When I think of books the image that comes to my mind is always of case bound hardcover notebooks. Definitely not printed books, definitely not softcovers. As a bookbinder it’s important to me that all the basics are as affectionately made as the more elaborate structures. Simplicity works. I love it.
In my new shop there’ll be medium size hardcover journals with linen covers (56€ incl. worldwide shipping) and tiny hardcover notebooks with book cloth covers (23€ incl. worldwide shipping).
Even before COVID and the current stay at home orders, I’ve meant to tell you about the easiest jean outfit recipe I’ve ever made. It’s so effortless to put together, yet it looks like a million bucks thanks to this Dressori kimono jacket.
The plan was to meet my friend Vicky at MacArthur Place in Sonoma, a hotel and spa. It has a great coffee shop, an outdoor patio, and a light-filled lobby with cool art and small tables for catching up with ones you love like Vicky.
Don’t run over there now; it’s closed because of COVID.
Our pre-COVID get together over coffee
But this get together was on March 6th when we couldn’t have imagined how much the world would change in the coming weeks.
It was a bit chilly out, but I was so excited to wear this gifted Dressori kimono jacket. Vicky is a fashion lover, and I knew she’d appreciate it. I left my just-in-case warmer coat in the car and skipped into MacArthur place to meet her warm, beaming smile. Everyone deserves a friend like Vicky.
Three easy pieces
Anyhoo, the outfit was easy to put together. I wanted a simple background so the kimono jacket got all the glory it deserved. What’s simpler than a column of navy? Maybe a column of black.
I slipped into my DL1961 slim frayed jeans (medium wash) and grabbed a cashmere navy sweater with a high v-neck. I bought it from the men’s department at Saks Off 5th in the Petaluma Premium Outlets.
Jeans and a sweater had the background covered.
The kimono jacket color is called denim. There’s a shibori pattern on it that has shades of orange, sage green, brighter blue, and soft mustard.
Three easy accessories
When it came to adding accessories, I used my honey-brown leather pieces to pull out the warmth in the jacket colors. On my feet were my Cole-Haan ankle booties. I pulled out a leather belt in a similar color that I bought in town at the leather shop on the square. I buckled it near the end, so it hung on my hips, not my waist.
I added my honey-brown bag which came from SAX Consignment.
The boots, belt, and bag neatly tied the jacket to the column of navy. Is that simple or what?
Thinking ahead to wearing the Dressori kimono in spring
It was easy to imagine wearing this jacket in May with jeans, a tank, and sandals. I love the luxurious feel of the jacket and how it billows around me as a walk. I could see wearing it on closet appointments with clients or shopping trips or meeting girlfriends for lunch or wearing it to go out to dinner with Russ.
Ah, but those adventures are on hold. Plus, it’s been cold in Sonoma and I’m not at all tempted to wear a tank or sandals quite yet.
But I did wear this outfit on Monday when I was busy meeting writing deadlines and working on lesson plans for a 4-week class I’m planning to teach soon on style. Virtually, of course.
Changing the recipe slightly for my home office
I changed out just a couple of things from the original recipe to make my Monday work-from-home jean outfit. The belt feels like too much fuss to wear at home. Instead, I wore a pendant that my friend, Alice, sent me from Minnesota. It’s a crystal and a key hanging off a brown leather cord. It was an easy substitute.
It felt so good to wear it all day because it reminded me of her and our meeting in a coffee shop in Fergus Falls, MN. You may remember her, too in the post I wrote about her adventures in style while recovering from cancer treatment.
Back to my substitutions: My Cole-Haan booties have a small, chunky heel. For my home office, I went with my brown suede Prada booties. Flat, super comfy, and it was great to get out of sneakers. I wore my tortoise-framed glasses instead of the blue ones (also from Uber Optics).
I asked Russ to pictures for me. You can see that this outfit fits in well with the warm brown tones favored in my office furniture.
From melancholy to acceptance to appreciation
I was a little melancholy prior to putting on this outfit on Monday. I wanted to wear it, yet I felt sad. I had had such visions of bouncing around Marin and Sonoma having a lovely time wearing this kimono. And here it was just me, indoors on a Monday, again.
But was it just that? I was in my office surrounded by things I love. I was writing materials for members of the Monthly Marketing Bundle Program that I started in 2009. I adore the image consultants and stylists in this program who will use these materials. We’re there for each other, especially now.
I’ve spent the last few weeks working on a class that I’ve wanted to teach but never had the time to develop.
I’m referencing my books as I write the course and remembering how my last book was written here in this office.
I recall taking a break from writing back then and meeting Vicky for coffee as we do. She commented on how I’d accessorized my outfit, and the term Beauty Bundle was coined. Just in time to make it an essential tool in a chapter of Brenda’s Fashion Makeover.
Accepting today while dreaming about tomorrow
Do I wish I could be bouncing around Sonoma, Marin, Napa, and San Francisco Counties? Yes. But being at home in this office writing, thinking, remembering, and creating has its rewards. The slower pace offers me the opportunity to appreciate relationships, connections, God. I’m not rushing.
It also affords me time to worry and be anxious–I’ll admit to that! But that’s where the friendship loops back in again. Comfort and solace aren’t far away when I remember to reach out.
Your readership and comments, here and on social media, have been such good company. I feel the connection we all have for each other and our loved ones. I imagine that feeling of coming together will be a hallmark of this extended time with normal life on hold.
I hope you and yours are safe and healthy. From the window in my office, I’m blowing you a kiss.
Please share what you’re discovering about yourself during this unplanned extended time at home.
Tomohiro Yasui is best known as the creator of the paper robot wrestlers called kami-robo, but that’s not the only medium his imagination has conquered. Using wire and cheap rubber duckies, squirting frogs, and plastic hammers, the Japanese artist builds posable action figures that deserve their own Saturday morning cartoons and comic books.
Having spent the past 35 years designing paper robots and plastic toys, Yasui is an expert when it comes to humanoid anatomy in dynamic poses. Multiples of the same donor toys were used to create the chiseled physiques, which means that all of the pieces match in texture and color and did not have to be repainted. If the fantasy figures were packaged and displayed on a shelf in the toy section, no one would be able to guess that they were cut, reconfigured, and assembled by hand.
To see more of these unlikely heroes come to life, follow Yasui on Twitter.
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While the popular press talks of stress as a negative to be avoided, seasoned managers know better. If you’re trying to drum up new business, get a customer’s order out on time, or hit your numbers for the quarter, a little stress goes a long way. It’s even more important when you’re trying to transform your business or revitalize a sagging culture. That’s when you need enough stress to motivate action.
In its most positive form, stress results when an employee tries to do the same old things in a new environment. Those out-of-date behaviors produce subpar results and the growing gap in performance creates tension. It’s exactly the kind of stress you want, because it counteracts the powerful inertia of habit.
If you’ve been around the management block a time or two, you’ve probably also seen the other side of stress. As stress gets too high, instead of increasing momentum, it can counter-intuitively start to decrease it. You can immobilize people with too much stress: You stifle the creativity required to come up with new ideas, trigger fear of taking a wrong step in a high-stakes situation, or unleash frenetic but ineffective activity.
Somewhere in between these two extremes is the ideal level of stress; one that creates positive pressure in the direction of change without causing debilitating worry. This magic zone is what John Kotter referred to as the “Productive Range of Distress.” This is an extremely useful concept for managers who are leading through change, but how do you take it from being conceptual to being real? How can you alter the levels of stress on your team? How do you know when you should intervene?
Your first step is to assess the current state. There are signs that the stress levels on your team aren’t sufficient to create meaningful change. Watch for people who are too comfortable with the status quo — either resisting the need to change, referring incessantly to the “way we used to do it,” or generally not applying themselves to get the job done (i.e., coming in late, taking long breaks, and Yabba Dabba Do-ing like Fred Flintstone at the end-of-day whistle).
The bigger challenge is to identify the people who are burdened by too much stress. It’s tricky because some people will have an obvious, frenetic, or panicked stress response, whereas others will withdraw and direct their stress inward. Because there is no single pattern, you’re looking for deviations from an employee’s normal behavior. Is someone working considerably longer hours, failing to take breaks or to get lunch, behaving irritably with coworkers? On the other end of the spectrum, is someone becoming disturbingly quiet? Are they interacting with you noticeably less frequently? Is their body language demonstrating fatigue or cause for concern? Those changes might suggest too much stress.
Once you have a sense of the stress levels on your team, you’ll know whether you need to dial the heat up, or bring it back down from a boil to a simmer. There are several techniques you can use for each scenario.
If you believe there is too little stress on your team and that it will take a little more discomfort before your employees are in the productive range of distress, you have a variety of options to choose from. To make the suggestions concrete, I’m going to use the example of the introduction of a new sales culture. This is a common transformation and one that will stall with too little heat and blow up with too much.
Increase the frequency and pointedness of coaching. It’s easy to stick to the status quo when no one is watching. The moment that an employee knows that you’re noticing her behavior, the stress levels will naturally rise. The secret to coaching toward an optimal level of stress is to increase the frequency of the feedback you provide, but decrease the intensity. Imagine you have rolled out new sales management software but you’re struggling to get all of the salespeople to input their activity. Try simple feedback such as, “It’s Wednesday and I’m only seeing three opportunities in the funnel for this week.” Pair the feedback with a question such as, “What time of day works best for you to input your meetings?”
If you don’t see improvement, dial it up, “I’ve made three requests for people to input and I’ve only seen two new entries. This has become a problem. I’d like each of you to come to me today and share how you’re going to change your routine to include your responsibilities for tracking sales activity daily.”
Connect the person’s behavior to something bigger and more important. Sometimes an employee hasn’t made the link between how they perform and the organization’s ability to achieve something critical. The salesperson who is consistently delinquent in entering opportunities needs to know that big decisions are made using real-time pipeline data. Pricing, products, and promotions might all be affected by a pipeline that appears tepid, when in fact there are just opportunities missing. Help your team understand the trickle-down effects, by saying something like: “I had to go into the Regional Leadership Team meeting today with a pipeline that shows only about 30% of what it should show. The VP was alarmed and started talking about a few drastic actions. I had to assure him that the data aren’t representative, but I won’t get away with that again.”
Allow a natural negative consequence for a lack of action. Often, as a manager, you’re so invested in the performance of your team that you’re willing to pick up the slack from poor performance to avoid a bad outcome. That only reinforces the employees’ perceptions that they don’t need to change. Instead, allow poor performance to lead to a natural consequence.
In the sales example, if you ask the Regional VP not to discuss any opportunities that are not in the system, your technology hold-outs will be left out of the discussion. Salespeople are fueled by posting wins and this loss of recognition might just spur some action. Given that the missing pipeline numbers will also reflect poorly on you and your whole team, you have the added benefit of a little peer pressure to get them on board.
Knowing how to turn up the heat is valuable, but sometimes you have the opposite problem. When the pressure mounts, you might need to do one of the following to settle things down:
Provide frequent positive feedback. In the low-stress scenario, you were coaching frequently to increase the sense of accountability. In the high-stress situation, you should still be spending considerable time coaching and providing feedback, but you need to change the content and tone. Your content should be focused more on recognizing and reinforcing small victories and on helping to problem solve to create momentum. Your tone should be calm and reassuring. You want your team to feel that they’re making headway. In the sales example, you can pivot a conversation about a new prospect to “Hey, let’s enter that into the system together now.”
Break the problem into smaller pieces. Our language is full of metaphors for the sense of overwhelm we get when we try to tackle something too large. Whether they’re swallowing elephants or boiling oceans, your employees are signalling that they’re shutting down because of the magnitude of the challenge. At that point (or hopefully before), help each person zoom in on a specific part of the project. You can divide the project among a group of people so each person has a more manageable chunk.
You can also break the project into sequential steps and focus on one at a time. The goal is to make the next task seem surmountable. You’re not climbing Everest; you’re just getting to basecamp. “This week, we’re going to focus on the automotive sector. Let’s get all of our automotive leads into the system.”
Add structure to the problem. One of the worst things you can do when stress levels get too high is to jump in and solve the problem for your team. That can send all the wrong messages and leave you with accountability issues over the long run. The alternative is to go a little further than normal in helping your team think about how to tackle the problem.
Many people get stressed in the face of too much complexity. If you can give them a path, they can wrap their heads around it. For example, you could say, “First solve for how you’re going to roll out the new pricing, then you can go back and apply that to direct sales. Don’t even worry about the indirect channel until later.”
Model confidence. Whether you believe the hype about mirror neurons or not, you know from experience that emotions in the office can be contagious. The simplest way you can turn down the heat for your team is to show them with your words and your body language that you believe everything will work out. If you’re running around like a chicken with its head cut off, you’ll incite panic in everyone else. If you are calm, deliberate, and decisive, you’ll help keep employees’ stress levels from getting too high.
In some cases, the stress levels of your team members will be uniformly high or low. That allows you to use one common approach for everyone. Unfortunately, it’s more likely that different people will be in very different head spaces; some thriving on the heat of the moment and others shrivelling in it. When different team members are experiencing the stress of the change differently, you’ll need to have more targeted one-on-one conversations that give you the opportunity to adjust the heat. If you’re accustomed to huddling your team and sharing direction with everyone at once, this might require a temporary shift in approach.
Regardless of whether the heat needs to go up or down, your job is to monitor constantly and to make the course corrections that will keep your team in the productive range of distress. That’s the magic zone where change happens.
I had the pleasure to meet one of the co-founders of Splacer, a service that helps you find event space for a party, off-site, photo shot etc. As someone who is and has been putting on events in NYC for years, I know how hard it can be to find the perfect venue. Splacer is an absolute delight to browse. I was told they are just about to come out with a new and imroved website but I am already impressed with what I am seeing. If you know someone that has an event space here in NYC (or in Tel Aviv) tell them to sign up. It doesn’t cost anything to sign up and you’d just give Splacer a cut of your rental fee. They will be soon expanding to other cities.
