I try to go for a long walk (6 – 7 miles) every morning and then a shorter walk (about 4 miles) every evening. I try to time my evening walks so that I catch the sunset over the Mississippi River – they’re pretty stunning and last night was no exception.
Sometimes I’ll share the pictures to Facebook. The sharing is a combination of knowing that I have a few friends that appreciate images like that and also as a way to show-off how amazing life is down here (nobody knows that I’m single and unemployed with no friends, but they do see peaceful sunsets).
My morning walks are when I do a lot of thinking. Sometimes I get so caught up in thinking about something that I start to write as I walk and can easily spend a few miles with my head down typing on my phone. Yesterday morning, the first note I wrote down was limbo: time spent thinking about my past (deep recall) or trying to figure out my future. The other day as we drove to a concert, I was telling my friend Stacy that I have a lot of time on my hands, and I’ve been practicing a type of deep recall. I explained what I meant by sharing an oral version of my post “Is it FOMO…” and how I’m remembering and viewing the significance of different events in my life. She agreed I have a lot of time on my hands. It seems that when I’m not stuck thinking about the past (deep or recent) I’m stuck thinking about my future – what type of life do I want to live, where will I live it, what will I do and who will be with me? The tiny Buddha in me shakes his head because he knows I should be living in the present.
Fortunately, Buddhism is full of contradictions, and the loophole is, what if living in the present means thinking about the past or the future? Feeling a little smug for having outwitted my brain, I opted to lean in to my thoughts yesterday morning. I didn’t write down a lot of notes. For most of my morning walk I was spinning between doing consulting work; answering the barrage of mildly accusatory interview questions “why did you leave your last job after such a short amount of time, what went wrong, did you get fired, surely you must have messed up, how much money did you bring in to the organization?” and starting my own non-profit. All three ideas/trains of thought were interrelated. I am still extremely disappointed that my last job didn’t work out. I still struggle to answer that tough interview question without piling on and thinking about what a shit show the organization was. This thinking usually leads to a whole list of things that were wrong with the place, most of which come back to my boss being an incompetent and distrustful manager. To say that an employee was toxic and yet to have done nothing about it for years is inexcusable. To say that meeting devolve into bitch sessions and so there are no team meeting is a lack of leadership. This thinking spills in to wondering why I haven’t landed a leadership job like that and a retelling to myself of what I accomplished in the short time I was there (all revenue streams had increased and I was directly responsible for securing over $15,000 in new sponsorship revenue) – I was new, learning, and already earning my keep.
That thinking sent me down the path of consulting… a number of the nonprofits that I’ve seen and researched struggle with fundraising because they don’t have the systems in place to properly execute. Building relationships takes time. Ideally you want everything to be as customized and personalized as possible… but as nonprofits grow from a handful of donors to hundreds or thousands of donors, you need to automate certain aspects of your fundraising – it’s nearly impossible to provide personalized customer service to that many donors. As I walked, I thought about the analogy to writing. Good writers understand language and usage and know when to sacrifice proper usage for voice and readability – they understand the rules and know which ones to break. A good fundraising operation is built on good procedures and knows the exceptions to the rules. I was just starting to build out the procedures at my last job (in addition to raising money).
I don’t always like the “asking” part of fundraising. In fact, I’ve done little of direct asking. It’s uncomfortable – even for seasoned fundraisers. I always felt that the best pitches are the ones that don’t have to be made. The relationship is strong and built on trust and when you say you need help the donor says what can I do? What I do like about fundraising is the give and take relationship building that happens. For me, that’s where the creativity comes in. I like thinking creatively about fundraising and how I could manage my own nonprofit fundraising group or something.
Since I’ve been applying for nonprofit jobs, I try to keep my head in that space. Every nonprofit is looking for ways to raise money. There are a handful of traditional channels – events and sponsorships, grants, donors, fee-for-service, memberships, etc. I’m not a huge fan of fundraising events. Donors have raced their share of 5k races and golfed their share of charity outings. They’re familiar with galas and other events. These things work, but aren’t terribly creative and can often take more effort to pull off than they’re worth. Nonprofits are notoriously bad about accounting for real costs. In these scenarios staff put in extra long hours – none of which is properly accounted for in determining the cost of the event. Nonprofits also usually secure corporate sponsors for these events – I’ve been advising a few organizations on this process. My issue with sponsorships is that they tend to be transactional: you give us money, we’ll slap your name on some stuff and give you social media shout outs. Nonprofits then customize packages – at the gold level you get one type of recognition and at silver you get slightly less. The problem with this is that they are applying business rules of valuation without having any actual valuation. Most nonprofits, if pressed, would have trouble explaining why an extra banner and three more Facebook posts is worth x, y, or z. For me the better approach is to tell a business that you can design such packages, but that you’d like to hear what they hope to achieve from the relationship. This type of a conversation will lead to a partnership in which both sides are trying to help each other. An engaged partner will want to be a part of the process. Indeed I had meeting down here with the owner of a large brewery. We kicked around some ideas, and at the end of the meeting he said he was glad I didn’t come in and just ask for money. He can give money to anyone, he wants to do cool things and think differently. Along those lines, for some time I’ve been kicking around the idea of an organization that helps growing breweries develop local initiatives while promoting their products. In my head it’s called the Brew Good, Do Good Collaborative and a key function is charitable beer festivals in which members of the collaborative are highlighted and proceeds helps key community organizations (customers purchasing tickets can direct their funds to participating charities, etc. etc.) There is a coffee company that is doing something called brew good do good… hence adding the word collaborative. Piggybacking off of this, yesterday I wrote down Community Spirits (which is the beer fest idea but as a wine and whisky tasting event). All of this is geared towards the younger market – a market that nonprofits are struggling to reach.
I kept walking and thinking. A little more than half-way through my walk I got a phone call. The voice message was from Tennessee office of unemployment. They’ve reviewed my application and I am not eligible. However, they think I might be eligible in Pennsylvania and they gave me a number to call. This got me ticked at my former employer (again). It feels irresponsible to bring someone in from another state and to let them go before they’ve even been around long enough to secure unemployment. I don’t know if it was intentional. And I understand that they are not required to think about the human cost of such decisions – but it would be nice if employers did consider the humans on the other end of these decisions. It just seems like a level of decency or compassion. Instead, my employer tried, perhaps illegally, to leverage my healthcare in an effort to get me to sign a non-disclosure. I suppose I’m just tired of people and businesses behaving badly. They demand /expect life, blood, and loyalty from their employees but offer no such similar promises in return – they’ll keep you employed and they’ll pay you but will always maintain the right to let you go – “at will.”
I shifted back to thinking about poor leadership. I shifted back to interview questions. I shifted back to the fact that I can only be creative in my thinking if I’m given some time to actually think. My previous boss was so focused on micromanaging things that we were never going to break out of the way things were always done. My direct report and I spent a lot of time working on an auction – all to increase sales by about $2k or $3k. My boss would stress over small declines in $35 memberships and didn’t seem to grasp that we needed to analyze our membership levels and see where our greatest opportunities were. She didn’t seem to understand that if you keep you staff running on the hamster wheel, they will never come up with new ideas.
I stated to think about how I would want to be interviewed – what questions would ensure thoughtful employees? How would I run the zoo? Interview questions that I hate include the where do you see yourself in x years, or what made you apply for this position, or why are you passionate about this cause… I think if I were doing the hiring, I would want to make sure my employees were passionate about things outside of this cause – that seems to be where sparks of creativity come from. As I’ve had this time off, I’ve had the luxury of examining my own thinking, and I think we make a mistake when we demand mind, body, and spirit be devoted to work. Yet, scroll through LinkedIn and you’re inundated with posts bowing down to work culture and how to improve productivity and how to make the most of your Mondays. Maybe that’s my next blog – the anti-work culture blog. I’ll interview experts on loafing. I’ll feature people who were brave enough to leave the BS behind (Walk out Wednesdays?) I’ll write about how work is like any other relationship – it needs air to breath and if you have to talk about how busy you are as a way to show that you’re passionate, you’re probably doing it wrong and probably building resentment. Like being in love, good work seldom require anything more than intrinsic motivation.
I know a lot of my current thinking is in reaction to my last job and in reaction to what I’ve seen with other people in their jobs. The day my boss let me go she said she didn’t think I had the passion for the job. She was notorious for telling people how busy she was and how many hours she worked. I tend to look at being overly busy as a possible sign of poor time management or poor project scoping or insufficient staffing or not having figured out a smarter, more efficient way to do business. Hours put in on the job is not a good measure of passion. I suspect that the most effective work environments don’t demand this slave-like commitment to the job but instead encourage a more balanced approach and greater freedom of thought and experience.
I don’t have a current project (aside from the ones I create – blog, painting, poems, reading) to keep me in the present moment. Which means I can either go back and figure out how I got here or look forward and think about where I’m going – or a combination of the two. Oddly, last night as I sat down to look for jobs, I received a notification that my previous boss just viewed my LinkedIn profile. She must have known that I was thinking about the job (or maybe the unemployment office had called her that morning too). I have to try not to think like a victim and how shitty it all is… but when I think that I’ve lost close to $30k in wages and I’m the one who has to explain the gap on my resume – not because I wasn’t performing (all revenue streams were up) but because of a bad work culture – I just think I don’t even know why I, or anyone, would want to participate in such a system. I think I prefer the walks on which I don’t do much thinking. The ones that end with me listening to birds and seeing an amazing sunset.