This was an exciting week for me! I set up 4 (FOUR!) promising job interviews for next week, and was able to spend some time with my baby niece, which I haven’t been able to do for a while. Overall, it was a great week so let’s get into the highlights!

One cool thing I learned this week: I learned a huge lesson in the value of maintaining your network. I wouldn’t have been able to set up those interviews for next week without the help of both my personal and professional networks.

What I’m doing to become a better version of myself: Along with the exercises I talked about in my last wrap up post, I am training myself to understand different ways of thinking. I have always been great at seeing someone else’s perspective of something (I’m kind of a black belt of putting myself in someone else’s shoes). However, I want to be better at understanding other peoples arguments (like in a debate) as well. So this week, I started trying to identify good discussion topics in conversations with my friends. I plan to use some of those topics in the near future to have civil discussions and try to understand the thinking behind alternate opinions to my own.

Weekly Wednesday Workshop: The guest for this week was Cassandra LeVan. She talked about strategic career planning (where do I want to be professionally in X years). We’ve all heard of sitting down and planning out goals for 5, 10 and even 20 years. There was a bit of a twist though, and I’ve got to say it was very interesting to me. Instead of planning out goals in order, she asked us to think about what our 20 year goal was. After we set that for ourselves, she had us set a 10 year goal that would keep us on track to reach our 20 year goal. She proceeded that pattern with 5 years, 3 years, 1 year and six months. It was a lot harder than it sounded to work backwards like that, but it made a ton of sense! I want to say thank you Cassandra, and I will definitely keep practicing this technique because I see a lot of value in it!