5 Months Gone

Posted on November 6, 2010 by Tricia Ransom

It’s been over 5 months since I last posted to my blog! During that time I’ve thought of it often, and I have a list of topics I want to write about. Yet, nothing. So I started thinking about this blog and my purpose for it.

A life of learning and learning of life. That’s my tag line, and in essence is the purpose for my blog. But the real reason I started it? To create a digital presence and to put my thoughts out there; it was hubris. But over time I’ve changed. Now it’s not about putting my thoughts out in cyberspace and seeing if anyone comments.

Instead, I look at my blog more as a record of my growth. Tree of Learning is my pencil marks on the door frame charting how I’ve grown and changed over the years.

As an adult growth isn’t always linear, and it isn’t always about getting larger. In fact, I think one of the defining characteristics of adulthood is realizing that less is more, and that paring down to simplicity is actual growth. I don’t know how much I’ve grown in the past 5 months, but I do know I’ve changed.

5 months ago I was a new recipient of a Master’s degree, and anxious to find a permanent full-time job. I was looking for a PhD program, and comfortable in my contract position with a great boss. I thought I had arrived professionally. But that was before I spent the summer taking an Improv class. It was before I realized there aren’t that many jobs out there. It was before I procrastinated and paralyzed myself on getting my thesis published. And it was before I took a good hard look at myself.

So here I am with 5 months gone. I’ve had new experiences and self-revelations. I’ve compromised between theory and reality, and I’ve started my re-focus on simplifying my life. Have I changed? Yes. Have I grown? I’ll know that the next time I make a blog posting and check the differences in my pencil markings on the door frame.

Posted in learning, Personal | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Sandbox Series: Shiny Toys!

Posted on May 24, 2010 by Tricia Ransom

Remember. Remember way back…remember back to September and October in your childhood. School had just started, there was no cable, the only kids programming was on Saturday morning from about 6 – 10 AM, and one of the highlights of your day was going to the mailbox. What were you looking for? You know….the Sears Catalogue! If I had one in front of me right now, I bet I could flip it open to the toy section…I think it was usually around page 700 or so. Why do I know this?

My brother and I would literally spend hours pouring over that catalogue. My mom is a teacher who believes every moment is a teaching moment.We had a budget in our letters to Santa. We would write what we wanted, a description, and the page number. Practicing budgeting, math, prioritization, writing, and grammar. Not a bad training course on those topics, is it? And even better, we didn’t know we were learning… Oddly enough, that wasn’t the purpose of this posting, but it could be.  I’ll explore this further in a future posting…

But there is more to the Sears Catalogue than our letter writing. It was the toys. My parent’s motto was “You have everything you need, and some of the things you want.” Since Michael and I didn’t get every toy we wanted, we had to prioritize and figure out where we’d get the most bang for our buck.

We decided that the shiniest, most hyped toys aren’t always the best toys. In fact, those shiny “must-have” items often weren’t around the next year. We would watch the ads, we’d listen to our friends, and we’d think, “Boy oh boy, I gotta have one of those!” When we got it, yes it was shiny. And yes, people were impressed we had it. But it usually only did one thing. Once it did that one thing, then what? Don’t get me started on those board games with instruction books 10-15 pages long! Most of our childhood board games (except Monopoly) are still near-pristine condition…except for the money and the dice. We found uses for the money and the dice.

Our favorite toys? They were ones that were easy to use and that we could use in a variety of ways. For example:

  • We had cardboard bricks we made into houses, the USS Enterprise, or anything we could dream. (Yes, I played Star Trek. Yes, I’ll admit to a small amount, a very small amount, of nerd-ish-ness.)
  • My parents are still using our Radio Flyer Red Wagon…it’s transitioned from toy, to play station wagon, to lemonade stand, to garden tool.
  • We had a two-sided chalkboard…you can’t imagine all the uses we found for that – or maybe you can!
  • An old-fashioned black tape recorder could tape voices, or be a tri-corder (nerd alert again), or a strange discovery in a hidden cave deep underwater.
  • On rainy days mom would spread wax paper on the counter and break out a can of dad’s shaving cream so we could create sculptures and art work.
  • Mom saved all of our egg cartons, paper towel rolls (great for speakers, telescopes, and art projects), and old crayons.
  • We used old socks to make puppets.
  • All my brother’s electric train could do was go around in circles. But with some of those cardboard bricks on the tracks you have a tunnel, or a cave, or an ambush. Add in some Tonka Trucks carrying GI Joe and Barbie and you’ve got spies deep in enemy territory or a couple on their honeymoon.
  • A broom could be a horse, or a flying broom, or a prop, or a weapon, or something to clean up with.
  • My brother had Legos that we used with Fisher Price, Barbie, GI Joe, electric trains, insects, Tonka trucks, Radio Flyer wagons, and everything else.

So let’s apply this to L&D. The shiniest, most hyped toys aren’t always the best toys.

If your toy requires hours/days/weeks for you to learn to use it, there may be a simpler alternative. If your toy can only do one thing, is it really cost-effective for you? You learned when you were a kid that the best toys have uses limited only by your imagination. Look at the toys you already have in your toybox, and forget what the directions say. How can you add in some puppet socks and cardboard bricks to create something new?

New toys can be good, don’t get me wrong. I LOVED my Simon and our Pong game. Just remember what you learned as a kid. What toys did you play with the most? Which toys helped you create something new and exciting? Which ones made you think? The shiniest, most hyped toys aren’t always the best toys. Sometimes they are, sometimes they aren’t.

CHALLENGE: Your parents left you alone, and you have a cardboard box (about 3-4 feet high and wide with no staples), paper towel cylinders, string, couch cushions, and other random items. What do you make/create/do with it?

NOTE: I am not endorsing a specific brand or toy or vendor. I not endorsing the purchase of these brands or toys from any mentioned vendor. These brand names are the ones I remember from my childhood, and the links are to provide you with an idea of what the toy is/was.
Posted in Sandbox Series | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

A Marriage Kind of Love

Posted on May 24, 2010 by Tricia Ransom

I was on Twitter this morning, and found a tweet from @MarriageBeSaved: “Marriage is not a long date. It’s a partnership involving give-and-take and sacrifice.” I retweeted it and someone replied, “Sounds like a business deal, it’s about love?!” And that got me thinking.

I met my husband face-to-face 5 years and 2 days ago. We still love each other and want to spend time with each other. And to me, that says a lot. But it’s more than love. We LIKE each other.  For me, marriage isn’t a business deal, and its more than love. It is work, and commitment, and compromise, and flexibility, and anger, and friendship, and irritation, and happiness, and frustration, and contentment, and caring, and nagging, and laughing, and crying, and sharing, and liking, and growing, and whole bunch of other “ands”. That’s a marriage kind of love.

Marriage is an institution that needs to encompass business – just look at the statistics that say most marriages fail over money issues. Marriage can encompass love – but it doesn’t have to. To me, marriage is more than love, more than money, more than a lot of things. I wrote my Love Definition….oh I don’t know….probably 20 years ago. It helped me to not settle into a marriage just because I wanted to get married. It helped me to wait and find the right person for me. I waited 38 years to meet my husband, and I’m so glad I waited.

So that’s my lead-in to my Love Definition. This is what I wrote back then, in one take, with no editing. I’ve never needed to edit it – it says it all for me. So much so that I read it at our wedding.

Love Definition

I’m not talking about some grand perfect fairy tale illusion of romance. I’m talking about the person that you love enough to realize that you won’t always love them every single day – but you’ll always be willing to fight for the next day when you will love them again. The person that will make the memories and history with you, so that on the days when love isn’t there, you stay together, knowing that what you have is deeper than love. That you will fall in love with the person they are constantly changing into, and that they will love the new you. A day-to-day struggle that you willingly enter into knowing that it’s not love that holds you together, but love (or the continual promise of it) that makes you fight and believe that you will be together. That’s what I want, someone to fight, on a daily basis, for the love that we will share over the years, and for our memories and history that we make in our day-to-day lives.

Me and Jimmy on our wedding day 10-22-05

Posted in Personal | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

The Sandbox: All I need to Know about L&D I Learned as a Kid

Posted on May 23, 2010 by Tricia Ransom

This past week has been filled with learning and education. I graduated, and then I spent three amazing days at the ASTD International Conference & Exposition here in Chicago. At the conference I absorbed the latest and greatest in Learning & Development (L&D) from the best and brightest in L&D. I spent a lot of time reflecting on what I was learning, what I knew, and incorporating all of it into my personal world-view of L&D.

What did I realize from all of this reflection, you ask?  All I need to know about L&D I learned as a kid. In this series of postings, I’m calling it The Sandbox, I’ll explore this concept from many different angles:

  • The newest and shiniest toy isn’t always the best. Sometimes a box, a stick, and some imagination are all you need to keep yourself occupied for hours.
  • Collaboration is good, but if you’ve got a big group of kids, you learn to do what the oldest kids say, and to find fun and value in that.
  • Let’s not forget the grown-ups that were in our lives: the ignore-er of kids, the condescend-er to children, the kid-hater, and the cool grown-up that wasn’t a friend, but understood you nonetheless.
  • There were games, but also times for quietness and reflection.
  • And there were the personalities of the kids you played with. There were the quiet ones, the bossy ones, the criers, the bullies, the fun ones, the smart ones, and the strange ones.

I’m going to cover each of these angles – toys, big kids, grown-ups, games, personalities – and relate them to my view of L&D. I’m sure as I go through this I’ll think of others. I’m hoping that you will suggest other ideas, and share your input with me.

Posted in learning, Sandbox Series | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

In Transition: Simplicity ain’t Simple!

Posted on May 2, 2010 by Tricia Ransom

I was on Twitter chatting with @dr2b_robin when she said “I’m the queen of simplicity!”

She said it with such utter conviction (at least I thought it was conviction…maybe I was reading too much into 140 characters) that I started thinking. Am I a Queen of Simplicity?

I want to be a Queen of Simplicity.

I love simplicity.

Take me anywhere, and I’m watching everything going on around me and offering a running commentary to my long-suffering husband on how the process could be more efficient or more simple. I try to organize our home and our lives to make things more simple. I read Real Simple and clip articles such as How to Fake a Clean House. Do you know what I’ve found?

Simplicity ain’t simple!

My mom is a Queen of Simplicity too…and she makes it look so easy. You know, like watching Michael Jordan, the Rockettes, or Payton Manning. Apple products are simple…my parents were able to pick up an iPod and figure out how to use it without any instructions.

Simplicity, to me, implies an ease of movement. A fluidity to every action, placement, thought. By definition, all extraneous stuff is gone.

So why am I talking about this in a posting about being In Transition? Like I said, Simplicity ain’t simple…and it takes time and effort to achieve it. Michael Jordan spent hours every single day practicing. My mom has spent years culling down to the bare essentials and putting in organizational structures to support her concept of simplicity. There is work involved – a lot of work. Dolly Parton said “you’d be surprised how much money it costs to look this cheap!” I say “you’d be surprised how much work it takes to be this simple”.

Being In Transition has given me the time to actually step back and look at my life and to see where I can simplify it. Physically I’ve been able to empty out some closets. Mentally I’ve had time to begin work on some areas of my personality that can be a bit intense. Monetarily…well being out of a job takes care of that!

I’m not a Queen of Simplicity. I’m not a princess, nor even a lady-in-waiting. I guess I’m a debutante of simplicity. I’m just beginning my journey to define what simple means to me, and how I can achieve it. I haven’t even touched the fluidity aspect.

But to complicate my simple revelations about simplicity is the fact that I’m married. I cannot take my journey alone – I have a traveling partner. So that means my journey is also his journey, and he is going to have to be involved in my re-defining and efforts.

So let me tie all this back to learning…because to me life is all about learning. I’ve learned simplicity ain’t simple. I’ve learned that I need time to find where I can simplify. I’ve learned that I’m just beginning this path. I’m constantly re-learning that I’m not on this path alone, and that I have to be flexible enough to include my husband on my journey – if he wants to go. What if he doesn’t want to explore simplicity with me? Then I’ll learn how to compromise and listen to what he is truly saying.

And I may find that my life is simple after all.

Posted in In Transition | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment