Motivation

Today I went to a training on how to motivate your employees to be top performers. I’m actually not even really supervising anyone right now, but I thought maybe I could learn how to motivate myself. My friend JoLynn was doing the training and listening to her always makes me to want to be better. I want to be a person like that, who motivates people just by entering the room, but I have a loooong way to go! In fact, I think I might be more of a demotivator most of the time. Which reminds me….www.despairwear.com has a new shirt that says “more people have read this shirt than your blog”.

We talked about what motivates employees, and as usual, I felt as though I might be from another planet. This usually happens to me during marketing discussions. As the marketing professionals talk about how to reach people most effectively, I always disagree and when I express my opinion, everyone rolls their eyes and says “that’s just you Kelly, nobody else thinks that way”. It also happens to me when I attend conferences. There is usually some main speaker whose purpose is to loosen everyone up and get them laughing. Now you would think I would like this since I enjoy good humor, but no. While everyone around me will go on and on about how great the speaker was, I will feel annoyed because it usually feels like a big waste of my time to have organized laughing when I would rather go to a session where someone shares useful facts and strategies. I also hate workshops where the speaker makes me interact with others. I just want to sit and take notes and learn new information. Which they tell me, is the opposite learning style from the vast majority of people, who like interaction.

Today my alien feeling came when we talked about what motivates employees. Apparently employees like to get praise and recognition and have the ability to celebrate their successes. I appreciate the occasional “good job” from my boss, but when it comes frequently it just annoys me, although I’m not sure why. I’m much more comfortable focusing on what isn’t going well and how we can improve it. That motivates me to want to do better! I’ve brought this up to various bosses, but what I’ve been told is that while that may motivate me, most people like praise and recognition. So once again, I’m the odd man out. Good thing I’m used to that feeling!

$197 later.....

I have my computer back and it is fixed. Sort of. The only thing that couldn't be backed up was my email. Which is sort of a problem. I'm not sure how many hundreds of emails I had filed in my outlook folders, but I do remember that in my inbox alone I had over 2000 with about 400 unread. Now they will be permanently unread. I'm not too concerned about those emails though because they are mostly listservs I signed up for that I keep in my inbox thinking I will have time to read them eventually, or emails I read at work online, then when I download them at home they stay unread if I don't look at them again. About twice a year I clean out my inbox and file or delete them all. My bigger concern is all the email addresses that I have lost. Oh well. I guess worse things have happened.

I feel completely overwhelmed with life right now. I was telling my friend last night that I have this wonderful ability to take even the smallest task and obsess about it until I have myself so overwhelmed and stressed out that I can't function. This is before I even start the task! Fortunately I have friends who are not this way and can just look at the situation and say "no problem! I'll help you". Then I can relax and quit stressing so much. I'm so glad God gave me such good friends!

So here's a short list of the things that I'm stressed about right this minute, if anyone wants to help:
1. I need to give my niece a good lecture on why it's important to study when you are in college and not to skip class.
2. Somebody needs to clean my house (I'm hoping this will be my niece, but chances are slim)
3. I can't decide if I should drive or fly to Denver later this month and I need to decide soon if I am going to buy a plane ticket.
4. All my children's ministry stuff for church feels really unorganized and I'm not sure how our new schedule is going to work out, and how the new preschool room will work. Kris has promised to help me, so I think this one will be fine because everything she does works out good.

My current crisis.....

Well, I know some of you will find this more amusing than concerning, but I am having a personal crisis this week. I am in Dallas at a conference (which isn't even that good) and I brought my laptop so I could do some work, check email, etc. The first thing I did when I checked in to my hotel Sunday evening was to boot up my computer, or at least try to boot up my computer. It would never load windows and kept taking me back to some stupid error screen. I tried everything I could think of, but nothing worked! So last night I couldn't sleep, I kept waking up, rushing to my computer trying to restart it to see if maybe it would work this time. But no luck. I called my IT friend at work today and explained the problem to him and he said I'm out of luck. I have to reload Windows when I get home and either lose all my stuff on the hard drive, or take it into a shop and see if someone can retreive it before I reload Windows. I almost starting crying, but being the big girl that I am, I held back the tears. Luckily the hotel has a computer in the lobby I am on, but my mind keeps rushing through all the things I will lose if I can't get someone to get them off my hard drive. Pictures, email addresses, old emails, all my downloaded itunes, etc. I knew before that I was attached to my computer, but now that I'm almost having a panic attack without it, I realize it even more. Not that I feel bad about that. The only thing I'm going to change is that I will do a better job of backing up my info and I will NEVER buy a PC again. I need to go mope and let someone else use the computer now.

High School Reunions....

I'm leaving for Dallas in the morning to attend a conference for child welfare trainers. I'm looking forward to the conference, but not the long drive. I need to be doing laundrey and packing right now, but I don't feel like it, so I decided this would be an excellent time to update my blog.

I had my twentieth high school reunion this weekend. I was really dreading it because I'm not very good at socializing, but I actually had a nice time. I got to visit with a couple friends from the neighborhood I grew up in, and some of my close buddies from my high school youth group. And my friend Sherry kept me laughing all night, which I really appreciate!!! Here's a photo of me with my friends Renee and Becky. We all went to church together and had a lot of fun with our high school youth group.

And here is a photo of us from high school. It was on one of our youth group trips to Colorado and we were trying to pose, but it wasn't working out very well. I just like this picture because I am wearing my swatch shorts, which I used to really love! They matched my swatch watch :)

10 Things I like about Wheatland Mission

We had a good night last night with the Wheatland Mission crowd, so today I wanted to list out some of the things (there are many!) that I like about my church.

1. The people - I feel so fortunate to go the church with the coolest people in the city of Wichita! Everytime I meet a new person I am wowed by their story and excited about the things I am going to learn from them and with them in the future.

2. The lack of history - I really love that we never get into situations where we have to deal with "but we've always done it that way". Everything is new, so there is no history to base it on.

3. The kids - I know, the kids are people too, so they are technically included in the first point, but I think they are special enough that they should get their own point too. Yesterday I was talking with someone about how unique and fun each one of the kids are and it got me so excited for our elementary kids to get to middle school so they can be a youth group. They will be one fun group of kids! I can't wait to go on a road trip with them! (Seriously here - no sarcasm - I love trips with middle school kids!)

4. The willingness to serve - I've never been in a church where so many people are willing to help at a moment's notice. I don't think there is a person there that I couldn't tap on the shoulder and ask them to come help in the nursery at a moments notice. Okay maybe Paul, but only because he is busy preaching.

5. Our space - I know we are looking to move someday, and I'm sure it will be a good move, but it's really nice to have the outdoor picnic area and lots of grass to play games in like we did last night.

6. My house church - I love all the people, but I especially love the families in my house church and I miss meeting with them when my schedule gets busy and I miss a week, or a month as is the current situation.

7. The grace and forgiveness - nobody ever gets mad at me when I forget things (which I am very good at hiding, but actually happens more often than you'd think! For example, I have not sent any kid birthday postcards in three weeks. Sorry September birthday kids!) I'm so thankful that Michel and Monica never made me feel bad for not being able to get up and make it to breakfast at 6:30 on Tuesdays. Instead of making me feel like a bad Christian, they just made it known that they missed me when I couldn't be there.

8. Making me think, and study, and pray - I haven't been very good at keeping up, but I do love reading the insights on the many blogs our members have started. They make me think, and challenge me to look at myself differently. I also appreciate the sermons, the house church studies, and am looking forward to the upcoming study we are going to do on Wednesday nights.

9. Saturday nights - I will be fine if we move to Sundays in the future, but for right now, I'm loving meeting on Saturday nights and having my day of rest of Sundays!

10. A sense of belonging - as a single adult, I appreciate being in a church with lots of families and kids of every age. I've always disliked singles ministries and prefer to be in groups with people in every circumstance of life. I appreciate having a church where everyone can belong.

Confession time...

I have to confess that I've been ignoring my blog because I've been playing with my Facebook page. I was sick several days this last week and someone sent me a facebook note. I created my facebook page several months ago so I could monitor my niece's page (she loves it when I do that!), but I never looked at it much before this week. The way facebook works (for those of you who don't use it), you can't view anyone's pages until you create your own, which only takes a minute. It's been kind of a fun way to connect with some people I haven't talked to in awhile.

On another note...I made chicken enchilada soup tonight and fed some to Kara (my niece). She took one bite and said "is this the first time you've ever made this?" I panicked and prepared myself for the smart aleck comment that I knew was coming. I figured I must have left out some key ingredient or done some other obvious failure that she would find amusing. She is used to her dad (my brother) who is a much better cook than I am. So after I answered her that no, this wasn't the first time I had ever made it, she suprised me by saying it was good. I still didn't believe her and waited for the next smart remark, but then I realized she was being serious. Sometimes it's hard to communicate normally in a family that uses sarcasm as the main form of communication. When something serious is said, it sort of freaks me out and I don't know what to do with it.

One more confession. I was just reviewing my to do list (which I do multiple times daily) and realized I had not crossed off very many things on it today. So I added "update blog" and immediately crossed it off. It made me feel more productive.

side note: Tracey you owe me a dollar. Calana said so.

High School Musical 2

Here's the video I mentioned in my last post...my friends watching High School Musical 2: