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?

Another year, another Relay for Life

Recently I had the opportunity to participate both as a team leader and a committee member in the Canadian Cancer Society's Relay for Life. Having been a participant for the past few years, it was interesting to see the other side of things.

A large portion of my evening was spent walking around the track at Brampton's Fair Grounds taking pictures of teams in costume and generally making sure that everyone was having a good time. (Pics can be seen at the Brampton/Caledon/Georgetown/Dufferin County Unit's Facebook page.)

The main thing that I noticed about this year's Relay compared to the last few was that the focus had shifted from individual team members to families. There was a sports area set up for kids as well as a bouncy castle and even a clown doing balloon animals. Having all of these things made the event more kid-friendly and I saw that a lot more families were present for the event, compared to last year.

I think it was a brilliant move on the part of the committee to have more kid-friendly activities. Apart from drawing more families to the event, it made the whole evening feel more like a social get-together where the focus was on celebrating victories over cancer, remembering those who have lost the battle, and symbolically fighting cancer as a community.

Congrats to the Unit's successful event and I'm looking forward to next year's.

The benefits of online learning

I thought I'd take a different spin on things this week and talk about education. It tends to be a favourite subject of mine, considering the amount of time I've spent in school (7 year post-secondary and counting!). Today, however, I will be waxing on the awesomeness that is the University of Guelph's online equine programs. (In the interest of full disclosure, I am currently a student in these programs and have been taking these courses for two years.)

Courses offered range from Exercise Physiology to Equine Event Management. The great thing about the programs is that you can learn nearly everything you need to start out in the equine industry from the comfort of your own home. Obviously it's a good idea to have access to horses for the duration of the courses, but it's not an absolute necessity.

The courses are taught by professors with years of experience in the given topic and are from different parts of the world, so variety is definitely the spice of these courses. Guest speakers are drawn from all sorts of different walks of life and are available to answer any and all questions for at least a week. Assignments given tend to be practical and can be tailored to be useful to anyone even after the course is finished.

These courses build an international online community of people who love horses and want to learn more about them. It's great for learning and networking.

Thank you Equine Guelph.

Why the PR Game Shouldn't be Played by Science

Wired posted this great article on Monday "Why Science Needs to Step Up Its PR Game" and while I find the premise quite intriguing, I have to disagree strongly. As a PR professional myself, it's quite easy to get frustrated with the lack of success in persuading public opinion that science often has.

The point, however, is that the purpose of science is not for persuading. The facts should be unbiased and speak on their own. It is the job of activists and PR-type professionals to persuade, it is the job of scientists to provide the material with which persuading will occur. If scientists were to start employing PR professionals to "sell" their ideas, the objectivity of the scientists would be lost and their information would be biased. If information can be argued to be biased, it can be dismissed and, despite the potential validity of this information, it will not be able to be used as for further research purposes and therefore will be ignored and valuable resources will be wasted.

I would argue that instead of using PR to promote science, we should be using PR to change the perception of scientific research and to help the public to better understand just what it is that science really is.

Lessons from Monty Roberts: Teaching vs. Learning

I finally got around to reading Monty Roberts' book "The Man who Listens to Horses" and I must say that I'm very impressed. The book is part biography and part tantalizing hints about horse behaviour, all wrapped up in a neat package.

If I try quoting each part that has stuck with me, I'd probably need to write a book of my own, so I'm just going to quote one:

"Knowledge, she told us, ...needs to be pulled into the brain by the student, not pushed into it by the teacher. Knowledge is not to be forced on anyone. The brain has to be receptive, malleable, and most important, hungry for that knowledge... To use the word 'teach' implies an injection of knowledge... there is no such thing as teaching, only learning." (The Man Who Listens to Horses, p87-88).

Now the great thing about this statement is that it can be applied to both people and horses. In fact, Roberts uses it as part of his teaching philosophy with horses. I'm in the same mindset as him; it's impossible to teach either a horse or a person something if they don't want to listen or learn. The trick is to get them interested and wanting to learn. Usually this will involve making learning fun, rewarding (either in the physical sense, with praise or treats, or mental sense), or easy. Or it could be a combination of all of the above.

What I'm really getting at is if you find yourself as the teacher getting frustrated with your students, be they two or four-legged, take a step back and ask yourself "Am I helping to facilitate learning or am I forcing knowledge right now?"

Call it a hunch, but some of my sessions with my students will probably go a lot easier from now on.

The importance of confidence

I was working with a particularly difficult horse today and the more frustrated I got, the less she responded to what I was asking her to do. I had to let her be for a few minutes while I got myself calmed down. Finally, I got back in the ring with her and projected a calm, confident aura to her and she responded positively to me and did what I asked her to.

This whole experience has reminded me of the importance of confidence. Confidence is one of those things that you take don't really notice when you have it and desperately want it when you don't. This is particularly true when dealing with horses. Horses can sense and respond to the energy that you're projecting and it's particularly helpful when you're projecting confidence.

It makes me wonder how much more effective I'll be in working with horses when I've done more leadership training. Maybe boosting my confidence in myself is what I need to be more confident around horses. I'll let you know.

Maxwell House brews up some good feelings with a bitter aftertaste

I was watching TV last night when one of the Maxwell House commercials came on and I actually paid attention for once. It's a bit old (2008) and is referencing their "Brew Some Good" campaign (orchestrated by OgilvyOne Toronto) where Maxwell House donated $226,000 to nominated charities instead of spending it on a commercial.

The reason that I paid attention was because Maxwell House donated to C.A.R.D. (a.k.a. the Community Association for Riding for the Disabled), which just so happens to be a pet cause of mine. The ad had me completely convinced that I should support Maxwell House at least by buying their instant coffee when I'm going camping. (I'm very particular about buying whole beans instead of ground coffee, so switching over completely isn't feasible.) However, after a little research, I found out that the donations and their Brew Some Good Week were a one-time deal in celebration of their reformulated 100% Arabica bean coffee.

If Maxwell House really wants to celebrate by rewarding "Canada's top do-gooders", the donations should be on-going or at least offer yearly competitions, and Brew Some Good Week would also be a yearly thing organized by Maxwell House. If the company can afford to throw that kind of money at charities once by reducing costs on their commercials, logically speaking they can do it again. And again.

Nice PR stunt Maxwell House, but I'm not buying.

Rupert Isaacson and The Horse Boy

Last week, I was fortunate to be at a screening of The Horse Boy in London followed by an appearance by Rupert Isaacson for a Q&A session. Isaacson runs a centre in Texas for autistic children and their siblings to socialise and interact with each other in a fun, low-stress setting.

I won't wax on how amazing the entire story of taking his autistic son to Mongolia to visit various shamans was, because of course it's amazing and if you're really interested, the book and film are available from Isaacson's website. What I will talk about is something that Isaacson said during the Q&A session after the movie.

Isaacson posed the question, why shouldn't we teach children where they want to be taught instead of using traditional methods where they have to be in a classroom? Why can't the outdoors be the new classroom? At his New Trails Center, children are free to choose where they want to learn, and as a consequence, the lessons are easier and tend to stick better. The key message that I took home was that autism is just another way of seeing the world, not something that should be seen as devastating and a disappointment. If you can learn to accomodate for a child's particular quirks, you can learn a lot.

Check out the short version of the story in Isaacson's own words:

Updates and apologies

You've probably noticed that this blog has been, well dead. So as stated in the title, I've got both updates and apologies.

My life has been quite chaotic up to the point of disrupting my work life. I've been working as a communications consultant while juggling other responsibilities, so unfortunately this blog was left on the backburner to burn.

But no more! I will be doing my absolute best to post on a minimum of a bi-weekly basis about PR in the news.

Seal meat is on the menu at Parliament

Let's hear it for Stephen Harper! He's finally made an obvious statement of support for the seal hunt: seal meat is now on the menu at the Parliamentary restaurant.

I'm pleased that the government is supporting this important part of Canadian history. This is a a step in the right direction for support of the seal hunt. I have to wonder, however, if this is a PR move based on the controversy that PETA has brought about.

Harper hasn't typically had a good relationship with First Nations peoples and also hasn't really had their support. It could be argued that this sudden acceptance of the seal hunt is a bid for votes, or maybe he really wants to support this way of life. I'm hoping for the latter.

Identity theft with a twist

It sounds like something out of a nightmare: "Girl finds dead mother hawking cure-all on Facebook." Helen Breimer died 9 months ago of cancer and her Facebook account was hacked to promote a "miracle cure-all" colon cleanser. The account has since been shut down but this is just one example of many of how commonplace identity theft is becoming.

The main point that I got out of this article was that this was just one case of many. Nothing particularly different or important happened in this case but it makes for a good story.

On the contrary dear readers, something important did happen. Shelby Breimer found her deceased mother's profile active and touting the importance of this "miracle" drug. The company, Teloxys Technologies Ltd, has yet to apologize and did not remove the content on its own and Facebook hasn't returned any of Shelby's calls.

The biggest question, for me anyway, would be how to seek justice. A person's privacy has been violated here and no one seems to be willing to do anything about it. How well does this reflect on Facebook and why do none of the news stories seem to have picked up on this?

Sustainable cooking - an oxymoron?

The Brighter Planet has just launched a contest à la Julie-Julia Project to "Master the Art of Sustainable Cooking." I'm both intrigued and skeptical.

It's a great contest idea both for raising awareness of carbon footprint reduction/conservation and for challenging people to think more about what they eat. I'm pleased to see that they've launched the contest right at the beginning of the fall season when food is still plentiful from farmer's markets and relatively easy to get locally. The types of foods that are readily available are also low-effort foods (you don't have to do too much to prepare them).

What I'm really wondering is if people would be willing to stick with the challenge during the winter months when local food isn't as easy to get and when people are craving higher fat foods that require more preparation and more ingredients.

All right, I'll bite. For the month of October, I'm going to try to follow all of the tips listed in the contest, paying particular attention to getting foods from local sources.

Wish me luck.

Howling to the wolves

I was recently fortunate enough to participate in one of Algonquin Park's most famous activities: the wolf howl. According to the report, the wolf howl that I attended was the only one this year to get a response from the guides' calls by wolves.

Apart from anything else, I was very impressed with the level of organization from the staff. Although there was a relatively small group for the howl (around 600 people) the staff were more than ready to leap into action and help everyone out.

The naturalists were knowledgeable about wolf ecology and were able to explain it in a way that everyone was able to understand. All in all, it was a great event to raise awareness of wolves and to help combat people's prejudice against these amazing predators.

Ingenuity for sale

Being the uber biology nerd that I am, Gmail often suggests sites that I should check out and most of these are biology-related. This little gem, on the other hand, is completely chemistry.

Made with Molecules, Raven Hanna's brain child, uses recycled materials and local sources for her jewellery and clothing designs. The part that I love the most is the integration of molecular images and art. Who would've thought that ethanol could look so elegant or that oxytocin could look so cuddly?

I have to admire Hanna who decided to do something that she loves and make it into a viable and thriving business. It makes me want to take a page from her book, but I don't really think that anyone would pay me excessively for drawing ducks.

Oh well, there's always PR as a fallback.