#GSD: Social Media Week DC

Warning: shameless self-promotion here! But hey, if you wanna #GSD, you gotta do your own PR sometimes! This week is Social Media Week in DC and I'll be on a panel discussing the visual web. This should be a good discussion because a) I'm totally addicted to Pinterest, and b) if you've been working/doing anything on the internet in the last year you've noticed it's all about the REALLY BIG PHOTOS, kinetic type videos, and  infographs! Infographs! Infographs!

We'll be discussing the democratization of creativity, social engagement, strategy and more. Come check it out :

What: Show, Don't Tell: The Rise of the Visual Web

Who: 

• Alejandra Owens, Managing Editor, AARP Blog; Social & Content Strategy
• Mitch Gelman, VP of Product for Gannett
• Mark Coatney, Director and Media Evangelist at Tumblr
• Aaron Murphy, VP and Associate Creative Director at Social@Ogivly

Where: Ogilvy Washington, 1111 19th Street, NW 10th Floor

When: Friday, February 22nd at 4pm (I may or may not be bringing a surprise for everyone...'cause if you show up to a 4pm panel, at the end of Social Media Week, on a Friday...you deserve a reward.)

Don't forget to say hi if you attend, but also follow me on Twitter where I'll be sharing links, info and lessons learned but also hit me up on LinkedIn (a collector of business cards, I am not).

#GSD: Power Posing

A couple years ago I asked my mom if I was always as confident and assertive as I am now. My mother, not known for padding her feedback, replied, "HA! No! In fact, I don't know where the hell it came from. You certainly weren't like this in high school!"

I spent some time thinking about the different stages and phases of my life, trying to pinpoint just when I got this get-up-and-go mentality and finally came to one defining moment.

High School Is So Traumatizing

True story: My junior year of high school I asked my parents how much money was in my college fund. All my friends had one, and I figured I must have one too! Again, my mother "HA!'d" me and said there was no money. Anywhere. (I immediately wondered why my parents had practically made college a mandatory since I was 5 if they weren't going to help me pay for it, but never mind that.) I think that was the first, legitimate "oh shit!" moment of my life. The idea that I had this huge, expensive life event barreling my way and no way to pay for it made my 17-year-old self pee my pants a little. I shifted into efficiency/practicality mode. I was in the full-time International Baccalaureate program and shifted to part-time for my senior year, enabling me to take just a half day of classes. The other half of my day would now be spent applying to every scholarship I could get my hands on. I dismissed any idea of attending an out-of-state school - Arizona schools offered affordable in-state tuition, with opportunities for wavers based on GPA, SAT/ACT scores and class ranking and I made the cut for free tuition by any measure. All that was left was housing and books.

Like any wayward high school student, I went to my guidance counselor to talk about scholarship opportunities. My counselor handed me a sheet of scholarships I could apply for, and informed me that most, if not all, on the list were prestigious and very difficult to obtain, especially without some level of sponsorship or endorsement. She waved me off and I went on my merry way and applied for them all - and no less than 200 other ones. Throughout the year, one-by-one, I started winning scholarship after scholarship. In the end, I pieced together enough small and medium-sized scholarships to pay for my first and second year of college in full. I was thrilled! I shared my successes with my peers, and they shared theirs with me. And then my friend, Jack, we'll call him, told me he'd won the holy grail (or at least I thought) of college scholarships: the Coke scholarship. Congratulating him, I asked how he'd done it! (I wanted his secret sauce.) Why, he informed me, our counselor had helped him! The same one who'd just sent me off with a sheet of paper. She invested time in Jack, time to help him craft the best application...the winning application, for a scholarship that was going to take care of his ninny ass for a good long while.

My 17-year-old self processed this information in a number of ways, but the one that stands out the most to me was that our counselor saw more value in Jack because he was a boy. She thought he was smarter, more worthy of her time and assistance. Who knows if that's true, but it fuckin' pissed me off. (He probably just asked for the help, a novel idea.) But it was in that moment I realized, no one was going to help me (certainly not just because) so I had to help myself. Now, in reality, plenty of people have helped me along the way and for that I am grateful. But those people are far and few between in the world of business, so I have to fill in the gaps with a steadfast idea of my worth and my value and muscle my way to success. I have to be able to rely on myself, because there will not always be someone there to help or back me up or support me.

Enter: Power Posing.

I noticed long ago that my male colleagues would literally sprawl out in their chairs during meetings. Bosses would throw an arm over the back of their swivel chairs and lean back like Al Pacino in Scarface. They'd lean forward, gesticulate when they spoke. They didn't just fill space, they animated it. Women, however, tended to shrink back and down into their chairs, hesitantly raise their hands and wait to be called on or hold a downward gaze instead of looking head on into the eyes of their peers. When you call it out, it's easy to see what kind of message that sends.

I've read a ton of articles about body language at work and find the topic just fascinating, so Amy Cuddy's TED Talk on how body language shapes who you are was immediately interesting to me. Cuddy, a social psychologist at Harvard Business School, outlines a study she and a colleague did with MBA students at the school. Watch the TED Talk, but to summarize: ladies, we are sucking at owning a room and it is quite literally impacting our performance, our self-esteem and our ability to succeed.

Exercise Your Ego

Cuddy goes on to talk about how they worked with male and female MBA students on practicing either high power or low power poses, tracking their hormone levels (dominant people have more testosterone...shocking!) and ultimately, class performance.

She had students on a power posing regiment. Every day students had to pick a power pose and hold it for two minutes. (Bonus points if you do it more than once a day.) The idea being that you can't just walk into a board room, throw your arm over the back of a chair and feel like a BAMF. You have to train your mind, your body and, yes, your ego into believing you are more dominant and confident that you might actually feel you are.

This is just like exercising folks! You can't just go for a run once a month and expect to lose ten pounds! You have to train yourself and work on it consistently, to see results.

I Feel Faster, Lighter & More Confident!

Now almost a decade into my career, I consistently have to remind myself to not just be in meetings but be a presence in meetings - especially ones with people who make me feel less valued or unheard. But instead of leaving things to chance or "trying" to remind myself, I've started Cuddy's power pose work out. Just a couple minutes a day I toss my feet up on my desk or sometimes I even close the door to my office and stand like Wonder Woman. (Bonus Points: Lynda Carter who played Wonder Woman is Mexican-American!)

I can't always be confident and self-assured - there are plenty of times I doubt myself or feel insecure! It's in those moments that I'll have to fake it 'til I make it, and power posing is one of the ways I'm ensuring that I'm ready for those moments. Instead of defaulting to body language that lets the world know I'm not feeling so hot, I'm reprogramming my default to send this message:

#GSD: Sleep

I told you guys last week that I'm going to start blogging about more than just food, so here goes. I'm calling this the #GSD (get shit done) series since I plan on sharing all the tips, tricks and info that's helping me (or not) be more productive in my life.

Instead of setting New Year's resolutions I decided to focus on "getting right" over the next three months. I wanted to address my mental health, namely my insanely high stress level, by re-establishing healthy habits. I figure that by focusing on simple changes for a set period of time, I can block out the noise that often makes these efforts fail.

I am not: trying to lose weight, save money, go on a diet, work out harder or being less social. (Though if some of these things happen, yay!)

I am: choosing activities (or lack of activities) based on the reality of my mental and emotional needs, not my desires or  even guilt.

This means making a lot of small tweaks to my life and plenty of big shifts in how I think - and it all started with SLEEP! True story: after my break up last September I started sleeping like shit. I'd expected this, since, having been through a few break ups in my time, not being able to sleep was a fairly normal reaction to emotional lows for me. What I didn't expect was that a couple weeks of bad sleep would snowball into three months of exhaustion, going through a lot of concealer and managing poor sleep with over-the-counter sleep aids (such as Tylenol's Simply Sleep). Being the rational person I am, I eventually realized this was not normal, nor was it okay. I could get one or two nights of sleep sans aids per week, but only out of sheer exhaustion.

Looking back on those months, I am now firmly of the Arianna Huffington school of thought that sleep is truly the foundation to achieving everything else in life. The reason being that if my mind and body have not recharged, I'm less able to deal with day-to-day stress, make sound decisions, wrangle my emotions, not cry during every Kleenex or Hallmark ad, etc. There's even mounting evidence that sufficient sleep helps you lose weight, improves your memory, boosts creativity and lowers stress. Basically a good night of sleep makes me feel like I can conquer the world.

How Much Sleep Do You Need? 

Generally speaking, most adults need somewhere between 7-9 hours of sleep. But everyone is different, especially depending on your age. Now, if you're 23 and reading this thinking, "I can sleep four hours a night and totally get shit done!" I challenge you to a) really think about what kind of shit you're getting done on that kind of sleep and b) remember that your sleep needs are going to change the older you get. And by older I mean 25, 27, or 30 - not 55.

I played around a bit to find my "magic number" and ultimately it's 8 hours. When left to my own devices on a weekend without an alarm set, my body regularly shoots for 8 hours. When I get to bed late and end up hitting snooze, I always end up feeling better at 8 hours. It might take a week or two, but you can figure out your number by keeping track of how many hours you've slept vs how you felt when you woke up and how you felt during the day.

Who Knew Getting To Bed Would Be So Hard

I love sleeping. To be honest, on my list of favorite things, it trumps coffee AND bourbon. That's saying a lot. But once I decided that my sleep schedule was going to be on a strict 10pm - 6am time frame I found that getting my ass into bed, let alone ready for sleep, was much harder than I thought it would be.

I have a friend who is always starting too many projects in the evening, thus pushing back her bedtime further and further. We joke about it regularly, but I ended up having to assign a 9pm hard stop to starting any activity that didn't get me one step closer to bed time.

Which lead to establishing a pre-bed time routine. Listen, none of this info is revolutionary, but shit is for real! After 9pm I'm mindful of lowering the volume on the TV, dimming the lights, being in my pajamas, brushing my teeth, washing my face, turning down my bed (so the sheets are nice and cool! mmmmm!) all as a lead up to finally getting in bed by 9:50 or 10. If I notice my mind is busy, even after all that, I hit the sack early with a book and read for a half hour to help bring me down a notch.

Morning Person Convert

It took less than a month - I'd say two weeks - for my new sleep routine to kick in. When my alarm goes off at 6am not only do I feel legitimately great, there's also a good chance that I've started waking up a bit before the alarm has even gone off. As an insurance policy against my own laziness, I have my iPhone alarm set for 6, 6:15 and 6:30. Something about knowing the most sleep I'm gonna get on a snooze is 15 minutes makes getting back into bed very unappealing. Also, knowing that should  I decide to keep sleeping, I'm going to have to get up three more times totally sucks.

My phone/alarm is positioned clear across my studio apartment, forcing me to actually remove myself from the cozy cocoon that is my bed.

Bonus Points 

I have a pretty kick ass bed, not gonna lie. I invested in a good mattress, a feather bed and sheets that make me giddy like a school girl when I crawl into bed. Sleep is about an aesthetic too, folks! A comfy bed and linens are not luxury items when you spend 50+ hours a week in your bed! Imagine wearing underwear two sizes too small all day, every day. Yeah. No. You want your underwear to fit and feel good...just like you want your bed to fit you and feel good too!

There's nothing worse than waking up to cantankerous honking so I have Madeleine Peyroux's Dance Me To The End Of Love as my 6am alarm. Every alarm after that? Cantankerous honking. There are no rewards for sleeping in. Whatever song plays for my wake up call, it's a nice way to set the tone for the day. Sometimes I need Madeleine, sometimes I need Beyonce.

Here's another truth bomb: doing this whole sleep thing totally sucks sometimes. There are evenings that are so fun, I don't want to leave early just so I can go to bed. There are nights I know I need to do something or get something done, but it won't be done by that 9pm cut off. But the proof is more than there - I feel so much better when I sleep enough. I also don't want to sound sanctimonious or lame when I tell friends, "Nah, I gotta head home so I can sleep. It's, like, a thing I'm working on." This is why I have that three month deal with myself. If after 3 months I'm like, "Ehhhh, whatever." Then fine, but at least I gave it enough time to see and feel the results of changing my routine.

It's not like one night of not enough sleep is going to kill anyone, it's the accumulation of many nights and a back-slide into bad habits that'll get ya. So, are you sleeping enough? Do you make sleep a real priority or is it just this thing you do? Can you tell a difference in your day when you don't get enough sleep?

Photo: me! Alejandra Owens