How did you get into this career?

My degree’s in biology, with an emphasis on marine biology. So right after college, I got to go work on Catalina Island off the coast of California at what’s called the Catalina Island Marine Institute. It’s kind of a science camp for kids.

Groups of school kids would come out there for half a week or a week, and we would take them snorkeling, we’d take them sea kayaking. We’d have various classes about different aspects of marine biology.

I thought for sure when I graduated from college that I was going to go back to grad school and I was going to be a research biologist somewhere for a university or something like that, but once I started working with kids and teaching, I found that it was really, really, really fun. I enjoyed every minute of it.

Then I got a job at the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach as a marine biologist.  That was much more of a research-oriented job.  A lot of that job was spent working by yourself.  Behind the scenes, I had a whole set of animals that I was responsible for taking care of, and really, spent a lot of time working by myself.  I found myself more wanting to be out in the public area of the aquarium, teaching people about the animals that I was in charge of, rather than just taking care of them and feeding them and trying to keep the animals as healthy as possible.

That was a big turning point for me when I realized that I preferred the human interaction part of it, the teaching part, rather than the research-oriented part, where you are mostly working by yourself.  Some of the people I worked with were super-into the research and didn’t want to talk to a human being at all.  They just wanted to do the research-maintenance part whereas I discovered I liked the teaching.  That was when I knew that I was going to be a teacher.  

Boudicca, getting it done

I quit saying, “when things calm down…” years ago.  It’s simply never going to happen.  Not that that is a bad thing – I like being busy.  When I have time on my hands, I don’t get anything done at all.  However, I’d like to find a bit more time in my schedule than I have right now.

See, I had a baby 16 months ago.  She is awesome – fun even when she’s throwing a wobbler.  But boy, are babies ever time-sinks.  When people say, “you look up, and the day is over!” they aren’t kidding.  It’s like every baby has a copy of Hermione’s time-turner but they are using it to eat your day rather than help you get more done.

Another thing about having kids that is true – you suddenly become much more ruthless regarding your time.  I don’t have time to waste doing anything that isn’t fulfilling me or us in some way.

As a result, I am working hard this year to focus and get more things done.  To help me with this, I have these goals:

1. Daily top 3 list
2. Only do things that are worth it.
3. Dayparting.

For my daily top 3 list, I list the top three things I want to get done each day, and work on them first.  This helps keep me from procrastinating.  I’m pretty good about avoiding procrastination, but when I am stressed out, I can fall back into bad habits.  If I list my top 3 and get them done first, then at least I know that I’ve accomplished something, even if the rest of the day goes to hell.

Repeatedly asking myself, “Is this something that I want to do or have to do?”  If not, I am trying to drop it.  When time is a premium, it’s important to stay focused on things that really matter.  For someone who can get sucked into the Web incredibly easily, I have to continually remind myself – “Is this something that I really want to do?  Does this photo essay of surprised babies really need to be seen by me, right now?”  A lot of the time, just asking myself that question makes me realize how much time I am potentially about to waste on silliness.

Dayparting.  There is a different term for it that I can’t remember right now, but in radio, it’s when you break the day up into distinct parts – for example, you may play really upbeat, happy music during the morning drive, and more moody, darker music at night.  Dayparting your work means designating times to do different things, such as only reading email twice a day at 8:00 and 2:00, for example, and working on your most mentally challenging task in the morning and more rote tasks in the afternoon.  It’s challenging, and doesn’t always mesh well with jobs that are driven by tasks assigned by others, but I am attempting to use it when and where I can.  

I’ll do posts on each of these things more in depth in the next few weeks.  Good luck prioritizing your days!

Dream jobs.  I know they exist, because I’ve had one or two in my life, but I also know that two things are true:  one size does not fit all, and even the absolute best, can’t-wait-to-go-in jobs have their days where you are, simply, burnt.  Here are some other people’s opinions on the subjects:

An interesting perspective on the mundanity of everyday work:  The mundaneness of science

Here’s a counterpoint to the above article – “Everyday I tell students in the lab that they’re really doing something that’s never been done by anybody at any time, ever.”

Even a dream job has its ups and downs.  Here are some tips on how to relight your fire:  Are you busy at work, but still bored?

You might think something is your dream job – but take it from someone who knows – it may not be all it’s cracked up to be:  The Bitchless Bride:  Rainbows and Unicorns

How to pick a career you will like.  This has some excellent points about how the grass is often greener…

The Oatmeal on dream jobs

How would you find something like this if you didn’t explore?

This week I’m obsessed with streetwalkers.  No, not that kind.  I’m interested in people who make it their goal to walk every street in their town.

Have you ever thought about what it would take?  For some small towns, not much.  But there are other cities out there that would take an extreme effort to cover.

When I was on maternity leave, I spent some time walking just in the area around my neighborhood.  Even though my town is relatively small, and my neighborhood a place that I’ve spent a lot of time in, I discovered a number of new and exciting things.  And when I travel, I always try to find time to just walk around some neighborhoods and see what’s going on.  It always leads to some good finds, such as the bunnies (above) that I found in Shoreditch, London.

Here are some people who have walked their towns:

Caleb Smith:  New York City Walk

Matt Green is doing that, too, but wants to add in every bit of all five boroughs

Tom Graham:  Tom Graham walks every street in San Francisco

Ariniko O’Meara:  A Crusade to Walk Every Street in Lansing

I’m not sure who this is (no About page), but they are walking every street of Dunedin, NZ

Christine Colasurdo is embarking on a smaller project, but I like her philosophy – she’s taking to words of Walt Whitman to heart, and keeping it light and open-minded about what she’ll find.

Alan, a 94-year-old who walked every street in Sydney, Australia

Actually, New York and San Francisco are sort of rife with walkers.  But each brings a new perspective to it.  And what a way to get to know your town, eh?

Tell me a little bit about your job. What do you do in a typical day?

My job is multi-faceted in many ways.  Typically, I teach five classes. Three middle – 7th grade general science. It’s mostly life science. And then I teach one advanced math class and one marine biology class. 

Most of my day is spent in actual instruction time, with the kids and in the classroom. I have my math class first – first class of the day. Then I have three science classes in a row. And then my marine biology class at the end of the day. Then I have one class period of planning time. What goes on during the class, there’s all kinds of different things. I mean there’s what you would consider instruction time, where the science class – we’re generally doing some kind of hands-on activity and analyzing that activity and getting results from that activity, and going over some of the vocabulary we learned in that activity. And maybe setting up what we’re going to be doing the next day, to build on it.

Math class is a little bit different. We might introduce some kind of new concept. It’s mostly pre-algebra and algebra. We’ll be able to do some practice problems and some examples, and then I spend a lot of time in math class going around the classroom helping the kids who might need help with some of the problems. It’s advanced math, so these kids are pretty sharp and pretty intuitive thinkers. So it goes pretty quick. They grasp concepts much quicker, which is why there’s an advanced class and there’s a regular class.

It can vary day by day. It just depends on what we’re covering and what we’re going over during that week. And there’s all kinds of little things that go on during the class. There’s interruptions that happen – you never know what’s going to happen, so it kind of makes each day a little bit different.

You also do some extra-curricular coaching with the kids?

I coach mountain biking with the high school in the fall.  We meet three or four times a week.  We do all kinds of stuff, but there is a four race series for high school kids that happens. So we focus on getting ready for those races. When we meet, we compete, we work on practicing skills, mountain biking handling skills,  getting our bikes ready to go. We do a lot of riding and training. And we go through different race scenarios and it’s really, really fun.  A lot of what we end up doing is just riding on some of the trails around Lyons with a bunch of kids who are really psyched about mountain bikes, so it’s mainly keeping them engaged and excited about mountain biking, providing them with an opportunity to do that as a high school sport.

Would you consider your job to be solitary or collaborative?

Very, very collaborative. The teachers are always getting together and talking, either during formal meetings or informally. If we’re having a problem with a particular kid, if we’re having some issues, or certain kids need help with something. We collaborate a lot with the other teachers. Even working with the kids is – it’s a collaboration in many ways with them and their parents to help them be as successful as possible, because we try to get the kids to buy in as much as possible to their own learning and their own education. We really try to portray it as a collaboration between the teacher and the student and the kids’ parents, as well.

Everything we do is collaborative, and even in the class the kids do a lot of work together in small groups, with some collaboration going on, so they’re learning those skills as well as just the rote content.  They’re learning how to work together and how to disagree with each other on a more professional kind of basis, and how to disagree respectfully with somebody, and those kind of things. So collaboration’s a big part.

Cool. Okay. What’s the best part of your job?

That’s a good question. The best part of my job is when the kids come in – like I had a girl last week, and we’ve been studying cells; bacteria and viruses.  She came in one day and she said, “I can’t stop thinking about science class. Everything I look at now is different, because I know there’s bacteria all over everything, and there’s bacteria in my mouth, and bacteria in my intestines.” And she’s like, “I just can’t stop thinking about it, and it made me look at everything differently.” So when kids say something like that, where their perspective on the world has changed a little bit, then that’s, for me, one of the best parts. And it’s also nice to see kids grasp concepts and be successful in school, and do really well on a test or something like that, or when they make positive contributions to the classroom or to the school. That’s the main thing. Summer vacation doesn’t hurt, either [laughs].

True.

But that’s not the main motivating part. That’s a bonus, I guess.

What’s the worst part?

The worst part is definitely the amount of work that has to be done outside of class, especially grading. I like the teaching part a lot more, and seeing the kids interact with each other, and learning the content. But then when we get into tests, I have to grade the tests. That’s definitely my least favorite part. It’s funny because I like to be able to give them feedback and see how they did, but at the same time I much prefer the actual act of teaching to assessment, to see how they actually did. The grading can be real tedious – you have a stack of 75 papers that are all very similar, and you have to try to focus and grade each one objectively, without being influenced by the other ones – the other 15 that you’ve already graded.

It definitely is time consuming, and a lot of that is done at home. So where they – ‘cause there’s just not time at school to do a lot of that, so – yeah, the grading.

My aunt teaches high school math, and she says the same thing. It’s like she said, that’s the thing is people always say, well, of course you don’t get paid that much, you get three months off. And she’s like, yeah, but I’m working 80 hour weeks for the whole rest of the year.

Yeah, we get summer off, but when we’re on during the school year, it’s so intense.  On any given day, you might have a meeting with your other teachers, you might have emails and calls and meetings with parents who want to drop in and check in on their kids and see how they’re doing. And then you have these interactions with kids that you have to keep relationships with kids established so that they will buy into your class, so you have to be really – it’s not really like entertaining, but you are – oh, I can’t even really think of how to describe it. You have to hold up this standard with the parents, with the kids, and you can’t let your guard down in many ways.

But, on the other hand, it makes it really rewarding, because you can make positive influences on kids and even on parents sometimes.

Is there something in particular that you think that someone who wanted to do this job would have to enjoy, and if they don’t enjoy doing this thing, then they should just avoid being a teacher at all costs?

Yeah. You have to enjoy kids. You have to enjoy the flaws that they all – and I don’t say it as a mean way, but you have to know, okay, this kid’s going to forget his pencil every day. And this kid – he’s going to forget his homework most days. They’re all learning how to be people.  The kids that I have are 12 and 13 years old, they’re going to make serious mistakes, and you can’t hold them to the same level of expectations for organization and behavior as you would an adult. If you schedule a meeting with a group of adults, if they show up and they’re not ready and they’re not prepared and blah, blah, blah; well, that’s their problem.

With kids, you can’t really treat them like that. They’re learning how, they’re figuring this out, there’s all these social pressures they are under. You have to have a lot of patience. You have to embrace that aspect of kids, that they are trying to figure it out and, yeah, no matter how many times that you remind them, “hey, you have to have your notebook so we can do this activity,” they’re going to forget it maybe 7 times out of 10.

You have to be able to roll with that, to let that go, and just make some jokes out of it. You have to have a sense of humor with those kids that are the total space cadets, because I’ve seen teachers in the past who get so frustrated that kids aren’t learning or they can’t even add fractions, or we’ve gone over this for a solid month and they still don’t get it, and they throw their arms up in the air, and then they start getting so frustrated with the kids that the kids notice, and then it makes their school experience even worse. And so you gotta accept that they’re just kids. Some of them are trying harder than others for sure, but you have to be able to embrace of all of what comes with working with kids.

If you don’t have any patience, I definitely would not say be a teacher. It would not be very a good thing for you.

photo by Emmli

When I was in college, I became quite the snot.  Seriously bitchy in certain circumstances – I was infected with a bad hipster virus, and it made me very arrogant about certain, hipstery-things.

One of the manifestations of this was that my friends and I would go to dance clubs and spend at least part of the time making fun of how people were dancing. Not that we were great dancers, by any stretch of the imagination, but for whatever reason, when we got bored with the music, it’s what we would do.

It took me a while to realize what this was doing to me.  The longer I went along with this, the more and more self-conscious I became about dancing.  I loved going to clubs and dancing, but it was starting to really affect me.  Going out and doing one of my favorite things was no longer fun.  It just made me sad, after a point, and extremely self-conscious.  So, I decided it was time for an attitude adjustment.  I stopped making fun of people, and instead focused on how the music made me feel, which is generally pretty damn happy.  I started to enjoy dancing again, and more importantly, I stopped feeling self-conscious about it.

Snark can bite back.  Drop it, and you’ll probably find yourself feeling less self-conscious yourself.

Photo by Lucy

How did you get into this job?

I’ve always thought about doing something of the like. Never really thought it would happen. But when I was working at the Montreal Children’s Hospital, I had a colleague who went for 6 months and came back, so I said, maybe it’s time to check it out. I applied to a few hospitals up north, because it’s not [the only] center  that exists up north.

In the northern part of Canada, there are many other hospitals, because of the codes, the different bays. And because everything is so remote there are many different hospital settings.

So you had thought about working in the sort of rural atmosphere for a while.

Absolutely, yeah.

What intrigued you about that?

The fact that I get to do a little bit of everything. It’s a general practice, and it’s a very community-based setting, where you actually get to know the people that you care for, and not just people that come into the hospital. And I’ve also been interested in doing developmental humanitarian work, so I thought that this kind of setting would test my interest. It’s sort of like testing out my interest in my own backyard, because it’s always in the same country, as opposed to going overseas, before doing some alone work in a rural area.

Do you have any recommendations if somebody was interested in pursuing this sort of a job? Anything that you would suggest that they do? I mean, obviously they’d have to have a nursing degree, although I suppose they could also be a doctor. Are there any other specialties or things that somebody could do in this sort of workplace?

Social work, psychologists. They could also do the same work.  And for them, what I would recommend is to get good general training, background experience on diverse population. And they need to seek out for adventures and not be afraid of unknowns.

And go for a weekend camping to be sure that a weekend in the woods or in the mountains, that they’re comfortable in that kind of setting.

Maybe in the middle of winter, too.

Right, right.

Do you have anything else that you’d like to add?

They need to know themselves well enough [to know] what to do in a situation where they’re removed from their family, they’re a little homesick. They need to be able to know some of the signs that, okay, is this good – this is where I need to be, or should I [get help].  What do they do about these emotions or these feelings or these reactions?   Because when you are alone or with strangers around you, what kind of outreach you can do?  Do they go and call someone, or should they go on Skype, or how can they fill the emptiness?   How would they deal with those kind of quiet moments, or homesickness?

A lot of people, if they find themselves in a very stressful situation without close friends or family, they could and may go into drug addiction, let’s say. I’m not saying this would be the case – just to take away or numb their emotions or something. [They need to] find healthy means of relieving stress, or feel comfortable being in new group.  Where I work there are no highways. One cannot easily just say, “oh, I’m just going to drive back home for the weekend.”  Or go to the restaurant or go to the pub; go for a drink, go for a coffee. No – there’s no highways.

If they are being trained right now as a nurse, as a doctor, actually spend one of their rotations in a rural setting.

Shy’s Hill by Stephen Drake

When I first started trying to come out of my shell, one of the most effective things I tried was to smile and say hi to anyone I ran into three times.  That made them someone that had enough in common with me that I was likely to see them again, and I figured that they would be worthwhile to meet.

By deciding to just smile and say hi, I took an enormous amount of pressure off of myself.  No fears that they would reject me – I mean, if someone is so rude that someone they see regularly  who offers a smile and a brief “hi,” gets blown off, then that’s not going to stress me out – f*#$ them.  And really, no one ever reacted badly to it.  In fact, it opened the door for a number of people to start conversations with me, which led to friendships, and I never had to face the freakout-pressure of somehow coming up with magically fascinating things to say to someone that I had never really met before.  It was perfect.

It does have its limitations, though.  It’s still a rather passive approach.  It still requires that the other person take most of the action, start the conversation, etc.  How can I ease into being more proactive, without totally freaking myself out?

My new goal is to make a point of complementing strangers whenever I find something to complement them on.  I know, it sounds kind of cheesy, but it’s a way for me to be more active rather than passive in talking to new people.  It can also seem a bit contrived, but the reality is that I often see things that people are doing or wearing or reading or something that I find interesting.  Maybe it’s related to my effort to find at least three good things every day, whether it’s something as small as “pretty flowers,” or “ate a great cookie.”  Regardless, I’m not going to force it (no screaming out the window of the car at the woman with the excellent sweater that I saw crossing the crosswalk – I want to start conversations, not cause accidents or receive restraining orders).  But if I happen to run into someone that is doing something cool, I’m going to make a concerted effort to verbalize my thoughts.

Everyone likes a compliment.  If you can offer one that is sincere, it can be a great opening to a conversation.

Puvirnituq from the air. Photo by Lucy Shum

What is your actual title?

I’m a nurse.

Okay.

I’m a nurse at Puvirnituq.  That is a small village of about 2000 people. And it’s located above the 55th parallel. It’s part of Nunavik, which is a Native First Nation Territory, but it hasn’t started having its own government – governing body, so we’re still under the Quebec Province of Canada.

Tell me a little about what you do there – your day-to-day work.

Well, there are three types of nursing in Puvirnituq. I actually started off in the hospital. There’s also the clinic – dispensary, which I’ve also just started.  I will focus more on the hospital nursing job, because I’ve been doing it for over a year and a half.

Basically it’s caring for any in-patients in the hospital during their hospital stay, from admissions to discharge. As a nurse in the hospital, we also have the duty to pick up patients from different villages that needs to be hospitalized. So, what happens is, on our day off, we also have on-call duties, and during those schedules, we’ll be called when needed. And we would take an airplane, and go to a different village to pick up any patients that need more medical attention. So, basically, the hospital that I work in in Puvirnituq provides medical services, hospital care to any resident that fall under 7 – 6 other villages along the Hudson Bay.

It’s the only hospital for all the 7 villages in total. And that’s why as nurses, on our day off, we have an extra duty to go pick up other patients.

They must be fairly geographically wide apart if you have to fly between them.

Uh-huh. Puvirnituq is in the middle of the 7 villages.  That’s why the hospital was built in Puvirnituq.  Going up north, the farthest would be Ivujivik, which would take about an hour and a half to – just one way, to fly in.  From where I am to the farthest southern village, it would take at the most two hours and a half. It’s a lot.

The plane that we take is called a Twin Otter. If I have the history correct, it was first built and used in World War II. So it’s very sturdy, it’s a very small airplane with the capacity of a dozen passengers, and it could land anywhere. It  doesn’t take a long runway for it to pick up, so it’s easily manageable in case of emergency.

I imagine, in a hospital setting like this, you probably do sort of everything. You’re not just in one clinic in the hospital. You probably do everything from ER to general in-patient care?

Definitely, definitely. And that’s one of the aspects that I like about this job. Being in the village, you have to do a little bit of everything, as you mentioned, from emergency cases that can come in at any moment to caring for the elderly. There are some wings in the hospital that have long-term patients, and they’re there until they die. So we have to also frequently check on them and so that they’re – they don’t have any pressure sores, or any other chronic issues like constipation. You want to make sure that the patient is voiding well, and also defecating, and not keep a whole week of…

Stuff inside.

Exactly. So – and then we also care for children, newly born, moms, women that are pregnant; patients that have psychiatric problems. 

Everything.

There’s variation, which I like, but at the same time it’s very challenging because you need to have a lot – one has to have a lot of experience in all those areas to feel comfortable, whereas I’m a nurse that has been practicing for four years, and I’m pretty new to a lot of things.

Would you say that your job is solitary or collaborative?

Oh, collaborative. Oh, I will not be able to take on, let’s say, an emergency alone because there’s so many aspects to the treatment or to the approach. There’s no way that I can start a line while giving oxygen to the patient. There’s no way that I can make sure that the patient is calm when – that the patient is moving and in pain. I can’t go get medication while I talk to the patient. It’s very hard, so no I need a team. I work in a team, and there’s no way around that. If I work alone, it wouldn’t work. I would become the patient…

Do you get to switch around roles, or does one person likes doing this part better, or the other person likes doing this other part better? You stick to those roles, or you switch around a lot?

We switch around a lot. It depends on the convenience. Timing. Am I the first one who welcomes the patient? Where am I located in the room? Am I closest to the patient’s head, or am I closest to the patient’s legs? And when I doubt, the one who has the most expertise would actually be the one who would take over and guide the team.

What would you say is the best part of your job?

The best part? There’s so many wonderful things. As we mentioned before, the diversity of cases, population group. I don’t get to work just with kids, but I also work with elderly, young mothers, adolescent. I get to go on Medevac, which is the medical transfers on the airplane.

And there’s just so many unexpected things that can happen, good and bad. Meeting new people. Because we’re so remote and isolated, there’s a constant change in the medical staff.

That’s a plus side, but there’s a disadvantage to it, just because there’s constantly a new flow of team members, there’s constantly orientations, training, and getting used to each other. But just meeting the people is wonderful, and last but not least is vacation time. We work two months and we get a month off. So that’s how I have been able to do Operation Smile or other traveling of my own.

And oftentimes most of the vacation time are paid because we work extra hours during our two months on duty. We actually put them aside and then they make up for the whole month of vacation. On top of that we could get extra weeks of vacation for being where we work.

So do you live in this town, or do you just live there during the months when you’re actually working?

I live there when I work. When I’m not working, I’m not there.  I’m constantly on the move.

What’s the worst part of the job?

The worst part. There’s a lot of differences in culture between the Inuit – the First Nation that lives there and non-natives. When it comes to working, collaborating together, it requires a lot of tolerance, a lot of patience. The way that they view life is really different from the way that I am used to, that my colleagues are used to, my non-native colleagues are used to. 60 years ago, they were still living in igloos, and this is not a joke; they never really took a shower unless it were summertime because 7 months out of 12 months the whole village, or rather the whole Nunavik area it’s white – I call it a white sheet of land.

Oh wow.

Yeah. Seriously. It’s beautiful. It’s really, really beautiful, and it’s white, it’s black. There are rarely hills or mountains. No mountains, just hills.

For them, they hunt – they still hunt to obtain their – well, they call it country food. And for them, money is not important. They live without money – actual bills, they never had them. It was the Whites, or rather the Caucasians who went exploring that taught them about trading and monetary usage. So for them, and when it comes to work, their view is, “live the moment,” as they hunt in the moment; if I don’t want to work, I just leave. 

For example, if they don’t want to come to work because they want to go hunt, they just don’t come to work, and they don’t need an explanation for that, because they have to go hunt for their caribou or their fish, because it’s part of their basic needs. And people go to work to get their basic need.

So it’s kind of different. And so oftentime we end up with fewer staff than we planned on having. And so that’s the challenging part. And so basically we’re not just nurses on units, but we’re also receptionists. We are dealing with paperwork, administration work, and the South – we call it the South – in Montreal, or in the City – Big City. Nurses – we tend to care for the medication, insuring that the medical orders are respected. And then there – they would have helpers, like patient care attendants who would check on the patients, their daily routines, – hygienes, but as nurses that mostly have to do everything, because oftentimes we lack staff. 

So that’s the challenge. And the other thing is living in a small village, there’s no secrets. There’s really no privacy. Well, there’s privacy when your lock is on the door, but at the same time, people know everything.

As I was preparing for this interview with you, I thought about what is it that I find challenging or that I have a hard time with, and I thought of an example of how a psychiatric patient once ran away from the hospital. He didn’t want to stay with us. We called the police to look for him. But even before the police found him, there was someone in the village that called us and told us, “oh, I just saw him going to so and so’s house, so come and get him.”  So there’s no way to hide.

Wow.

It’s tough. I mean, it’s good and bad.

Is there something that you think that someone who does this type of job has got to enjoy doing, that if somebody doesn’t like doing this thing then they should just avoid this job at all costs?

They need to be able to like nature.

We’re full of Mother Nature around us. We are surrounded by a huge piece of flat land. 7 months out of the 12 it’s white, covered with snow. And then the other months it’s rock, and there’s no trees.

No trees, so those who actually miss green, it could be harder for them, but they could always replace it with brown – with rocks and lakes – river. They need to be able to find pleasure and entertainment in the snow. It’s very cold. In the winter, it can get to minus 50 Celsius.

We cover ourselves – when we go out, we cover ourselves with everything that you can think of: snow pants, your winter jacket, your ski goggles, your scarf. Nothing is exposed.

Wow.

Yeah, or else you can get frostbite easily. This person also needs to be able to enjoy alone time, because it’s a village and there’s no public entertainment. Meaning, there’s no shopping center, there’s no movie theatre, there’s no ice skating rink up there. There’s nothing. There’s a nature, but there’s no big entertainment center that you would find in a city. No bowling alley. But two supermarkets. And those two supermarkets you actually find everything that you need there. Or you may not find anything that you need there. So be able to entertain him or herself.  And be able to cook really good food because there’s no restaurants.

That’s a good point, because your job isn’t just a day-to-day thing. It’s a lifestyle for those two months while you are on duty.

I was thinking more of the living situation, but speaking of job, the person needs to be able to be very flexible, because he or she will have to encounter or deal with emergency at any moment, or any cases – maternity cases, or baby with breathing issues; new staff. There’s constantly changing staff. Doctors come in. There’s a change 5, 6 weeks at a time. Nurses come in, because we work two months and get a month off, the team is always constantly changing.

Do they schedule you all so that you’re always constantly shifting, or do you tend to have the same schedule as a couple other people, so you – the two months are at least a couple people are the same, or is it like one week one person shifts out, the next week another person shifts out?

There is a system. There are two teams, and we do constantly work with one team throughout our month – two months’ stay. Then we would work on a random basis with different team members so that you’re not always stuck with the same. In terms of shifting out, and in and out, it depends on when the person  is due for his or her vacation. So it could be that I go in tomorrow, and if you were a nurse you could just be leaving tomorrow, so I would just end up working one time – one day with you, and tomorrow you’d be back in Colorado.  Sounds a little crazy, doesn’t it?

I’ve identified that shyness is a significant barrier to me following my passion.  So, what can I do to overcome that?

ThinkSimpleNow has a lovely article about shyness.  According to them, my shyness falls into one (or more) of three categories:  excessive self-consciousness, excessive negative self-evaluation, or excessive negative self-preoccupation.  I would say that excessive self-consciousness and negative self-preoccupation definitely apply.  I definitely become quite focused on anything I perceive that I am doing wrong in social situations, and can even dwell on perceived mistakes months, even years after an incident.  I blow things way out of proportion.  If I misspeak or forget someone’s name, I will be freaked out in front of that person for a long time.

It’s great to read that other people have similar concerns, and that most people are so preoccupied with their own issues that they don’t notice the little quirks that other people have.  Being an INTJ through and through, I can intellectualize most things, but feeling the confidence on an emotional level is a huge challenge.  So, what do I do to fix this?

About 10 years ago, I had a very distressing couple of years and an almost wholesale turnover in my social circle.  I was forced to get out and meet new people, and I didn’t have any convenient, built-in social situations to do that in, like school.  Due to the circumstances that led me to this place, I had super-low self-esteem, and that combined with my shyness made it really hard to go out and meet people.

So, I decided to treat socializing as an experiment.  This fit me well – I can separate my ego from the situations using experimental controls, so I could try things to just see if they worked or not and not get too wrapped up in success or failure.

Experiment 1:  Just Say Hi

I made a vow that anyone I saw for a third time, I would just smile and say hi to them – nothing more.  No pressure to come up with further conversation.  I figured, who is going to be offended if someone just says hi with a friendly smile, and it kept me from getting ahead of myself and panicking about coming up with further conversation.  This experiment was a smashing success.  I ended up making several long-term friends by starting with this approach, and expanding my circle of acquaintances (acquaintances!  I’d never had acquaintances before!).  For the first time in my life, I had a wide circle of people I could call up to just do random things.

Experiment 2:  Props!

Granted, being a long-term shy person I was quite familiar with using props to start conversations already.  But for the first time I made an effort to really see what worked best and to try to respond in an open, friendly manner (no point in using props to start a conversation if I freeze out anyone who tries to start talking to me).  So, each time I went out and chose a prop, I’d make sure that I paid attention to which ones were most effective.  In the end, my spiky red backpack was the winner.  I’ve had people follow me for blocks in order to ask about it.  By being open to talk about it, I was able to make myself more comfortable with random conversations, and realize that they can be just that – random conversations.

Experiment 3:  Posture!

At night, I would go to coffee shops to read.  While I was there, I would experiment with different postures to see if people would approach me more or less, depending upon how I was sitting.  I know we hear it everyday, but it really is amazing how just changing your physical presentation can change how readily people will approach you.  I found that if I sat with my back to a wall, facing out into the shop, shoulders back but relaxed, and frequently looked up and around, people would start conversations.  Shoulders hunched, I became much less approachable.  Facing the wall or with my side to the wall, less approachable.  And if I never looked up, no one ever had the opportunity to strike up a conversation.  Using props, like making sure I was reading a book with a provocative cover or something unique, helped.  So did smiling.

The three most effective things I found from these experiments were:

1. Smiling and saying hi to people got them to start conversations, taking the pressure off of me.
2. Props rock.
3. Your posture says a lot about how approachable you are.

These techniques all enabled people to approach me, but didn’t make it easier for me to approach other people.  That’s what I need to figure out now.