A Birthday Message

Every morning I ask myself a question and I listen for an answer. I don’t know if the answer comes from from my Higher Self, my guardian angel, God, whoever. Sometimes I wish I could pinpoint the source, but I know the most important thing is what comes through. Today, I asked my usual question but I directed it to my mother, who passed on August 5th. This is what I heard, edited only for typos.

What do I need to hear right now?

You need to hear from your mother right now. Here she is:

Kel, you were the answer to a long-held prayer that began longer than 56 years ago today. When I married your father, I prayed for you. For the first nine years when pregnancy didn’t happen, I prayed for you. When I was finally pregnant, I prayed for you. When my brother was killed two months before you were born, I prayed for you. When you were born exactly 56 years ago at 8:09 A.M., I prayed for you. I have prayed for you and loved you every day of your life. Even now, I pray for you. I know how hard my passing is on you. I want to thank you for all the love you always showed me, especially over the last four years and as you helped me transition. It was the most incredible gift I’ve ever received and I know what it cost you. One of the things you said to me during my transition was that I won’t stop being a mother when I stop being there physically. Never forget that even when you have times of feeling alone in the world. You are never alone and you never will be alone. I am always right there by your side. I held your hand to protect you when you were a child and you held my hand to guide me when I was transitioning. We are connected and we always will be. I’m your Mom and you’re my girl. That will never change. Happy Birthday, sweet girl. I love you always, Mom.

I love you too, Mom. Thanks for everything but especially for being my mother. That was always the best birthday gift.

The Hands of Time

My mother always had the most beautiful hands. Even when they were disfigured by arthritis, she still made them look fantastic. She always shaped and painted her own nails much to the surprise of everyone because they looked professionally done. The photo above was taken after her first manicure a couple of years ago. Macular degeneration, which had robbed her of her ability to drive, to read, and to fully enjoy watching television, among other things, had also made doing her own nails much too frustrating and difficult.

Her hand had held mine since the moment she brought me into this world. A week ago tonight, I held my mother’s hand for the last time. She got through tricuspid valve replacement surgery in February, and a hip fracture and surgery in May, but the damage done was just too much to overcome. She spent two days in palliative care after time and age just caught up with her heart, her kidneys, and her liver. Since Mom wasn’t talking any more and only opened her eyes on the day she died, I spent a lot of time holding her hand and talking to her. I told her what a wonderful mother she had been, how strong she was, how proud I was to be her daughter, and how much I loved her. As I was helping her transition from this life to the next, I kept a firm grip on her hand and continued telling her, “Don’t be afraid. I’ve got you.” I could hear her mechanical mitral valve (which she had implanted in 1996), click slower and slower as her time on the Earth grew shorter and shorter. I reminded her of something a friend of hers always said: “The last breath you take on Earth is the first breath you take in Heaven”. Isn’t that a lovely thought?

While I grieve the loss of her physical presence, I feel truly blessed that I could take the hand that comforted, supported, protected, and guided me for almost 56 years and do the same for her as she made her journey home.

What’s Your Number?

We often hear people say, “It’s just a number” when speaking about age. Okay, I get that, but numbers do dominate our lives. Test scores validate and rank a student’s progress, what the scale says can determine how you feel about yourself on any given day, your salary is an indicator of your worth to your employer, and yes, the date on your birth certificate can affect what you and others feel about your own viability, desirability, and cultural relevance. In essence, numbers can dictate your “shelf life”.

When it comes to age, the numbers game has always troubled me. For as long as I can remember, I’ve felt that time was my enemy. I was always running out of it or wasting it. This “time bomb” constantly ticks under the surface of my daily life, but it’s guaranteed to blow at least two times during the year: New Year’s Eve and my birthday. Unlike people who see both of these days as markers of new beginnings, I see them as grim reminders of all that I’ve failed to do, change, or achieve since the last birthday or “Auld Lang Syne” sing-along. This feeling has only gotten stronger the older I’ve become. Today is my 53rd birthday and to be blunt, this has been a shitty year. I’m not going to bore you with details of angst and woe, but trust me, life hasn’t been some Hallmark Channel, happy clappy, fun-filled adventure. Think Sharknado and you’ll be on the right track.

So, unless I want a sequel of deadly flying sharks symbolically destroying my life again until my next birthday, I need to change my mindset. With the patience of a gnat on crack, “instant gratification or bust” has been my unsuccessful mantra so far. What to do, what to do?

I have a telephone consultation with a therapist this afternoon. That’s a start. I’ve done therapy before. My problem isn’t knowing what my problems are. I can analyze, diagnose and talk my issues to death. The trick is making the changes necessary. I’m looking for coping strategies, a bullet point list of steps to take. No more attempts at past life regression or cooing “there, there” to my annoying inner child. That’s all fine and good, but I need to see some results in the here and now, not in the hereafter.

The other thing I’m going to do is continue to find examples of people who’ve accomplished goals later in life. I stumbled across a great reminder on Twitter this week about the actress, Kathryn Joosten, who didn’t start acting until the age of 40. She didn’t get her big break until 20 years later when she was cast as Martin Sheen’s secretary, “Mrs. Landingham”, on The West Wing. Writer and activist Charlotte Clymer shared Kathryn’s story on Twitter as a response to the ageism she sees permeating our culture. I’m going to re-read Kathryn Joosten’s story every time the time clock is ticking like a time bomb in my head. Just like internalized homophobia, internalized ageism is just as detrimental as anything the outside world can do. My birthday wish? Less sharks and more serenity.

 

Don’t Let the Door Hit You in the Ass, 2017

Well, a lot has gone on in my life since I last posted over four years ago. I was in a very happy place back then. There have been upheavals career-wise, health issues, finding love and then seeing that love leave me. 2017 has been a particularly stressful and painful year.

For most of my life, I’ve found New Year’s Eve depressing. It was just a reminder of all that I didn’t accomplish and where I’d failed. Don’t get me wrong, I still feel that way as 2018 starts. The difference is that my desire to kick 2017 to the curb is stronger than my desire to dwell on it. Does that make sense?

I’ve been doing a writing exercise every morning and evening for the last five months as a way to center myself. I plan to have more information to share about this practice in 2018. Until then, here’s what I wrote on New Year’s Eve morning:

There are no accidents, just opportunities. This is an easy concept to buy into when things are going well or the “accident” isn’t something sad or difficult or otherwise awful. In these cases, believing that what’s happening isn’t some accident or cruel twist of fate is harder to take. But really, everything that happens to you provides an opportunity to choose how to respond. If you see an event as yet another example of how you always get screwed, you deny yourself an opportunity to re-frame the situation and grow. If you do see something that happens as an opportunity to learn, or grow, or change, your experience of the situation changes and in turn, your experience of yourself and your life changes.

So, instead of adopting a knee-jerk, negative reaction to what you perceive as a challenge, change your perspective and view the situation as an opportunity.

I’ve never been a “glass half full” type ‘o gal. I’m more of the “that glass never had any water in it and the glass is cracked and chipped” type. As you can imagine, making a conscious effort to see life’s challenges as opportunities and not a sign of Biblical-scale plagues on the horizon is a big ask. I know it won’t be easy, but being fearful, angry and negative hasn’t made life better, so what do I have to lose?

So, adios 2017, you will not be missed. Hello, 2018. I’m ready for you.

 

Synack Solution Explainer Video Script & Video

I wrote this script while working at RocketWheel Productions.The script and video were finalized and delivered to the client in July, 2017.

Cyber attacks dominate the news and the boardroom.

Attackers are savvy and persistent. To defeat them, you have to be even smarter.
Do your cyber defenses measure up?

They will. With Synack.

Synack’s crowd sourced penetration testing platform reinvents how enterprises and government agencies think about security.

How do we do that?

We pair the world’s best hackers with the most advanced scanning technology to find critical security issues that other solutions simply cannot detect.

The Synack Red Team consists of the top security researchers in the world who think like adversaries but are highly vetted and act as allies.

Synack’s proprietary scanning technology, Hydra, constantly scans all of your assets, and alerts the Red Team of any attack surface changes or suspected vulnerabilities.

All testing activity is routed through our secure gateway, Launch Point, enabling real-time monitoring and auditability.

The Synack Mission Ops team analyzes and prioritizes all vulnerability submissions so all security intelligence passed to your teams is realistic and immediately actionable. And we help your team verify that patches have been applied.

These four pillars make up the Synack solution and empower you to face security issues head on.

Synack’s web-based client portal provides real-time visibility into testing activities, intelligence from the Synack Red Team, and detailed reports on when, what, and how your assets were tested.

Why do customers choose Synack?

Efficiency.

An assessment can begin within 24 hours. With the world’s best hackers on your side, you’ll find and fix critical security issues faster and more effectively. And you can easily scale your testing programs as needed.

Visibility.

Synack provides a dynamic client portal with on-demand insights instead of just static reports.

Results.

Synack reduces business risk and increases resilience to attack. A realistic view of your security weaknesses ensures you can be proactive, not reactive.  

Discover.

Prioritize.

Remediate.

Adapt.

Let Synack show you the better offensive approach to security.

Trimming the Fat From Your Explainer Video Script

THIS POST WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON THE ROCKETWHEEL PRODUCTIONS BLOG ON JANUARY 11, 2017.

Trimming the fat. We do it to meat, we do it do our diets and organizations and governments try to do it to their budgets.

When it comes to explainer videos, we need to trim the excess fat from scripts. This isn’t just because of our shrinking attention spans. That’s a factor, but we should want our scripts to be lean and mean because it makes for better videos.

My friend, screenwriter and screenwriting instructor, Madeline DiMaggio, always tells her students that when writing for television, every word needs to count and must move the story forward. If it’s true in television, it’s even more so in explainer videos.

In an earlier blog post, I mentioned the importance of crafting an outline before writing that first script draft. The outline provides a helpful structure as you write the first draft.

In the first draft, you’re not concerned with trimming the fat. In fact, we often write the first draft fatter and then the fat trimming happens in the subsequent drafts. Even these fatter first drafts still tend to be leaner than they would be if we didn’t have an outline as our guide.

Now we can work with the client on trimming. First, we just cut out extraneous words by finding a simpler, more efficient way of saying the same thing with fewer words. This is the wordsmithing phase. We’re not making wholesale revisions that change the meaning of the narration at this point.

Depending upon how close the script is to the target length, the client may decide they like the flow and agree to keep the longer length, or we start making tougher decisions about what bits of narration have to go.

This can be a difficult exercise when there are a lot of stakeholders on the client side who all have their favorite features or benefits they want in the video. This is often when the client works internally on revisions to gain consensus. When we get the script back, we review and if necessary clean up via wordsmithing or suggest additional, more substantial edits.

Once the script is as lean as it can be, the storyboarding process starts. Sometimes minor script changes arise as the visual elements come together, but the fat trimming is complete. Now the magic of bringing a client’s story to life can really begin.

Blackbaud OmniPoint Explainer Video Script & Video

I wrote this script while working at RocketWheel Productions. The script and video were finalized and delivered to the client in June, 2016.

Every constituent in your database, every attendee at your annual gala, every casual constituent for your cause has the potential to be so much more.

Like Marc here.

Marc could be your next monthly constituent, major giver, or chairman of the board, if you just had a solution that helped you know him as a person, customize his communications, and understand what resonates with him. 

Designed for nonprofits with built-in best practices from for-profit companies, OmniPoint Enterprise Marketing Suite is an integrated set of really, reeeally smart marketing tools.

And not just any really smart marketing tools, but the exact tools needed to tackle the unique challenges faced by marketers at non-profit organizations today.

Challenges like data quality assurance and data integration across multiple channels…

…campaign segmentation…

…message personalization and timely marketing automation…

…and visual insight into campaign performance.

With this single, comprehensive solution, you can significantly strengthen your marketing efforts. Because OmniPoint brings together data from across your organization, you can see your constituents as people, not pieces.

Suddenly, Marc is more than just another name in your housefile.

He’s a constituent who’s given annually on “Giving Tuesday” for the last three years.

He’s a fundraiser who ran a marathon to raise money for your cause.

He’s a passionate supporter who prefers to get personalized updates from you over email, not snail mail. 

OmniPoint gives you a more complete picture of who Marc is, so you can create and send customized messages that matter to him, when and how he wants to receive them.

Because when you know Marc on a “first-name basis” instead of a [FirstName] basis, you’ll bring in more dollars and support for your cause. Know more about your marketing campaigns. Know your constituents better. Know how to boost your results. With OmniPoint.

Like Sands Through the Hourglass…There Goes My Attention Span

THIS POST WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON THE ROCKETWHEEL PRODUCTIONS BLOG ON APRIL 26, 2016.

I always tell people that I have the patience of a gnat on crack. I fully admit that patience is not one of my virtues. My impatience got me thinking about my attention span and how it seems to have declined as I’ve gotten older.

Do you remember those reading comprehension tests from school? I used to do really well on them but now, I don’t retain information the way I used to. Is this just the product of aging or is societal change a factor?

I came across an article that says that our attention spans have shortened since the year 2000 from 12 seconds to 8 seconds. We’ve been passed up by the goldfish. Our friendly bowl dwellers come in with an attention span of 9 seconds. Wow.

The article goes on to discuss technology’s role in the decline. So many devices are competing for our immediate attention and our brains have to constantly keep up, and we’re struggling. On a positive note, we’ve become better at multi-tasking!

Here at RocketWheel, we see the desire for “shorter, faster” when people come to us wanting to make videos. Just a few years ago, running times for explainer videos could be three minutes or longer. That is rarely the case now. The “sweetspot” for telling an effective story and keeping someone’s attention is now no longer than 90 seconds. That’s around 210-225 words.

We’re getting more and more inquiries for 30-60 second videos and we have produced videos in that range. The shorter the video, the more precise the message has to be. There’s no time to thoroughly discuss a bunch of features or dive into a problem/solution cycle.

Not every message is suitable for this kind of treatment. But with the popularity of apps like Twitter and its 140 characters and Periscope and Snapchat with their “Mission Impossible” self-destruct set-up, we better get used to consuming and producing shorter, crisper content.

After all, in a couple years we may be vying with the fruit fly and their 3-second attention span.

Junk the Jargon?

THIS POST WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON THE ROCKETWHEEL PRODUCTIONS BLOG ON NOVEMBER 4, 2015.

One of the main responsibilities I have here at RocketWheel is writing scripts for the videos we produce. I work very closely with the client and our animation team to refine and communicate the client’s vision.

Every industry has it’s own special jargon. This isn’t a bad thing per se because jargon can be an effective way to communicate with people in the same industry. Where jargon gets problematic is when it’s overused to the point where it loses any real meaning or influence.

Two articles, written three years apart, have made me examine my use of jargon and I hope it does the same thing for you.

Ann Handley, one of the foremost thinkers on digital marketing, reminds us in this post that context is everything. We need to know if we’re using certain words to show we understand our client’s world or if it’s just easier to not look for a better word or phrase.

Forbes published a list of the “most annoying, pretentious and useless business jargon” back in 2012 and the list is still relevant today. I was dismayed to see many words I’ve used in scripts, or clients have pushed for in scripts, on this list, including, “Scalable”, “Best Practice”, “Leverage”, “Drill Down” and “Empower”.

It’s not that these words are invalid; they are just overused to the point of becoming irrelevant. Running close behind these words are two phrases that I’m hearing and seeing much too often: “Paradigm Shifting” and “Disruptive Technology”.

Aside from overuse, the main reason that these phrases bother me so much is that they seem to ooze hubris. All clients love their products or services, as they should, but a little perspective is needed. For the most part, a client’s product or service isn’t solving global conflicts or curing a disease.

So, do we have to junk the jargon completely? I doubt that is realistic or completely necessary. But what we can do is promise ourselves that we’ll start being more conscious of the words we use and why. This self-reflection can only make our business and personal communications more truthful and powerful. And who doesn’t need more of that?

Helm CONNECT Explainer Video Script & Video

I wrote this script when I worked at RocketWheel Productions. The script and video were finalized and delivered to the client in February, 2015.

Managing maintenance can sometimes feel like navigating through rough waters.

Do you have enough information to stay ahead of maintenance and keep your boats up and running with certainty?

Are you worried about staying compliant as regulators and customers demand more and more reporting?

Sure you could use software to help solve these problems, but it’s often hard for your people to use and just gets in the way of them doing their job.

Can’t someone make this easy?

Someone did.

Introducing Helm CONNECT. Your easy-to-use maintenance and compliance solution designed specifically for workboat crews and engineers.

It’s web-based so you can use it onshore and on your vessels but your data is always secure and accessible even if you lose your internet connection.

Through configurable templates and checklists, you can build a standardized maintenance program for all your vessels.

And all of this information is recorded in a single place for easy reporting across your fleet.

Helm CONNECT’s simple, yet comprehensive system enables you to be more efficient so you can be proactive, not reactive.

Streamline how you manage workboat maintenance and compliance with Helm CONNECT.