A little more detail about me…

Now that I’ve explained what the intent of this site is, (check out my previous post: Tiny Office, Big Ideas), I’d like to share a little more insight into who I am professionally and give you a couple of keys to understanding what I am all about.

Over the course of my career, I have gained the bulk of my experience in two vastly different industries: bookselling and energy management. Books because I love them, and energy management because well, I needed a job. We’ve all been there, right?

After working for my family’s various businesses for many years, entering the world of bookselling was a dream for me. In that career, I worked first in a used bookstore, and then at both Barnes and Noble and the now absent Borders Books. At both companies, I eventually held supervisory and training roles. But starting out, I was just a girl who loved to read. I tried my hand at all manner of roles in the store from inventory processing to shelving, customer service to cashiering, merchandising, Storytime lady, and even spent some time serving up coffee and treats in the cafe. A bookstore is an excellent atmosphere to learn about people and business. In bookselling, you have the luxury of not being too beholden to hard sales tactics. Bookselling is more about relationship building. Let me explain.

Working in a bookstore, you not only read a variety and volume of books, but you also absorb this mental knowledge of the store’s inventory. You know what is currently popular (Oprah’s Book Club) but also what backstock you have on hand. You learn about popular authors and get a feel for their style, even if you never read one of their books. This is important, because a big part of selling books is being about to help people find the book they are looking for.

Because people rarely know the title or even the author of the book they are rushing in to buy. Sometimes they do, but often they do not. They heard about it somewhere, and when you hear about something somewhere, you rarely remember the name. They come in looking for that book on that show, or the book with the blue cover, or the one about pumpkins. It is amazing how good you can become at calming someone down, getting more details, and piecing together what they are looking for, and placing the book in their hand. Pure joy.

(Yes, I know things have changed. I worked in books in the early years of the internet and right as Amazon was taking off and lacked all the digital tools available today. I would never knock how helpful it must be to look up a podcast or find a picture online to verify it is the right book. That must speed things up considerably. But I will say, the old way was so fun and fulfilling.)

Besides, my point is this: in a bookstore, even today, you can gain valuable experience figuring things out, helping people discover what they are looking for, and learning to talk to them in a way that is respectful, fun, and de-escalating. What a set of social skills! What a lucky girl I was to learn them.

The other thing a bookstore teaches you is to respect all kinds of thoughts, styles, opinions, and ideas. You are surrounded daily by the ideas of the greatest thinkers of all of history and all cultures. You earn true respect for the thoughts of others, and curiosity about them.

Now, energy management taught me a bit less about people and more about analytics and data. About how and why the cost of running your appliances adjusts throughout the day and seasons. About how energy is generated and travels to transmission stations then to where it will be used, how natural gas is stored, how to identify a persistent water leak, and tiered pricing for all of it. I learned how utilities function, and provide their valuable services.

And I took the Client Management skills I did not even realize I was learning in the bookstore and applied them to serving the clients of my company. I learned how to relay the complex information in the utility industry to my clients in a way they understood and applied to them. I learned how to relay context.

Context is vital in the business world, and particularly in the application of training. I was a customer service manager in both industries, as well as a designer and trainer. And let me tell you, context is everything. People cannot effectively learn and properly do their job if they do not comprehend WHY they are doing it. They might understand the how, but until they fully grasp the why, they will not be performing to their full potential.

So that is what I will aim to provide here. Context. Understanding. Curiosity. Grace. Growth.

I hope you are as excited as I am to see what we will achieve together.