See, Penelope Trunk is awesome at helping you write resumes.
Posted: October 5, 2011 Filed under: Work, writing 11 Comments »Even though I sometimes have issues with Penelope Trunk, like when she basically tells young women to become Betty Draper except with an MBA, she often says amazing, true stuff. I also love her willingness to be vulnerable and brutally honest about things like mental illness.
I think the stories you tell about your life ARE your life. They become your life. A resume is one format for a life story. The steps she outlines at the end of the post?
So here is a five-step resume plan for you to take control of your story:
1. Figure out where you want to be in your career right now, this moment.
2. Look back on all of your life and pull out the tidbits of your life that somehow relate to what you want to be doing now.
3. Get rid of everything on your resume that does not relate to what you want to do now.
4. Make a story that explains the way you got from one moment to the next moment in your life where you were doing what you want to be doing now.
5. Once you can tell the story verbally, have a resume writer help you build a resume that tells that story in resume format in a compelling way.
The most important thing about a career is that it is a tool to create a vibrant future. Your career is a mutable, dynamic story that you control. If you cannot tell stories about yourself from multiple angles, then the single story you have on that paper controls the rest of your life. You deserve more than that.
That’s why people pay me $150-$200 to write their resumes. That’s my process. That’s what I do. I help you figure out what kind of story you want to tell about your life and then we turn that into a resume. Next time you write a resume, get rid of everything you don’t ever want to do again and turn your resume into the story of stuff you are great at and stuff you want to do.
The State Religion is Constant Self-Improvement
Posted: January 14, 2011 Filed under: Culture, Essays, Feminism, Quotes, writing | Tags: Culture, Hoarders 5 Comments »
Photo by Flickr user rivieramaya26
Bookslut writes about Judith Warner’s column on “yoga memoirs” like she took the words right out of my mouth.
“It was with joy/frustration/hilarity that I read, then, Judith Warner’s piece in the New York Times about the rise of the yoga memoir. And how it ties into the death of feminist political action, because all anyone wants to do anymore is “find themselves.” These days that means in the yoga studio, in the bedroom, in their home, rather than in their community, their job, their consciousness raising group. I read a list yesterday of the whatever 11 resolutions all women need to make for 2011, and of course it was nurture your soul, find time for yourself, not let’s go out and rally for real political change, or let’s protest our banks’ behavior by taking our money out, or let’s establish a community garden so that we make sure our children, regardless of financial situation, are getting nutritious, fresh food. No, let’s light a scented candle and talk to our inner child.”
Ha! Look, I’m not going to make the case that yoga is bad, because obviously it’s really good and good for you and more importantly, I happen to enjoy it and feel better when I do it. And I’m not going to make the case that having a clean and organized home is bad. I’m sure if I could ever figure out how to have one I would really enjoy that too! And I’m not going to make the case that all the “real” feminism happened in the 1970s, because there is a vast and diverse community of brilliant men and women figuring it out in front of us as we go. I’m also unsure about the whole take-all-you- money-out-of-the-banks-by-way-of-protest thing, because it makes me think of the guy in my hometown who has Revolutionary War cannons in his front yard and once put a baby raccoon into my trick-or-treat bag. I bet he took all his money out of the banks years ago.
But I’m thinking back to Brene Brown’s talk, and how one of the things we do to numb ourselves against fear and vulnerability is to “perfect.” Sometimes the world really makes me scared and angry, like when the financial industry runs a protection scam on the entire country, or we start a bunch of wars that we don’t know how to get out of. It makes me really scared and angry when we torture people – even really bad people – because I think there are things that humans should Just Not Do Ever. I should totally do something about all of that, after I find an exercise regime that really works for me and find a way to pare my wardrobe down to a few elegant and perfect essentials and try out some meditation and relaxation techniques so I can become more centered. Read the rest of this entry »
The power of vulnerability
Posted: January 8, 2011 Filed under: Quotes, Science, TED, writing | Tags: Writing 6 Comments »I just watched this TED talk by Brene Brown (thanks to Between Those Things).
I’m a total geek for TED. The internet is amazing. We live in amazing times. I press a few buttons and books come to my house. I press a few more and I get to sit at the feet of brilliant people and hear about the neat stuff they are doing. I’m not big on New Year’s Resolutions because by March they become The List of Things I’m Currently Failing At but it wouldn’t be a terrible idea to watch a TED talk every single day and write about it. Shit, I started the wrong blog!
How does any of this relate to advice columns and screenwriting?
Two years ago I took an “Autobiography & Memoir” class with the great Chicago performance artist and teacher Brigid Murphy. Here’s the class: Brigid gives you writing prompts. Using a paper journal and a pen, you scribble down a story from your past without editing or judgment. You bring the story to class and read it out loud, and the group comments on the details and moments they found most compelling. You write 10 or so of these pieces and then choose one to polish and adapt into a screenplay, a piece of fiction, or another piece of art.
What happens when I just wrote down what happened, without to be literary or to make myself look good, was magical. Reading the stories aloud told me where to cut and where to elaborate. It turns out there is a club for people who tell stories like this, and I started reading in public. I got in the habit of speaking truthfully about vulnerable topics and not feeling ashamed. My life got better. My art got better.
If you are any kind of artist, your embarrassment and pain and fear and weird gross obsessions and preoccupations and failures become the DNA of your work. Joel hides Clementine in his shame. Meg Murray defeats IT with love and with her faults.
In life, the courage to be vulnerable makes you go after what you want. Try these on for size:
“I’ve been afraid to ask you out because I don’t want to ruin our friendship, but I really like you and would love to take you on a date. Would you be up for that?”
“You think you’re being helpful when you say those things to me, but really you’re just hurting my feelings, so I need you to stop.”
“I don’t really like being a management consultant. I want to save up some money and then start my own business.”
“I can’t handle this all by myself and I need help.”
“Let’s have a kid.”
Scary, right? It’s uncomfortable to put yourself out there. What Brown discovered in her research and we all know from any awareness about our culture, when we are afraid to be vulnerable and uncomfortable, we numb ourselves. We look for certainty. We blame others. We try to pretend that consequences don’t exist. We grit our teeth and limp through another year.
Or, we take a risk. It could fail spectacularly, but it could be kind of amazing.
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