Month: November 2024

When it comes to stress in my life, it is something that I have learned to deal with over the years. I have noticed that no matter how much I get done or how good I am doing in life, I am always stressing about the “next thing”. These surveys didn’t tell me much about myself that I didn’t already know, they just gave it a name and a potential risk. I was not a surprise that I am in the middle of the ratings for the Holmes-Rahe test. I was also not a surprise to me that I rated in the middle of the type A personality test as impatient/irritable. Lastly, I was again not surprised at the low rating on problem-focus coping.

According to all three of the surveys, I am at risk of health issues due to my results. From my research, these surveys are correct in that my scores all tend to be influencers of heart disease and high blood pressure. Almost one year ago, I had an issue with my blood pressure spiking. After many trips to the doctor and numerous tests, my doctor diagnosed me with anxiety. Once I started taking medicine for this, I have been much more balanced and relaxed. For the past three years, my wife had begged me to talk to my doctor about getting anxiety medicine because she seen that I could benefit from it. However, I am stubborn and it took a health scare for me to consider the medicine. Looking back, I wish I would have started the medicine years ago. It has been life changing.

I was motivated by money recently. I had an idea to start a small, unofficial, business on the side to put a little more money in my pocket each month. I started buying dog food wholesale and reselling it about 1 year ago. At the time, I wanted to start a business out of it so I would have a second income. Because of the potential large monetary gain of a second income, I was very motivated to market it. However, I quickly learned there was little profit in selling dog food unless you sold a large volume. As I learned this, I lost my motivation because I was not selling much feed and that meant I wasn’t making that extra money. Without the motivation from money, I stopped promoting my potential small business.

Fast forward almost 1 year, and I got an opportunity to start buying wholesale dog supplies and dog food. As I learned more about the profit margin of the dog supplies, I realized there was much more money to be made in supplies than in food. Again, I became extremely motivated to market my potential new business and products. I have been selling supplies and feed for 3 weeks and have made a good profit to keep me motivated. I have made flyers and a Facebook page for additional marketing, and I will soon file for my business license and make my side hustle an official LLC. As this business continues to pick up, I am already thinking about what other products I can offer to my customers to bring in more profit.

Effective Trainings

In my role at the manufacturing facility that I work in, I am required to facilitate problem solving teams. Before I could do this, I was required to get certified through our company training program and be evaluated on my ability to facilitate according to our standards. This training had multiple parts. The first part was a classroom setting learning/teaching approach and was facilitated by trainers. This classroom portion used things from our learn this week such as opportunity to practice, timely feedback loops, shared training experience with the other trainees in the classroom. This training was very effective because of these key principles of making a training effective.

Ineffective Trainings

In a leadership training that I participated in a few years ago, we had to attend for 4 hours per week for 16 weeks. This training was not very effective because the instructor for the training missed the very first principle listed in our learning material which is to communicate the relevance of the training. From the first meeting we had, it was clear that it wasn’t very organized nor did the instructor ensure we all knew the learning objectives of the training. All we really knew was that we were learning about leadership. This training also fell short because it didn’t have opportunity to practice anything so therefor it also didn’t have anything to give feedback on. The only thing about this learning that followed the principles in our learning was that they “chunked” the material up and made it digestible.

In the interviews that I have been part of in the past, we used a panel system that was multiple interviews with two interviewer. This gives us a very well rounded evaluation of the interviewee because multiple people get to hear the same answer and they will all pick up something different out of it. We also use scoring guides that allow us to ensure we are being fair to each interviewee when making a decision. This system helps prevent the common issue with thinking a interviewee is better than what they are just because the previous interviewees were terrible. Structure is another thing that we have in our company when it comes to interviewing. We have a interview questionnaire that has categories and each category has a few different questions that can be asked. The talent acquisition team decides for the interviewers on what category they will be interviewing in the panel.  This doesn’t ensure that the same questions are asked to all candidates like the material mentions but it limits them to only being asked a few preselected question. We also provide interview training through our company call “Effective Interview Training”. Just as our learning material states, the training stated that taking notes, making sure to give the interviewee time to ask questions and explaining next steps are all important to effective interviews. Pressure to hire doesn’t mean settle. Our mindset is to hire tough and manage easy. Task based work samples are something I think we should use in my company, especially welding test to ensure the validity of our interviewee’s experience and skills.