6What's Their Secret?The One Commitment You Have to Make to Yourself and How to Keep It
Learning to Clear the Decks
Like almost everyone else who ends up in a big job, Caroline Starner, Oakley's global senior vice president of human resources, worked her way up through jobs where she learned her craft. Sometimes in those roles you end up in situations where you feel like you're in way over your head. That happened to Starner early in her career, and it shaped the way she's approached her life and work ever since.
Starner shared her story with me:
I was fresh out of college, and I had an important role running a department within a function. I was feeling completely overwhelmed. I just could not see how to get all the tasks done. So I made a list of all the things that had to happen as evidence of how tremendously overwhelming and how impossible it was going to be to accomplish all this. Then I sort of started stalking my boss to show him that I can't get all this stuff done.
Needless to say, Starner's boss wasn't leaping at the opportunity to sit down with her, wave his magic wand, and solve all of her problems. She was persistent, though, and with some exasperation, he agreed to take a look at her list.
There were two things he said to me that have stuck with me ...
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