How Anne Frank shifted my viewpoint

At the beginning of this year, I decided to enter a challenge through Goodreads. I sifted through my ever-growing list of books that I want to read and pared it down to 85ish books that I felt I should've read by now, that looked interesting or a like light read, or that I thought they might have an impact on my life viewpoint. The most recent one that I read was Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl. I'm almost ashamed to admit that it took me this long to get around to reading it.

Now that I've had a few days to mull it over, I think I'm finally ready to review this book.

Anne Frank wanted her diary to be published. She had dreams of being a writer. Her father, the only one of the Secret Annex group to survive, edited and published her diary for the world to read and I thank him for that. The diary is an open, honest, and sometimes harsh view of what life was like for Jews during the war. Anne doesn't hold back her strong opinions while writing in this diary.

As the book is a diary, the writing is somewhat disjointed at times but you can clearly see the development that Anne undergoes as a person during the two years while writing in the diary. You can really get a feel for the kind of person she would have become if she had survived.

This book made me question a lot of things; the reasons behind the war were the biggest ones, and to a lesser extent, the things going on in my own life. I teared up every time Anne referred to what she wanted to do in the future for her career or how she was going to raise her children. After seeing some of her hopes and dreams and realising just how short her life was cut, I started questioning things that were going on in my life and what I wanted to do. Although this wasn't what the book was designed to do, it made me up my rating to five stars. Any book that makes you question things in yourself has to be amazing.

Thank you Anne. I appreciate it. Rest in peace.

Don't drink the Kool-Aid!

I can't comment on the specifics for obvious reasons, but a recent crisis in my industry pointed out a few (often fatal) traps that PR professionals (myself included!) often fall into. The best example that I can think of is drinking your company/non-profit/charity's Kool-Aid.

As the voice of an organization, you have to believe wholeheartedly in what it is that your organization is doing. Unfortunately, it's all too easy for an organization to get sidetracked by projects or new and exciting prospects and stray from their mandate. If you're not doing regular evaluations of your activities to see how effective they are as well as how they relate to your organization as a whole, it's easy to start falling down a path different from the one you started on.

There are a few important things to remember here that will help you out immensely!


1. Don't rely on inside sources only! Reach out and talk to people other than your co-workers and fans of the brand, they can often give you some much-needed perspective

2. Regularly evaluate and adjust your strategy if it's not getting the results you started out to achieve

3. Ask your brand fans/members/target audience for feedback even if you're being successful. They might see something that you miss, or even come up with brilliant additions to any campaign.


What else do you do when organizing a campaign?

Being a comma

Disclosure: I bought the latest Coldplay album last weekend and haven't been able to stop playing it yet. Thankfully (for the husband's sake), I only really play it while I'm in the car and he's not usually with me.

There's this one lyric that just keeps playing over and over in my head and I'm not quite sure why but it's something that I've been mulling over the past few days.

"I'd rather be a comma than a full stop"



I never really thought about it too much when I first heard the song, but it's latched onto my cortex and won't let go. I guess the question that it raises is, what exactly does it mean to be a comma instead of a full stop?

Other than the huge life changes that went on last year for me, I'm planning a few more this year. I've been working at an amazing facility where I teach therapeutic riding and I love it so much that I'm working on my certification. It's not really a change, but it's moving me into a different career path than where I am currently.

So, back to my original question. What does it mean to be a comma instead of a full stop? I interpret it as being more in the moment and moving with the flow of life instead of trying to cling to things and force them to work the way you want them to.

Here's to living in the moment in 2012.

Event planning 101 or How I survived planning my wedding solo without ending up certifiable

 Planning (and surviving) a wedding is an awful lot like consciously choosing to avoid a mental breakdown. There are meetings, scheduling conflicts, and (quite frequently) wine.

I just survived my first.

Wedding, of course.

After nearly two years of planning, plotting, and drinking, it's all over.  And I have managed to wrangle five key tips for event planners and future brides:


1. Make a battle plan.  Set up a strategy and plan every last task that has to be done down to the hour.  You may be cross-eyed after doing this,but it'll make life a lot easier in the long run.  While only half of your tasks will have hard deadlines, it doesn't hurt to set personal ones for everything else, this way you can schedule yourself to death in advance and still have a bit of wiggle room for when the s*** hits the fan.

Never underestimate the importance of caffeine.

2. The devil is in the details.  Pick three things that you really want to focus on and stick with them.  If you try to focus on every little detail and make every little thing special, you're likely to fail and/or go insane.  Besides, if one tiny thing is forgotten, only you and your team will know.  Everyone else will be too busy having a great time.

Always look on the bright side of life.
Monty Python does.

3. Never underestimate the importance of flexibility.  Sometimes things will go wrong and you'll have to improvise, fast.  You'll have to roll with the punches and live with it.  Depending on how flexible you really are, you can either have a blast, or end up crying in the corner.  Take your pick.

Despite losing power, we still managed to rock the night with a capella
versions of pretty much any song we could think of.

4. Things will get overwhelming.  There are a lot of decisions to be made that rest on your shoulders and people will judge you on.  Everyone will deny it, but let's face it, this is an event that uniquely represents you (in the case of the brides) or your organization (in the case of event planners).

Take the time to slow down and take a breather, even when you're convinced the world will end if you do, it will be a good thing.  Being calm will help you deal with the ups and downs or at least come down from that crazy night-before-the-event adrenaline-high that'll have you crashing hard.

Sometimes, holding a big ball of fur can be helpful.
Sometimes, not so much.
Especially when that ball of fur really wants to get at,
and destroy, your big expensive dress.

5. Build, and rely on, a great team.  They can be your support network and helpers.  They will be the ones to pick up the slack when you're exhausted and keep you cheery when all you really want to do is burn all of those ribbons to cinders.

Having the support of a great group is key.

Bonus tip 6.  Enjoy it!  It's been a long haul and it's finally happening/over!  Find moments for yourself and savour your victory.  It all goes by in a whirlwind and it's nice to be able to remember it.  Pictures are great but they tend to lessen in meaning if you don't remember the event depicted happening.

The boy soldier and the teenager

I recently had the opportunity to read A long way gone: Memoirs of a boy soldier by Ishmael Beah. It's an amazing, thought-provoking, tragic, and at times gruesome, story of Beah's time as a child soldier in Sierra Leone.

I won't go into how awesome the book is - you should really check it out for yourself. What I will talk about is the reaction of one of my students to the book.


I tutor a few kids a week in English and one of them is reading a novel about child soldiers in Uganda. I started to tell him about Beah's book and he begged me to read him a description from the book. He wanted me to find the goriest part and read it (I didn't). He thought it was so cool (and so do his friends from class) that kids in other countries actually get to use guns and kill people.

Needless to say, I stopped reading pretty quickly. I'm still not really sure as to how to react. I'm disturbed that he couldn't relate to this being real and not fiction.

I'm contemplating having him read Beah's book once he's finished the novel, to give him some perspective and do a mini research project on the Lord's Resistance Army. Maybe then he won't be so quick to wish we were at war so he could fight.

Be true to yourself ...about yourself

I recently finished Kathy Pike's book Hope... from the Heart of Horses and found one part in the book in particular caught my attention and held it:

"A human who is in an incongruent state of being - thinking one thought while feeling a different emotion, or carrying an agenda and trying to hide it - gives off the same vibration or stress signals as a predatory animal in the wild. ...Horses couldn't care less what you are trying to appear to be; horses sense what you are feeling, who you are, even if you are unaware of it yourself." (p 49)

It's true. A horse won't care what your agenda is or who it is you're pretending to be - they only care about the true self. That's what makes horses so great to work with when it comes to therapy: you know pretty much immediately if someone is hiding something based on how the horse reacts to them.

Take my last group demonstration for example: I was having a bit of a crappy day and tried to fake it with my group. I wasn't able to get my demonstration done initially because Jamie, the Standardbred horse in the photo, was anxious and a bit fidgety, sensing my emotions. After taking a minute to sort out my feelings and show Jamie that everything was okay, he responded well and did everything I asked him to do.

I guess I, and pretty much everyone else out there, need to take a minute and remember that you can't lie to a horse so you might as well be honest with everyone in the first place.

Of seven year olds and pole dancing

I came across this thanks to the Toronto Star.



I'm going to start by saying that I do not endorse this style of dancing by girls so young, but I found the whole controversy surrounding the issue quite interesting. Parents are outraged that their children, usually daughters, are learning erotic moves and wearing smaller, sexier outfits.

The more interesting question that this whole scandal has raised (for me, anyway) was at what age is it appropriate to teach these moves and introduce these costumes? When is it okay to teach girls that grinding, groping yourself, and doing moves that would usually require a pole are dance moves that are competition or dance-floor appropriate?

We'd like to think that kids can be kids until they have to grow up, but is 7 years old really the time for them to have to grow up?