life, love, *motherhood, and then more
Archive for November, 2009
Some skins ought to be shed
Nov 30th
Aspirations are fine things, in fact, I think they are necessary to keep you on your toes, allowing you to hit goals and get better as time passes.
However, it's one thing to have aspirations and go for them, and totally something else altogether to have aspirations but insist to achieve these goals by doing things in the old way.
I mean, if you were right all a long, then you would have achieved your goals a long time ago, so why even bother declaring goals when you have no intentions whatsoever to shed your old skins?
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A snake who intends to grow bigger would shed his old skin in order to get bigger. You can't cling on to your pasts and your methodology and 'get there'. It's just impossible.
And so?
Nov 24th
Serious? Was I a little too upfront up here? I don't think so. I mean, we need to call a spade a spade, yes?
So how far do results actually matter to you?
Stepchild frustrations
Nov 23rd
Reading this article entitled PR is not Marketing's Stepchild had me deciding to be a little more upfront about my frustrations with the current practices adopted by so many people who employ corporate communications professionals 'to help put the company's communications in place'.
I don't know how many of you working for client-side businesses in the PR industry often feel frustrated when your bosses completely ignore what's printed on your job description sheet and assign you editorial duties like 'checking for English grammar', or 'making the sentence look more branding-friendly' (whatever that means), or, 'ensuring the logos stay in the right place', or 'writing a press release' and 'making sure that particular release gets adequate coverage in the papers'. How many of you get hoodwinked into the idealistic territory of making 'strategic public relations decisions' if you sign in to become a corporate communications professional in a company, only to find out that your superiors are not able to connect the dots that links marketing and PR as mutually supportive , but essentially separate functions.
It seems that in the local business arena,the PR professional inevitably suffers. Old school managers find it hard to understand the proper functions of the PR department, and for some reason, we're the promoters for the company. And to top it up, so many of us are stuck in a deadend reporting to Marketing Managers who're unable to distinguish between the marketing communications for a product, and the branding for the company that helps to elevate the brand promise of that particular product. Or perhaps, it's really a matter of semantics, but as long as there are labels which carry the word 'communications' in them, the responsibility gets inevitability to Public Relations.
'Marketing Communications'. Communications. Hmm… it's a communications function. So I'm going to call the PR/Corp communications Manager, and ask him/her, 'Eh what are you doing to communicate the status of this product to my customers? What strategies do you what to do?'
Sheesh. You tell me. Give me your instructions. I'll support you. Right now, I'm here, trying to make sense of that piece of dishevelled graphical disaster you call a product advertisement. Woops, that corporate logo, it's out of place, it's not supposed to look like that. You can't put it there. We've outlined the guidelines for your reference, can you please follow that. Hey, I've got to get back to my annual report, to my CEO interviews, to my article submissions. And then I've got to get that media tour and media skills workshop out of the way.
'I know all these things are important, but I need your direction in completing the sales cycle. You need to give me a direction for my product.'
Excuse me. I thought You're the Marketing Person In Charge? Or since when did this become a game of pass the ball?
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Or maybe it's just a very Malaysian thing. It happens all the time I guess.
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And then I read this, 'What Public Relations Is Not' and I wondered why is it, with so many proper write ups on what the vocation entails available online, we're still so bloody confused.
Beyond 2012.
Nov 16th
Eric and I caught 2012 on Friday. The show sort of lingered in my mind over the past few days since I get spooked quite easily by things like the world ending in 2012.
Actually I read of the Mayan prophecy a few years back and it's been on my head for a while now, so the show sort of made some kind of graphical impression upon me. It got me wondering what would happen, and what I would be doing on that particular date, whether I wanted to be at work (21/12/2012 falls on a Friday, friends) and live life as usual, or would I want to force Eric to take leave and be with baby and me (who, coincidentally, will be almost 3 years old then!) so that we can be together when the world stalls disintegrating.
After the show I also told Eric that even though ideally our kids should be 3 years apart, I don't want to be pregnant in 2012 at all, and well, beyond 2012 if the world continues, then we can try for more, so my baby's going to be an only child for at least 4 years! (My mother would probably disapprove of this, but well, the Bible does say that in the end days it will be super difficult for pregnant and nursing mothers, so I want things to be a little 'easier'.)
I don't want to strike something off as total bollocks, but when I read this article on Daily Common Sense , I felt a huge sigh of relief (the whole pole shifting in one day thing doesn't make logical sense, as the article explains). I also know that it's unwise for us to already know how we're going to die (if life were so bloody predictable, then life would be a boring game to enjoy, eh? The point is, neither death nor the future are two things we're meant to discover this early in life, and while I can keep telling myself that 'nows' the only time and thing that matters at this point in time, that part of me that ensures survivability (my fear thermostat, that is) keeps ticking on me.
Damn you Roland Emmerich.
That's all I can say now. Stupid money sucking scam artist. Shucks. Now I need to actually stop believing that 2012 is going to come true. (these kind of paranoia can't be good for us).
To life!
Arrrrggggh… The goal!!
Nov 13th
I'll be lying if I said I am totally, amazingly, happy about this whole body blooming into something I don't recognize phase that I'm in.
Exactly a year ago, this was me….
Now I look like this
Sans all the clothes, I have stretch marks, dimples, tiny blotches here and there, and a belly that moves involuntarily in the night, causing sleepless nights. It's normal to cry over this right?
*Pant pant, 2 more months to go*
