Promoted

I received a promotion, officially announced at this evening's office happy hour. Effective immediately I am now a senior account executive, which pretty much means that I'm responsible for all the things I was already doing and I'm expected to begin doing all of the things in the position above my current one.

Pretty standard corporate protocol.

While this should be overall good news, I'm not entirely sure I'm happy about it. Work has been pretty all-encompassing and I've been feeling stressed and more overwhelmed than usual. My anxiety has been so high that it's been coming out in my nervous jittery legs which more than one person has noticed in recent weeks.

While I'm honored to be given more responsibility and accountability, I'm also wary because there are so many personal things I'd like to accomplish this year and I worry this professional life is holding me back.

Summer 2014

I love summer, but 2014 is going to be a big one!

This summertime, I am a bride, having the experience of a lifetime, surrounded by my family and friends and overwhelmed with the unconditional love that has been so prevalent during the wedding planning process.  

Our wedding is set for August and so far almost everything we've experienced has been fun - at least to some degree!  We're planning our wedding, one of the sweetest chapters in our love story, and looking toward the future.  Yes, wedding planning has been hard work, but life is full of hard work!  That's what makes us appreciate the fun times!  

Over the past 10 months of our engagement, Sam and I have done a lot of growing up.  We've really begun to make plans for our future together as our own little family unit and I am so excited to see what's in store for us!  

A Little Life Update

I know I haven't been posting too regularly but I am making an effort to stop sacrificing all of the things I love and enjoy doing in my free time starting in March.

It's been too long since I was at the gym, wrote a blog post, tried a new recipe, etc.

I knew I was signing on for long hours when I took the agency job in December, but I was naive to how long the hours would truly be.  At best, I get to the office at 8:30 a.m. and leave at 5:30 p.m. when my workday is technically over.  The catch, is that there is that things seem to have a nasty habit of popping up between 4:30 - 5:30 just as I'm thinking about winding down.  Or, I start logging my billable time at 4:20 but it takes me 20 - 30 minutes to complete because I make meticulous notes to help my Account Coordinate do the billing.  On top of that, we're supposed to be billable 7 hours a day, which doesn't sound too bad until you think about the time you spend in the bathroom, your lunch break, the miscellaneous time you have waiting for a meeting to start or recapping the topics that were discussed on a call with a client for your billing reports.  So sometimes I have to stay after 5:30 just to try to make my billable hours.

Since taking this job, my TMJ disorder has come roaring back to life and I am not getting the relief from my mouthguard the way I have in the past.  My suspicion is that after 4 years I have probably clenched so much that I need to replace it, and I have an appointment later this month to see my dentist and have new impressions taken.

Then there is the stress level.  I'm going to be seeing a new family medicine doctor next week and I want her to reevaluate my anxiety medication and see if maybe there is something that's a better fit for me.

So things are going to have to change moving forward.

A dear friend of mine (a PR professional who was working at an agency at the time) gave me some very real advice that I pass out as often as possible:

The first three months of a new job are terribly hard because you're just learning the system.  The second three months of a new job are horrible because you start to understand what you really got yourself into, but you're still figuring out your system to be successful.  At six months in, you've started to form your routine and you're beginning to feel like you're able to perform your required duties.

It's funny, in a meeting yesterday I had the mounting feeling of dread that I had so many responsibilities and so many deadlines over the next few days that I began to feel overwhelmed.  And then, an interesting thing happened, the thought occurred to me that I should put all of the pitching deadlines at the bottom of my daily task sheet at the beginning of each month so that I see them all and am reminded to chip away at them little by little.  Wow.  What do you know, I'm starting to come up with my own system for success and I've been there nearly 11 weeks.

Back in January, as I was lamenting the death of my personal life and the onslaught of stress and pressure, my dad told me that it takes roughly one year to become competent at a new job.  He promised me that by Thanksgiving I would feel 180 degrees different than I felt at that moment.

I know he's right, but sometimes I wish the timing of this opportunity had come six months earlier... but then again, I was able to accomplish SO MUCH for our wedding while I was working for my last company that maybe this is all for the best.  I will tell you this much, I LOVE my team and what I do.

I just need to remember that there are less than six months before our wedding, and I am still not in the physical shape I want to be in.  It's tough to leave Hunter alone for another hour and a half and get my workout in on weeknights, but hopefully Sam can help me pick up the slack there because I need to find a routine that gets me moving and commit to making healthy, vegetable laden dinners.

Agency Living

I started 2014 with a new job - exciting times, for sure.  But also trying.

This week I worked an 11+ hour day on Monday, a 10+ hour day on Tuesday, and a 9+ hour day today.  I have been trying to keep to a healthy eating schedule (which has been interesting because I am so busy I rarely eat an actual meal at midday) and get to the gym (which has been less than successful) in what little free time I have.   

Last night, I was working on a blog post for my professional blog and I started nodding off around 9:30 sitting on the couch with my laptop.  I'm not joking.  I told Sam, I am incredibly honored to have been hired by this very prestigious agency but at the same time, I am suffering the loss of my personal life and have no work-life balance whatsoever.  Which is probably doubly difficult because in my last job I had the hang of everything, was working from home three days a week and had a very healthy personal life - I know, I was really spoiled.  One thing I do know, I am NOT going to let this get in the way of my health and fitness goals.  I let work consume me when I started at my last company and my eating habits went completely out the window... not so this time around!

Truth be told, it was a rough couple of days from Thursday afternoon to Tuesday morning working on a huge project for a HUGE client with an incredibly tight deadline.  I was wondering if I made a HUGE mistake on Monday night and was so worried that I'm not cut out of this that quitting actually entered my mind.  Talk about craziness!  Everything looked much better by Tuesday morning when I reassured myself that worst case scenario meant I would lose [another] job but more likely than not, the project would end and life would get back to normal.  Luckily, I was right.  

Tonight I am feeling simultaneously very proud and very overwhelmed.  The agency principle came to me today after reviewing my social media posts for our luxury jewelry designer and diamond client and told me they were fantastic... she asked me how much my other team members had revised my first draft and I said they each made one or two changes, which she was very pleased to hear.  She brought a jewelry magazine and several fashion sections from our local newspapers that she wanted me to read and come up with pitches for.  She also said I need to start looking at the big fashion and jewelry magazines on a regular basis so that I get accustomed to the industry's style of writing and colloquial terms.   

It all sounds like a lot of work, especially when I have marketing and SEO books lined up on my nook that I haven't gotten time to read yet.  I suppose this is what I'll start doing for fun... reading magazines when I get home from work.  C'est la vie.  I guess it's better than watching lots of TV but it takes a lot more brainpower too, and (as with all new jobs) I am completely mentally exhausted by the time I get home.  The last thing I want to do is work on "homework" and yet there are some seriously important things I need to read, chiefly all the bios and pitches we've done for the diamond client because I am going to be pitching him to a couple of publications this week.  

Pitching... eek!  As with everything in this job, I am diving right into the deep end and learning to swim on the fly.

Failure

It's very difficult for me to accept failure, especially when its my own.

On Thursday I was given a major project to work on that was due to our client on Monday midmorning.  I felt really good about the direction I was going in, and the other two people on my team seemed to be on the same page as I was - which made me even more confident.

Unfortunately, our agency director did not share our enthusiasm for my work.  She tore apart the action plan I spent hours drafting, had major revisions for one of my press releases and hated the other.

It was quite a blow to my confidence.

To make matters worse, the account director and agency director stayed at the office with me until 7:00 on Friday evening while we reworked the action plan.

It was bad enough that I had to stay late but I felt terrible about making them stay late as well.

I made sure to apologize and thank them profusely for their help and their patience and I'm sure it won't be the end of my career, but it was definitely an experience I hope to avoid in the future.

I ended up spending an hour and a half polishing up the action plan and rewriting the press release over the weekend.  I made sure that was alright with the agency director and she said as long as I made sure to track my time for billing purposes, that was absolutely okay.  Apparently she was going to be headed into the office today to catch up on some of her own projects.

I knew that starting a new job was going to require some additional hours on my behalf, but I forgot how much of a learning curve I was going to face and how resilient I was going to have to be.

Here's to another day, another dollar and another chance to improve.  Wish me luck tomorrow!

Past My Bedtime

My apologies if this post seems disjointed or disorganized- it is, as the title suggests, far past my bedtime and my brain is finally starting to slow down a bit.  I have consistently sold myself short in my dedication to hard work- which is funny because one does not become a First Team All-American water polo player without serious dedication and hard work.  But in my professional life, it was only in the last two years that I realized I was passionate about marketing and wanted to devote significant portions of my free time to learning and improving myself.  Lately, it seems that my hard work and dedication are paying off: I have interesting opportunities popping up all around me.

A girl I went through UCI's Marketing Certificate Extensions Program with reached out to me last week about doing Integrated Marketing Consulting for the company she works for.  Cue me writing my first-ever proposal for consulting services.  We'll see where that goes.  I have been more and more interested in consulting as I get to be more acquainted with self-employed professionals, but I'm not sure if I'm ready to take the leap and go to full-time consulting.  Sam and I are considering that when we start a family, but it's not something I want to explore just yet.

Another networking connection has a very interesting business opportunity that we discussed today.  I would love to be a part of his team and create content and integrated marketing plans for clients on a 12-24 month contract basis.

I am on fire today- completely reenergized and motivated to achieve all that I can.  It was one of those days where I logged nine and a half hours at the office and didn't take a single break.  Well, that's not entirely true.  I did use the restroom once and I had to get a class of water in the afternoon to ward off a dehydration/starvation headache.  I was so consumed by the projects I was working on that I completely blew off my lunch- postponing it to the point that it was ridiculous to even try to take a break to eat.  Ooops.  No biggie, I told myself, I will just leave early.  Next thing I knew, it was 4:15, and then 4:55.

I headed to the gym and met up with Sam for a short workout before we came home and walked Hunter.  By the time we had showered and eaten it was nearly 8:30 and I started work on my other projects.  I edited my consulting proposal with Dad, returned the favor and recommended a dear friend and mentor on LinkedIn and did some other work.

I literally looked up at the clock and realized it was 11:40.  Hunter was laying on the guest bed behind me, Sam had turned off the TV and gone to bed without telling me and my 10:30 bedtime had long since passed.  So I took Hunter out to go potty, piled all of Sam's dirty dishes in the sink for him to tackle tomorrow and sat down to write this post and finish my VERY productive day.  It's funny, at once point this afternoon the song that plays in the movie Rudy during his senior year when he is getting beat to shit during the practicing montage popped into my head.  It's really a very motivating soundtrack if you're looking for something to keep you going... I ended up listening to it all afternoon and evening.

Alas, it's now time to crawl into bed between my freshly washed sheets (yes I even did a load of laundry today!) next to my wonderfully supportive boyfriend and snuggle with our adorable dog.