go when he brought it up. Now, that’s changing. One big website the Web Worker Daily just pulled their design and said they were over-hauling it, because these concepts of “how do we communicate virtually” or “how do teams collaborate remotely” have become so normalized that it’s no longer “working online” it’s just working. The tools, even if you work in an office, have just become part of our workflow.

4. How has working while traveling, assembling your mobile office and opening your laptop in so many different places, affected your work habits?

It was a big shift for me in the beginning, but not for technical reasons – it was easy enough to get online and do my work – but for emotional ones. I was lonely in the beginning. I think for most working adults a big piece of our social interaction comes from our workplace and if you jump into working from home, you’ll find this empty spot that you used to fill with little conversations with coworkers or just having other people around. I’m not sure how long it took me to get over it, but I did try to work in cafes in the beginning – anything so I didn’t feel so disconnected. Slowly overtime I built a new network of friends, most of them online, who are there to chat with when I’m procrastinating and some of them I’ve met in real life, others I’ve just known online for years.

5. What’s the most surprising thing your research for the film uncovered?

We tried to find people who came from completely different education, career and economic backgrounds because we suspected that this wasn’t just a 20-something web designer phenomenon, it was broader than that. The surprising thing was hearing the same message over and over again, about how this lifestyle change quickly became routine, meaning it wasn’t that big of a deal. They didn’t constantly think about “working online” or travel.

Instead, in their own ways, they were talking about finding meaning in everything except their work. It shifted how they thought of themselves, their place in the world, and their priorities. You might talk to someone back home at a cocktail party about their life and they’ll say they got a new job or they might get promoted and they bought a house. Talking to these folks they were focused on these other things – learning something new like photography or surfing or yoga, where they want to volunteer next, the things they want to show their children in the world, the side projects they are working on, experiences they want to have like hiking Everest base camp or getting a Master Dive certification. They’re just as hard working and ambitious as our cocktail-hour friends from home but there is a shift from working and acquiring things to chasing meaningful experiences that was universal.

6. After speaking to so many people who have taken the same itinerant career route as you have, what do you think are the most common psychological hurdles in the way of creating a location-independent lifestyle?

Fear of what people will think of you. Fear of failing miserably and publicly. Fear of not being able to pull it off. I was petrified, myself in 2008. I got a $200,000/year job offer two weeks before I was scheduled to move to Madrid, after I had quit my GE job and my family thought I was an IDIOT when I said no. I mean, they were really just disgusted with me. I said at the time, “I’ve been working in this field for eight years now. I made a lot of money. I saved. When do I earn permission to do what I want with my life? When does it end?”

There was stunned silence at the table and I think I finished my glass of wine very quickly. It was hard to do, especially as someone who grew up in a poor family with a single mother. I was throwing away all of the sacrifices she made for me. I knew though, in my heart, I had to do it. It worked out. I was lucky. Being a writer is not the easy way to go about this, but somehow I’ve made it work. I will say this though, that tremendous fear disappeared when I landed in Madrid. My husband and I drove around on a motorbike through the city and I’ve never been so happy in my life. We ate tapas, we took photos, we traveled around and tried to learn Spanish. As much as people are afraid to do it, they have no idea that those feelings can be just as strong in the opposite direction once you make the leap: pure joy. That was my story anyway.

7. Apart from watching the film when it’s released (or seeing it ahead of release by pledging $25 or more to the campaign), what advice would you give budding digital nomads on what to do and where to go to learn the basics?

Don’t be a writer! Ha. It can take 3-5 years to break into writing, so while it seems to be the most popular path, it’s actually quite hard. I’d look for work doing practical things in the beginning like teaching English (if you don’t have a college degree you can still teach English in some countries – Vietnam is one) or working as a virtual assistant. Then I’d work on your passion project at night, whether it’s writing or photography or starting your own online business. If you’re American under 30 you can work & travel in Australia with their working holiday visa. If you’re a manual worker or you’d like to try out working on farms there are tons of opportunities with WWOOF. Bars, hostels and resorts hire lots of young people under the table during high season.

Before you do anyone of that, start living cheap now! Save everything you can, it helps to have 1-2 years of expenses to start out, especially if you’re starting a new career. If you’re already working in a remote-friendly job like IT, design, editing, etc already, then you’re in good shape. If your current boss won’t go remote, you can look for other work, even if it’s a lower salary (it’s much cheaper to live overseas than it is to live in the U.S. or other western countries). Don’t let your first no scare you off. Assume it will happen and doggedly pursue your goal until it does. It worked for everyone I interviewed (even the laid off professor who later found online teaching work for a different university before moving to Thailand).

Thanks, Christine!

(Become a backer of The Wireless Generation here).

Image: katerha; Editor B; Powderruns.

The post Interview: Christine Gilbert of ‘The Wireless Generation’ On Working From Anywhere appeared first on EcoSalon.