Beyond Work is our line of resources for people and community leaders looking for something new and innovative outside, be it a new job, career change, or personal development outside of work.
At Horizon Point we are big on giving. We give throughout the year to causes that are near and dear to our hearts, we give our clients a Book of the Year at the holidays, we adopt a family for Christmas, and we give to each other – our time, our gratitude, and of course, gifts. Some of our favorite gifts have come from each other, and we always try to personalize our gifts, both for the occasion and the individual. One way we are able to do this is through the help of a Favorite Things questionnaire that we have each completed.
Jillian
Gifts are not my love language. Or at least…they weren’t. I’ve always been a Quality Time and Words of Affirmation girl, both in my personal and professional lives. When our team studied the 5 Languages of Appreciation in the Workplace, I was also dating a big Gift guy. I had one of those Aha! moments when you realize it’s not all about you; that people show appreciation or love in ways that are meaningful to them, and that’s the part that matters. I’ve grown to truly appreciate Gifts because of what they mean to the giver. I’ve also been so fortunate that the Gift givers in my life are so thoughtful and intentional when they consider the type of Gift that I would appreciate – often gifting experiences like a gift card to a bakery I’ve been wanting to try, or a bag of locally roasted coffee they thought I’d like. Just today, I received a beautiful piece of art by one of my favorite Alabama artists, and I could just burst with the warm-and-fuzzies. So…are Gifts my love language now?! I married that Gift guy, so as the magic 8-ball says, “signs point to yes”!
Taylor
Finding a gift for a friend or family member is one of my favorite things to do. I love to find something that “fits” the person I’m gifting. I have a lovely aunt who has always been the best gift giver because she shops with the mission of finding something that is just right for whoever she is shopping for. As a little girl, I remember getting a glitter baton and a manicure set from her. For me personally, it truly is about the thought. With that being said, the top of my list of gifts I’ve received includes anything thoughtful. Recently at Christmas lunch with friends, I received earrings that were perfect & my sweet friend said she thought of me when she saw them. She also included a massage gift certificate; she knows me well.
Lorrie
Growing up my dad would save his change all year in one of those big water jugs and each December he would give it to me and my brother to buy gifts for our family members. We would spend hours rolling it and my mom would take us to the bank to cash it in and go shopping. We would spend all day looking for the perfect gift for each person on our list. It was a tradition that we kept well into our late teens. Through that tradition, I gained an appreciation not just for the gifts I receive, but for the thought that I know must have gone into each one. Each year for Christmas my dad buys me tools…yep, tools! And I’m not sure who is more excited, me to get them or him to give them to me. You see I grew up helping my dad build and remodel houses and now I enjoy restoring old furniture. Today at lunch with friends, I was surprised with another great gift – a book on how to build tiny houses and a gift card for Airbnb. This year I decided that I want to design and build a tiny house with my dad in the next few years and so I’ve started researching ideas. Part of that research is finding tiny homes on Airbnb and making weekend trips out of going and checking them out. My friend knows how important this goal is to me and her gift was perfect. Not only because it was given with thought and caring, but also because it was a sign to me that she believes in my ability to make this goal a reality.
As we head into the holiday season, how can you personalize your gift giving?
It’s Sunday afternoon as I sit at my computer and plan for the week ahead. I’ve been working from home for almost a decade now. My boundaries and rules have certainly changed over the past several years. As with most things, experience is the only way to do something well. This week, I’m sharing my top tips for setting boundaries around successfully working from home.
When I came on board with HPC, it was way before Covid, and remote work was not super common, so I discovered what worked and didn’t work through trial and error. During those early days, my children were in grade school & it was ideal for me to work when the house was quiet, so I did that. But I also constantly checked email and it wasn’t uncommon for me to work well into the night, even on the weekend. This was a huge shift for me, coming from a typical 8 to 5 role. No one was asking or expecting me to be available 24-7. My natural helper, people pleasing personality dictated my schedule those days.
With several remote working years under my belt now, I feel so much more comfortable with the flexible schedule I can create every week. Here are three ways I set boundaries and rules to successfully work from home:
I create a list, several (actually). At the end of each week, I create a daily list for the next week. Prioritizing 3 things that I need to accomplish each day works best. The daily list includes work responsibilities, but I also include personal responsibilities. For example, some form of exercise (ideally taking a walk outdoors) is on there most days, weather permitting.
I plan deep work early in the day and early in my week. I do my best to protect my Fridays. I make sure the most important tasks and meetings happen early in the week and day if possible. I recommend checking out the book, When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing, which helped me discover the time of day that I’m most productive.
Time blocking is so very helpful. Within my list(s), I often estimate how long I plan to work on each project or task. I often add these “time blocks” to my calendar to remind myself as well as to share with my coworkers what I have planned or the day and week. You can read more about time blocking in this article from Lifehack.org – How to Start Time Blocking to Get More Done.
Are you and or your team working remotely? What are your tips?
Here are a few more articles from The Point Blog you might want to check out:
Her name was Ima, Ima Fish. She was a Betta that I got when my son was four months old and I decided being a stay-at-home mom wasn’t for me. So, when my old boss called me and asked me if I wanted to come back part-time, I jumped at the chance. I bought Ima to put on my desk at the office. I had that little fish on that desk for five years! And everyone in the office knew Ima. If I was out of the office, I knew someone else was taking care of it, I didn’t even have to ask. Coworkers would stop by my desk daily to see how Ima was, even before they’d check to see how I was. Ima became the office fish.
Employees spend a large portion of their time at work, away from their families. Coworkers often become a second family. So how can employers create a work space that helps to bring people together?
It starts at the top. Leadership can help create an environment that brings people together by making connections with those who work for them. Get to know your employees, what makes them tick outside of work. Do they have families? What are their hobbies? Where do they see themselves in the future? When you check in with employees, don’t jump straight into work, ask them how their weekend was, if they have plans for the holidays, just take a few minutes to chat and get to know more about them. By doing this, you not only build a better connection with your team members but you are encouraging them to do the same with each other.
A lot of work and a little play. Allow for some down time at work. You’d be surprised at how that may actually improve productivity and it will definitely boost morale. Early in my career I worked for a company that had an office breakfast EVERY Friday. And it was employee provided. There was a sign-up sheet each quarter for those who wanted to participate and a schedule was made of what Friday you had to provide breakfast. It was great, people loved to participate and every Friday the entire office of about 50 employees came through the breakroom to grab breakfast. You could bring whatever you wanted and there was always an abundance of food. Good food! We even had one employee who when it was his turn, would bring his griddle from home and make made-to-order breakfast sandwiches. And while you were waiting on your sandwich, you’d get to have the best conversations with him.
Create welcoming spaces for connection and collaboration. One of the worst feelings for me is walking into a sterile work space, devoid of color, personalization, and warmth. It’s not inviting. Create spaces where employees want to be, that inspires them. A little décor can go a long way. And it doesn’t have to be expensive. Add a few pictures, some fake or real plants, some color. Take that bright white break room and turn it into a space employees want to sit and enjoy lunch or a quick break. A little paint can go a long way to making a space more welcoming, so get rid of that bright white! And while you’re at it, take away the clutter too. It creates stress and don’t we all have enough of that these days?
What can you do to make your work space bring people together?
This week, we are thrilled to feature the launch of a new Spaces And Places blog! Created by Drew and Mary Ila Ward, Spaces And Places is a little bit of real estate, design, and travel, and a whole lot of what makes spaces and places home. Horizon Point’s mission is to innovate the workplace, and part of that effort is sharing stories about spaces and places (you may have noticed our “space” theme this year!).
“If there’s something stirring in you now, and you know what it is, do that. There’s no need to overthink it. A mistake here and there isn’t going to kill you, so don’t waste time worrying about that. It’s infinitely better to fail with courage than to sit idle with fear, because only one of these gives you the slightest chance to live abundantly. And if you do fail, then the worst-case scenario is that you’ll learn something from it. You’re for sure not going to learn jack squat from sitting still and playing it safe.“
On his 40th birthday trip with friends, my husband sent me a picture of a paragraph from a book I gave him for Father’s Day the previous summer. He’s not a big reader, but sitting on a Dominican beach waiting for me to join him, he had finally started reading the Chip Gaines book I had given him several months earlier.
“This is so me,” he texted along with the paragraph where Chip described the joy and satisfaction he gets from working with his hands.
Today, as I pulled out the book to try to find the exact quote for this blog post, I found the note I wrote to him for Father’s Day stuck within its pages. Among other things, the note said, “I’m committed to whatever direction you feel God is leading you and us in, but I don’t ever want you to shy away from something because of lack of confidence or fear. Like he says in one of these books, ‘fear dressed up as wisdom provides very poor counsel.’ Let’s move forward with faith instead of fear, trusting God to lead us. I love you.”
You see, we’d been fighting a lot over the last year or so because he was working in a job and career that was making him miserable. I’m prone to catch on to misery quicker than he does, but he was finally starting to begin to admit it himself.
Although he loved- and still does- so many of the people he had the privilege of working with as well as aspects of the work, a variety of factors were leading to misery. One of which, I would realize later, was that although some of the people he led as a healthcare administrator got to work with their hands regularly, he didn’t. And he was at work so much, and devoted to spending time with our kids if he wasn’t, that he never got to heed the good advice of sabbathing with his hands because he worked with his mind. There wasn’t time to.
He’s one to grit his teeth and bare it, being brought up to believe that hard work- whether you like that work or not- is what makes you have worth and value. I had wanted him to quit for over a year, confident we could make it work financially if he did. But he was no “quitter.”
He was and is a smart, good looking guy (I know I’m biased, but he is). He is by all standards a privileged white male. He could do whatever he wanted.
No one ever told him growing up, “You know, you should find work that involves working with your hands because you seem to like to do that.” He didn’t take shop or any Career Tech classes for that matter in high school because he was taking all Advanced Placement ones. His GPA, ACT, and GMAT scores pointed him towards careers where he would sit behind a desk and or in meetings almost all day everyday and lead people. The whole world was telling him this was his path to success.
It was pretty easy for him to get there. He hardly studied for the GMAT and scored in the top 25%. Getting into graduate school to earn a Masters in Health Administration and an MBA wasn’t difficult for him. Did he enjoy doing it? Was he able to use his God given gifts and passions? Who knows? No one had ever said to him nor had he said to himself that that was the point or even a consideration.
But what had been so “easy” to get to had become unbearably hard because he hated it. A week after Father’s Day when I wrote that note, the decision was made. He would no longer have to grit his teeth and bare it. He’d been given the chance to figure out a route that hopefully would be more fulfilling and desirable, more prone to how he is designed.
By the 40th birthday trip, he’d taken some time to process and plan his next steps and self reflect, helping him realize what he needed. What he could offer. The path, whether the world told him he was crazy or not, involved working with his hands a whole lot more.
Of the two points I think I want to make in this post, one is this: in a world with multiple career paths, we often point others and ourselves down the wrong ones because we don’t allow them and ourselves to figure out what makes us tick. I think the general assumption has been we do this the most to those who are less privileged. To those that have to get a job to make ends meet, whatever job that may be. However miserable the job may be.
While this is certainly true, I think we do it just as much at the very opposite end of the spectrum. To the ones that seemingly have all the options in the world because of their privilege. Such is the misery of the smart, attractive white male. We decide for them and they decide based on what the world says successful careers are. All of which involve professional degrees and dress pants. And if we are honest, the privileged still live in a world where the stereotype is that successful men need to be in careers where their wife can stay home and raise kids and keep domestic life for a family running. Where she can work if she wants to, but heaven forbid would have to. It’s a different pressure than having to choose a job to be able to put food on the table, but it is actually of the same vein. Pressure to earn regardless of the cost.
But for my husband, the work all this led to was difficult in the form of it being a little bit like slow torture. It hadn’t always been like that, but the last time I had remembered talking to him at work and it sounded like he was enjoying it was when he called me back after being up the ceiling of an operating room trying to figure out why there was a leak. “You were up in the ceiling? In your dress pants?” I asked, “Isn’t there someone else that is supposed to do that?”
“I wanted to see it for myself,” he said. “I wanted to fix it.”
He wanted to fix it with his own two hands. Not just his mind. He’d been solving so many problems over the past 15 years with his mind and his hands were desperate to be put to use.
He still solves a lot of problems with his mind now, but he gets to use his hands to implement those solutions. And he is happier. And our family is happier. And by His hands, we are still fed. We have never been anywhere close to having to go without our daily bread.
Now, a year and half after this transition, he’s away this week fixing flooring at an investment property we have. (Not paying someone to fix the floors was another source of fighting for us until I realized doing it on his own was much like being in that operating room ceiling. He needed to do it with his own two hands. He needed to fix it himself.)
Earlier this year, he turned a house into a home for a family that had been living in a hotel for over two years. In a world where those who have made mistakes in the past can’t get financing or a chance to rent a decent home, he decided to change that. One property and one family at a time.
He built a swing set out back for their young kids to play on. “They need to be able to play outside,” he said. And then he went about building. Not buying a swing set kit to set up, but building a swing set with no plans, just his two hands working with his mind.
And for my second key point of this post and of what this whole post was originally designed to be about, he’s redone our home office. He designed it with his mind, and every single thing in the office he built himself from scratch with his own two hands. And it is beautiful. And functional.
Here are a couple of sneak peek pictures of it, but it will be featured on a new website he is “building” to showcase, in part, the work of his hands. The site is a little bit real estate, a little bit travel, and a whole lot of our family’s journey to capture what makes spaces and places home. We will post the full feature of the website next week as it goes live with advice on how to design a home office, or any office for that matter, without taking the home out of it.
BEFOREBy “his” handsAFTER
As you move into your work week, I hope you’ll take some time to think about what makes you tick and if that is provided at all in the work you do day in and day out. Do you get to build your equivalent of swings sets and office spaces? Because if you aren’t, you most likely aren’t building beautiful things that end up helping others live and work well either. It is a courageous and loving act instead of the fearful one. We all need to figure out what makes us tick, not because it is self-serving, but precisely because it is the exact opposite.
By his hands, my husband is serving, and by His hands, a gracious God has moved our transition that was plagued with fear and expectations of what we are supposed to do to one where we are doing what we are meant to do.
