Hello and welcome!

I’ve been reading a blog lately about how to improve happiness at work, and it has inspired me to get off my duff and start a blog of my own. I have been threatening to do this for some time, and it feels good to finally get it going. In the spirit of emerging on the blog scene (albeit a bit late in the trend), I want to outline for you my principals and goals for the writing I will share with you as we go.

• Everything boils down to communication, good or bad. Every issue; war, tiff, promotion, anything involving more than one human; is directly caused or influenced by our ability to communicate clearly. If you approach any challenge with this in mind, you are already one step ahead of the problem because you will proactively try to communicate clearly.
• Vegetables to Careers – try everything once. I firmly believe that most ideas have some merit, and that you cannot fully judge an idea’s success without first giving it a shot. Perhaps you can learn something about the issue at hand even if you try an unsuccessful solution. Perhaps, by trying broccoli, you find that you like the taste but not the texture. This will better inform your vegetable choices in the future, and the same holds true in our work lives. It may not be the solution that you had envisioned, but to try another person’s idea may inform your decision-making down the line.
• Share your success with others – hence the blog! What better way to make the world a happy place than to share your accomplishments so that others may find a similar success. In a capitalist nation, it is easy to hide your success story in an effort to keep a leg-up on the competition. Communication skills must be shared, however, in order to work effectively. One person can communicate clearly, but unless the whole team understands one another, that person will run into a wall at some point. Show and Tell – it worked in Kindergarten, why not in adulthood?

Believe it or not, my background is in the Fine Arts. I have always been a Left-Brained Artist (a contradiction, in other words), so after leaving school with my Masters in Fine Art, what to do with my life? I am here now as an Operations Manager, supervising a team of 4, and loving every minute of it. I thrive on the teaching, the organizing, the conflict resolution, the problem solving… and yes, the communication analysis.

So my hope is that you will enjoy my brief yet regular posts about anything I can share, in an effort to improve your ability to communicate within your own life. Please join me in my endeavors and feel free to comment, guest-post and network.

Cheers!
-Kate