Deborah Fike

Deborah Fike is the founder of Avalon Labs, which provides marketing consultations and writing services for start-ups and online businesses.   She carves out a significant portion of her time to raising her two young daughters.

Taking Responsibility for Your Decisions

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asking for advice

When we’re teenagers, we hate the thought that our parents can limit our decisions. I remember my father not allowing me to stay out late with my boyfriend and feeling utterly defeated. How could he do that to me?

Obviously, parents have every right to restrict their children’s decisions during their formative years. Looking back on high school, I’m grateful for all the decisions my father made for me. Without his guidance, I wouldn’t have become the person I am today.

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Creating More Time

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creating more time

Admit it: you have a project you want to work on. Whether it be renovating the bathroom, starting a personal blog, or just exercising more, there’s something you wish you were doing. You tell yourself that your days are too full. You’d love to pick up a project, but you don’t have the time.

The truth is, most of us can make time, if we’re willing to scrutinize our days. This time doesn’t even need to be taken out of your sleep schedule, your work day, or even your pleasure time. Consider the following options:

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Dealing with the Unexpected

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baby feet

To say that life doesn’t always goes as planned can be the understatement of a lifetime. I got a large dose of that reality last month when I gave birth to my first child. My beautiful daughter Eleanor was born by emergency Caesarean section on July 21, 2011, weighing in at 7 lbs. 8 oz. and 21 inches.

Being a project manager by trade, I tried my best to anticipate what would happen during the birth. I created a “birth plan,” which outlined everything I wanted to happen from my first contraction to leaving the hospital. Of course, I knew that labor can turn into an emergency, but after attending several birth classes, I felt assured that I would have a less traumatic experience. I mean, I prepared beforehand, right? What could go wrong?

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Creating More Love in Your Life

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love

I have a confession to make. I read cheesy romance novels. The kind of novels where the woman has a great career and doesn’t need a man, but that doesn’t matter. She finds one anyone in an epic adventure of suspense, mystery, and yes, passion. Sure, at first she doesn’t think they’re a good match and she might even (gasp) hate this man, but as the story unfolds, it’s obvious that they are made for each other. Love descends upon them both in a flash of brilliant desire and boom, happy ending for our couple.

Of course, these novels aren’t realistic in any sense, and no one really takes them seriously. Hidden between the pages, however, is a misconception that has permeated our lives. It’s the idea that “love happens magically,” as if meeting the right person at the right time will ignite it. Only those of us who win the love lottery will get to experience true love.

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Why Failure is a Part of Success

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failure

As long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to be a writer. I kept a journal faithfully throughout my school years and entered every story writing competition I could. I’d write short poems in the margins of my science lecture notes and even penned comic book stories about all my friends being superheroes. With good grades and stacks of finished stories, I felt like nothing could stand between me and a promising career as a writer.

Except that life interfered. Despite my best intentions, I ended up curtailing my dream once I hit college. Studies overrode novel writing. I picked up a boyfriend, who took up most of my time. I did try to keep writing by submitting short stories every now and again to collegiate magazines, but none of them were accepted. After several rejection letters, I shelved my writing dream in lieu of other pursuits. Once in a while I would find an old 3.5” floppy filled with story ideas and imagine “what if,” but things didn’t get much farther than that. I was unhappy about it, but I felt I should spend my time doing “adult things.” At the tender age of 23, I felt I had failed at writing.

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How to Help Others Cope with Change

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Cope With Change

When I moved away to college, I had the trunk space of a Dodge Colt to hold all of my worldly possessions. I took a few suitcases of clothes, a box of childhood stuffed animals, and a hand-me-down TV. Both of my older sisters had lugged that ancient 13″ TV to their college dorm rooms, and they were passing it on to me. I remember staring down unconvinced at that beaten up black box and saying, “Do I really need this?”

“Yes, you need it,” my sister told me, shutting the trunk of the car. “Trust me.”

Turns out she was right. That TV became a focal point of how I dealt with living on my own for the first time. I watched the same news my mom watched every morning, which staved off homesickness. My room became a hub for Friday night movie parties on my dorm floor. When my college boyfriend broke up with me, I bought an old video game system and whiled away many lonely hours as I got over him. My sisters had not just given me a TV, they had given me a coping mechanism for a transitional period in my life.

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Getting Loved Ones to Understand Your Decisions

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talk

When my husband (then-boyfriend) and I first started dating, we really hit it off. It took less than a month for us to spend all of our time together. Before long, we had two sets of everything : one for his apartment and one for mine. Then his apartment lease came up, and we decided to move in together. We were eager to take this next step in our relationship.

Having grown up in a conservative household, my boyfriend knew his parents would not approve. He decided to write an email to his folks explaining his decision to move in with me. He took an afternoon off to write it down and didn’t show it to me until after he sent it. When I did read it, I nearly fell out of my chair. It started, “Mom, Dad, I love Deborah, and I don’t care what you think. We’ve moved in together.” The email continued to get more aggressive in tone, ending in the ultimatum, “You will respect her when you meet her next month.”

That’s right. Worse than the email itself, I had never met his parents. Needless to say, when I shook their hands at the airport, I felt like the harlot who had stolen their little boy’s innocence.

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How to Explore New Careers (Without Quitting Your Day Job)

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explore new careers

Ever wonder what it would be like to spend your 40+ hours a week working somewhere else? If so, you’re in good company. In the US alone, 55% of people aren’t happy with their current job. We’ve heard the success stories of people who quit their day job and found something better. Maybe they went back to school, moved to another location, or even started their own business. We admire their tenacity because we too would love to drop our lives and start afresh.

Then reality kicks in. Many of us can’t take the financial risk of quitting our jobs. Our children need a roof over their heads, our house payments keep coming, and our obligations keep us rooted in our current communities. We dream about changing jobs, but looking at our lives, it appears impossible to follow in our career heroes’ footsteps.

Fortunately for us, exploring new career opportunities doesn’t mean you have quit your day job tomorrow. There are more subtle ways of getting where you want to be. Consider these simple ways to start pursuing a new career:

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Forgiving Yourself

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forgiving yourself

I am a critic. To some degree, we all are. We criticize our co-workers when they do a bad job. We get upset when our friends don’t come to our aid. We lament that our family doesn’t understand who we have become. It can be particularly hard to forgive someone else if they have done a terrible wrong against you. Relationships suffer, loneliness ensues, and it takes a lot of time to heal these wounds.

But even harder than forgiving someone else, we struggle to forgive ourselves.

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How to Build a Real Network (Not a List of Strangers)

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online network

In this digital age, we are obsessed with networks. We want to keep in touch with our 3rd grade friends, so we check their Facebook profiles. When we meet new people, we greedily gather their contact information and store them at LinkedIn. Even our mothers love networks, if the sheer amount of forwarded spam email is any indication. Information hording makes us feel like we are part of something bigger, that we have a network of support we can leverage at any time.

Unfortunately, that might not be true. You could have 1,000 friends and not have even a mediocre network. Like all relationships, you need to work at maintaining them in order to get anything from them. If you decide to friend everyone you know and never talk to them, you don’t have a network. You have a list of strangers.

Networks rely on real communication, the kind of bonds that keep us interested in each others’ lives. It may seem like a daunting task, but you can engage in real communication every day with your network. Doing so not only makes you part of the network, but builds relationships over time you can turn to in times of need.

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