Carolyn Birsky
How To Take Care Of Yourself Post-Layoff

If you’ve been reading the news or your LinkedIn feed, you’ve likely seen the layoffs happening across the tech industry. Maybe you yourself have been impacted. Whether this is your first layoff or you’ve been a part of one before, the experience can be quite disheartening.

You go from having a full work day to hours on hours of open time. You had a group of colleagues you worked with daily and suddenly you’re no longer interacting with those folks on a regular basis. There are moments when your new found freedom feels amazing - and others when it’s absolutely brutal.

So how do you support yourself through it?

Below are some ways in which I’ve been taking care of myself throughout my own layoff journey. Hope you find them helpful too!

How To Take Care Of Yourself Post-Layoff
Carolyn Birsky
Start, Stop, Continue, + Support

In business, there is an exercise called Stop, Start, Continue. The purpose of the exercise is to enable teams to give feedback, clarify priorities, and create agreed upon next steps. By putting all of these ideas out in the open, it’s easier to get everyone on the same page about what action needs to be taken. It’s often used at the end of project sprints or the end of a quarter to help teams self-evaluate and improve upon processes for the next project or quarter ahead.

It can also be a helpful exercise for your own self-reflection.

Start, Stop, Continue, + Support
Carolyn Birsky
How To Support Your Grieving Team

We’re all experiencing grief right now. It might look and feel a bit different from what normally comes to mind when we think of “grief”, but ultimately that’s what it is.

We’re grieving the loss of life - both the actual loss of life of those who have died of COVID-19, as well as the sudden loss of our “normal” lives. It feels like overnight the world we knew changed and we’re mourning what we once took for granted like meeting friends for dinner, going to the gym, or even shaking hands with someone we just met. Many of us are grieving the loss of stable income and aren’t sure when we’ll be able to find jobs again.

We’re also grieving the loss of the futures we had in mind for ourselves - whether it’s postponing a wedding or graduation, changes to who is allowed in the delivery room when giving birth, the move we were supposed to make, or the new job we were supposed to start. We had plans and dreams that suddenly seemed to have vanished or have drastically changed on us.

Nothing feels certain - other than the fact that we’re experiencing grief.

As we deal with our own grief, it’s important to remember that in many ways this is a collective grief. Every single one of us is affected by this pandemic in our own way.

This is particularly important to remember when it comes to work.

How To Support Your Grieving Team
Carolyn Birsky
What I'm Loving Lately: Quarantine Edition

How are you holding up, friend?

I hope you’ve been finding ways to have fun and appreciate the good things in life amidst all of this uncertainty. To help you feel inspired and hopefully discover some new things to keep you occupied in quarantine, I’ve pulled together a list of things I’ve been loving lately.

Each item on the list is something I’ve personally been using for inspiration, stress management, or just for fun.

What I'm Loving Lately: Quarantine Edition
Carolyn Birsky
The Do's And Don'ts Of Working From Home

Over the past week, several friends and clients have mentioned the difficulty they’re having adjusting to working from home. Maybe you’re feeling that way too?

As someone who has spent a few years working from home and on distributed teams, I thought it might be helpful to share my best do’s and don’ts of working from home to help make your adjustment easier.

Here’s what I’ve found to work well.

The Do's And Don'ts Of Working From Home

A Letter Of Self-Love

A Letter Of Self-Love

Happy Galentine's Day, ladies!

Given that this day is all about female friendship (and since I just wrote a blog post on making friends the other week), I thought I'd focus on a different female friendship in your life: the one you have with yourself.

Knowing I wanted to focus on self-love today, I'd been struggling to find a way to talk about it that felt different from my self-love blog post from last year. Then all of a sudden, a good friend emailed me a piece written by Tama Kieves for Oprah.com about how she talks to herself when fear creeps in. I opened the link and a lightbulb went off! This piece contained the exact message I needed to hear in that moment and it gave me inspiration for a fresh take on a self-love blog post.

Making Friends As An Adult

Making Friends As An Adult

Adulthood is filled with lots of things you never thought you'd have to do when you were dreaming up your post-college life, such as:

  • Dealing with cockroach infestations in your postage stamp-size apartment
  • Navigating exceedingly crowded public transportation on your way to and from the office
  • Being hungover after only having 2 drinks
  • Finding new friends

Just to name a few.

Interestingly, the topic of how difficult it can be to make new friends as an adult has been coming up a lot lately in my conversations with both friends and acquaintances alike. No idea why. Maybe to prompt me to write a blog post about it? 

My Interview On The Permission To Grow Podcast

My Interview On The Permission To Grow Podcast

I'm super excited to share my recent interview with Kelsie Brunick of the Permission To Grow podcast!

Kelsie and I met via Instagram. We'd been following each other for a while, doing the whole "social media friend" thing (commenting on each other's posts, quick responses back to each other, etc.) and then just like that, we were recording a podcast episode together!

8 Books To Help You Crush It In 2018

8 Books To Help You Crush It In 2018

I love books. Better yet, I love books about self-improvement. Hazard of the job I guess.

I frequently have about 3-5 books at going at once. I write in them and bend the corners - marking pages to come back to when I need guidance, inspiration or insight. They're a major source of conversation in my life, as I'm always curious to hear what other people are reading and love recommending books that I've fallen head over heels for. 

During a recent coaching session, a client told me I should really write a book roundup since I’m always talking about new books to read. I’d been toying with the idea, but her suggestion convinced me to actually do it.

Forget New Year's Resolutions... Let's Focus On Goals

Forget New Year's Resolutions... Let's Focus On Goals

For most of my life I was very focused on New Year's resolutions. Or at least I tried to be... 

Around this time of year, I would think about all of the things I wanted to change about myself or be better at and I’d write a list.

Past items on my resolution lists include things like:

  1. Floss every day
  2. Go to the gym 5x per week
  3. Lose 5-10 pounds
  4. Drink more water
  5. Eat healthier

 

I’d write them down neatly in a journal, attempt to maintain them for a few days and then, within a week, I’d fall off track or completely forget about them.

2017: A Year In Review (FREE DOWNLOAD)

2017: A Year In Review (FREE DOWNLOAD)

As we approach the holidays and the year comes to a close, it's natural to start looking ahead to 2018. Focus shifts to New Year's Resolutions and what comes next for us in our lives and careers.

While it's important to be forward thinking and get serious about your goals, I encourage you not to let 2017 go so quickly.

Guest Post On Biz & Bubbly: 3 Ways To Stay Sane As A New Solopreneur

Guest Post On Biz & Bubbly: 3 Ways To Stay Sane As A New Solopreneur

Hey there! This week, I'm super excited to share with you a guest post I wrote for Biz & Bubbly last Friday! 

Biz & Bubbly is an amazing community for female entrepreneurs, run by Morgan Anderson (who is a total gem)! Morgan believes in bringing together women to share their knowledge and support each other in business. She writes her own blog posts and also provides an opportunity for other women to contribute their knowledge to the blog as well.

As an avid connector and believer that knowledge is power, I'm all about this model and am extremely grateful for the opportunity to contribute to the Biz & Bubbly blog! I don't talk a ton about entrepreneurship on my own blog (except for sharing stories from time to time with you), so this was a fun change of pace.

Your Career Isn't A Straight Line

Your Career Isn't A Straight Line

We live in a culture that views careers as a straight line in forward motion. There is even a phrase for what you are “supposed” to do throughout your career: climb the corporate ladder.

Ah yes, the corporate ladder.

We are all so familiar with this phrase that we don’t give much thought to it. We just absorb it into our vocabulary and assume we’ll do what it describes: Start at the bottom. Look up. And keep climbing through positions until we get to the most senior level possible.

Open Up: Mindset Shifts & "Ah Ha" Moments

Open Up: Mindset Shifts & "Ah Ha" Moments

You know those times when you’re so set in one way of doing something that you’re almost blind to alternative ways of looking at it? And yet, the way you’re going about something just isn’t working for you?

In these cases, you’re so fixated on the way things are that it's as if you don’t have access to changing your perspective. The more you focus on the problem, the more it seems to stay and the less you're able to see alternatives. It often takes something or someone outside of yourself to access a new mindset or perspective that, when you look back at it, often seems pretty logical or even obvious. Sometimes it comes from a comment made by a friend. Sometimes it comes from reading a page in a book. Sometimes the Universe smacks you upside the head.

How did I not see it that way before?!

What Attending INBOUND Reminded Me About Inspiration And Growth

What Attending INBOUND Reminded Me About Inspiration And Growth

Last week I had the privilege of attending Hubspot’s INBOUND conference - an annual marketing conference that the tech company hosts here in Boston. I’d never been to the conference before, but thought it would be a good opportunity to network and hear what’s new in the marketing world, since as an entrepreneur both of those things are super important. Thankfully, I managed to snag a free ticket from an incredible organization called She Geeks Out (if you’re a woman in tech, you should absolutely check them out!) and avoid the $500+ price tag for the opportunity to attend.

I went into the conference expecting it to be like many conferences I’d attended as a sales rep: full of vendor booths, swag, and plenty of opportunities to network, but not a ton of inspiration. Sure, there was a lot of the former. It’s a tech conference after all.

But what I wasn’t expecting was how inspired I would leave.