If you’re a woman who is career focused, I know you’ve read your fair share of stories about how women are treated differently in the workplace, or how it’s impossible for women to strike the perfect career/life balance. Recently, former Google exec Marissa Mayer announced she was taking over as CEO of Yahoo. That’s huge new, and media widely reported it, but the stories quickly turned to focus on the fact that she’s pregnant. And various news organizations wrote about advice they have for Marissa on taking over a fledgling company while handling the stress of being a first time mom.

Think about a time recently when you got really nervous or anxious because you put a load of pressure on yourself. Maybe your voice quivered and your words came out all mumbled. Maybe your hands were shaky and you started sweating. Maybe you made a mistake because you were focused too hard and trying not to make a mistake.

Admit it – you fear failure. Maybe you don’t worry about failing or dwell on your failures as much as others do, but that doesn’t mean you wake up every day and say “I’m willing and ready to fail!” No one likes to fail, but it’s inevitable. Here’s the good thing about failure: With every… Read More

Let’s have a chat about ethics and how it relates to your success in life and business, shall we? The definition of ethics is quite easy to grasp: Ethics is a system of moral principles. Put simply, being an ethical person means you have morals and values and you respect other people.

When you study public relations in college like I did, you learn early on about the importance of ethics to the profession. The Public Relations Society of America even has its own ethics guidelines, the PRSA Code of Ethics. Even if you’re not in the public relations industry, it’s just plain smart to adhere to ethics in any and all professional conduct.

We could all afford to remove things from our lives that aren’t doing us any good. We make excuses for keeping these things around – we’re too busy, it takes too much time, we don’t know how, we’re scared, we’re not ready for change, etc.

If you’ve already graduated from college, what is the best thing you did that helped you succeed in your first full time job? I bet if you did an internship during college, that would be your answer (providing you had a positive internship experience). It’s definitely mine.

It’s called “bittersweet change” for a reason. If you dissect the first word in the phrase, you’ll find there’s a combination of negative and positive, with the negative leading and positive following. We recognize change as bittersweet when we know something good will ultimately follow something difficult or challenging. I’ve learned that change is all about perseverance, and that is particularly true with this type of change.

I’ve gone through two experiences recently that 100% fall into the category of bittersweet change – the death of my grandmother and stepping out of a role for an organization I’ve dedicated myself (and much of my free time) to for the past three years. Let me explain how both of these changes are bittersweet and how through my experience with them, I better understand how to handle similar changes in the future (and hopefully you will, too).

Are you the type of person who asks for help the minute you need it? Or, do you always do everything possible to figure things out on your own before you dare ask for someone to help you? Maybe you’re like me and you’re somewhere in between. I’m not too stubborn to ask for help when I know I need it, but I also like to do some digging before I reach out to someone else. I won’t lie – my impatience gets the best of me sometimes and I ask before I’ve put in enough effort on my own, but I’m working on not doing that.

The same thing frequently happens to me on Sunday nights. As I’m finishing up tasks that needed to get done over the weekend and planning for the upcoming week, the anxiety starts to set it. Anxiety about what I didn’t get accomplished during the weekend. Anxiety about the week to come and everything on my to-do list. Anxiety about having anxiety.