My exceptional web designer has updated my author website.
You can read my new author and advocate bio and read career resource information.
I’m gearing up to publish the Working Assets book this summer 2021.
More coming up on living through the pandemic while working at a job.
A 2018 Accenture study revealed:
Firms with the best practices in hiring individuals with disabilities saw:
28 percent higher revenue
Double the net income
30 percent higher profit margins
On average over a 4-year period.
Further:
It’s estimated that if the number of people with disabilities in the labor force grew only 1 percent the U.S. gross domestic product could expand by as much as $25 billion.
About 61 million Americans have some kind of disability.
My goal is to publish the print and e-book copies of Working Assets: A Career Guide for Peers in this coming summer.
One of the workers quoted in the news article that referenced the 2018 study:
“has long felt the limitations of other people’s expectations.”
James Geary lives with cerebral palsy. People discounted why he would be going to college since they thought no employer would hire him.
Today he’s working at his dream job courtesy of InReturn Strategies a recruiting firm that was founded to tackle “the disability employment gap.”
In the end that is what my goal is too:
To help people living with mental health challenges find purposeful work that gives us joy and dignity.
The words Sane Artists Collective flashed into my head and onto a notebook at “10:15 on a Saturday Night”–like the title of the Cure song from the 1980s.
I had not set out to create a Facebook group. It happened in an instant. That’s when I realized that since I hadn’t gotten support on other social media groups that creating SAC would be perfect.
Too often peers with mental health challenges are crucified because we choose to take medication. So I would form SAC for others like me who want to be healthy so that we can create art.
Art is therapy. Making art can help a person heal.
The description of SAC:
Sane Artists Collective / SAC is an online support group for artists of any kind living in recovery and engaged in treatment. We believe in the transformative beauty of creating art to make the world a better place. SAC seeks to promote health and wellbeing so that members can create their chosen art.
If you’re interested you can search on Sane Artists Collective on Facebook. To join a person must respond to 2 questions.
The premise behind using the term Sane was that Artists shouldn’t have to live their lives starving in a garret or going mad in pursuit of art-making.
The November 2020 issue of Harper’s Bazaar has a feature article on The Paradox of Being First: “You’re creating space for people to dream.”
I wanted to touch on this topic before the year ends. In 1988 when it was unheard of to think this I believed that a person could recover from schizophrenia. In 1990 I had a full-time job and my own rental apartment at a time when this was not common.
In 2002 shortly after I began my library job I started my pro bono career as a Mental Health Advocate.
Precisely because I was told my early goals were not possible I wanted to help other peers coming through the door after me.
Not everyone has the wherewithal to pull themselves up solely by their own bootstraps.
In the early 2000s a so-called international expert was still claiming that no one could recover. When I Googled her name I couldn’t find her website. Nor had she published any articles in peer-reviewed journals.
In the early days of advocating for peers I got a lot of flak for claiming people could recover.
Only I believed in my vision that recovery was possible from whatever a person was in recovery from.
I believed that you could recover from a microaggression, a mental or physical illness, trauma or any kind of setback or obstacle.
I wasn’t going to go along on my merry way, acting like the world was my oyster and nobody else’s.
In Harper’s Bazaar Toni Morrison was quoted from a 2003 interview. She told her students:
“When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.”
It’s 2020. The door is open. Come on through.
I wanted to write about a new popular form of workplace communication: Slack. It’s like Facebook for employees of a company.
I’m not a fan of Facebook at all. I’m a member of 2 Facebook groups devoted to fashion and image consulting. They’re the only ones I go on every week.
At your job you will be forced to sign up to your company’s Slack account. It’s either you do that or you’re kept out of the loop.
A person on a team or committee or working group that you’re a member of can create a Slack channel for this project without telling you about it.
Whether this is intentional or an accidental oversight you won’t know about it. Until you’re told this Slack channel exists and you should be on it. The person might not tell you at all that they’ve created this channel.
Not only that a lot of staff members send notices about meetings and other information only via Slack channels. Email has become to Slack what voicemail has become for texting–no one uses it to communicate anymore.
I would prefer to receive dates and times of meetings the old fashioned way–via email. Only it’s more convenient and reaches every team member at once when a person posts the meeting details to the project’s Slack channel.
Oh I know–you could create an email Distribution List and send the notice to everyone at once via the group email. That isn’t going to happen anymore either the way modern communication takes place at your job.
One thing is certain: you might be the only one sending comments to team members via your designated Slack channel. That is you might expect a reply to your Slack channel comment within a half hour.
When no one responds to you within a half hour you’ll need to keep checking your team’s Slack feed regularly to see exactly when and if someone has commented on what you said.
This leads me to want to write a blog entry here about the perils of online Zoom meetings. I’m going to write in detail about acing your video impression on Zoom. I’ll do this at the start of the New Year.
For now I’m giving you pointers about Slack because like other forms of social media Slack appears to be here to stay as a relationship-building tool.
How often should you check your Slack channel? As often as you check email? This can be a time-waster when it’s checked at inopportune times of the day.
Only the fact remains that there’s one more Feed to feed regularly to keep on top of your work projects.
I will be checking Slack at my job every 2 hours. Not any sooner and not spaced out longer than 2 hours.
You can keep Slack open on your internet browser and pop into the channel quickly.
There’s been a trend to use your preferred pronoun in email signatures like as:
Joe Jones (he/him)
Zadie Zorn (she/her)
Leslie Madison (they/them)
I might have written about this before in here. I’m going to cover it again for new followers.
I’ve read that when a cisgender person lists their preferred pronoun it helps Trans and other individuals feel safe to do the same.
Is it possible though that when you identify as they/them in an email and the person receiving it hasn’t met you in person they will attribute traits to you based on your perceived identity?
Only none of us should fear expressing our gender identity. Feel free to fire up they/them after your name in an email.
Having gender pride is a healthy form of self-expression.
I’ve decided that in 2021 I’m going to go the she/her route in my work email signature.
This is one of the few areas where the fact that “everybody’s doing it” makes sense for a person to follow along.
Of course the choice is yours. You have the right to list only your full name and job title in a work email.
It gets dicey further when composing the content of an email message.
I’ll talk about this in the coming blog entry.
I’ve decided to feature a blog entries carnival about sending and receiving emails at work.
You don’t want to be That Person. The one who thinks they’re being clever. Yet is only serving to antagonize their coworkers with a snarky message.
Case in point: using a pointed quote in your email signature like the following:
Kayla King, Senior Office Aide
Working smarter not hard
I ask you: is your email signature the best avenue for promoting yourself? I think not.
Last week I cracked open this fortune cookie:
Working efficiently is doing the job right. Working effectively is doing the right job.
Making an excuse for your behavior if you ask me will come across as trying to justify doing the bare minimum.
Your work ethic should speak for itself.
This email signature tactic might help someone else. I doubt you and I will benefit from attaching a gimmicky quote after our names.
In the coming blog entry: what you can and should list after your name.
I’ve lived in recovery for 33 years so far.
What I’ve learned:
You need to like yourself when you’re in your own company.
It doesn’t matter whether other people like or approve of you outside your home.
Only you need to be impressed with the person you are and will become.
I would like to believe that kind and compassionate individuals exist in the world.
The point is that you should take pride in yourself regardless of whether you have a fan club or don’t.
Being jealous of others will only keep you stuck. You’ll be unable to move on when you’re living in a mental garret you’ve enclosed yourself in.
The remedy for this self-stigma is to go the other way as hard as it can seem to do this.
I love reading empowering books and memoirs that successful people publish.
I want to soak up their habits and wisdom. To see what got them where they are today.
No–I’m not envious. I want to join them in their winner’s circle.
In the spirit of empowering blog readers I’m going to continue to write about topics that are in the vanguard that relate to my book Working Assets: A Career Guide for Peers.
While the COVID-19 outbreak has not ended this has shifted my focus to topics like WFH–working from home and interacting with others on Zoom video conferencing.
In the coming blog entry I will talk about working from home. This trend might remain in effect after the pandemic ends.
In future blog entries I will give interviews with women with mental health issues on the topics of having a job and having a family while living through the pandemic.
It’s my contention that the average Joe or Josephine on the street doesn’t get their behavior scrutinized half as much as people living with mental illnesses do.
On the flip side, the push to advocate for recovery for everyone can be well-intentioned. Yet it can set a person up to feel crummy when a goal they set for themselves doesn’t pan out.
Pat Deegan was prophetic in advocating for The Right to Fail.
I don’t like to use the term failure precisely because it’s a loaded word. Thinking that you have failed sets you up to not want to try again.
Instead you should think in terms of the action you took not panning out. You’re not a failure–you simply tried to do something that wasn’t viable in the end.
Living through the pandemic I’ve been thinking often about giving myself permission to fail at doing things.
For one I’m temperamentally unsuited to clean my apartment. Instead of doing my own wash I have a laundry service pick up and deliver back my laundry.
As well there are two donation bags that have been on the floor since March to take to the Salvation Army.
Fail boldly, I tell you.
Take the risk to achieve a goal. The outcome might sink like a lead balloon in a pond. That’s the signal to do things differently or to do a different thing.
My failed first career in corporate insurance offices is a cautionary tale about failure. It’s also a redemptive one.
I’ll talk next about the emotions that come up surrounding taking risks. And why sometimes you just have to risk trying one thing and then trying another.
Learning from our failures is the goal.
Pioneer mental health advocate Pat Deegan talked about “the dignity of risk and the right to fail.”
I want to talk first in this blog entry about the Dignity of Risk. In the coming blog entry I’ll talk about the Right to Fail.
Too often peers could be afraid to take risks. Mental health staff could have a poor impression of what a person is capable of doing. This could rub off on their patients.
As well family members might abandon their loved ones. It can be harder to take risks when there’s no one in your corner cheering you on.
The boxing match between you and your illness could be ferocious enough on its own. Thus the thought of tackling a grand goal can seem out of reach.
These factors add up to learned helplessness: the thought that it’s not worth trying to risk doing something so why bother.
Dare–I tell readers–dare!
To quote Michael Jordan:
Don’t be afraid to fail. Be afraid not to try.
This guiding motto is inscribed on a metal paperweight on my desk.
Too I have this quote magnet guiding me:
Proceed as if success is inevitable.
Only sometimes your best-intentioned plans go awry.
I will talk about having the Right to Fail in the coming blog entry.
After this I will give a pep talk about risking finding a job.
WorkingAssets 
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