Monday, February 18, 2013

Stretching makes me grow

Thumb-to-pinky, my span is bigger on my left hand.  It's from stretching to reach chords on the piano.  I can reach an octave-plus-one on my left hand and an octave on my right.  I've always wished I could reach an octave-plus-two on my left hand.  So many hymns require that.

I'm fascinated by how all those years of painful stretching made my hands different.  Stretching yourself always causes growth.  Last week was a challenge for me but I'm grateful for the opportunities I had to grow.

My boss has been dealing with some very severe medical issues in her family and has only been in the office once each week.  My team is hiring a new employee (yay!  I need help!) and my boss was unavailable to schedule interviews, etc. Until now, my only experience with hiring someone consisted of sitting in on a job interview a couple times.

I had to screen resumes, schedule interviews, prepare interview questions, and conduct interviews.  I also had to keep up with my normal job duties at the same time, which kept me busy.  Thankfully I was able to get input from a few people in preparing questions and my coworkers have taken turns sitting in with me on interviews to provide a second opinion.  We still have a full day of interviews to conduct on Tuesday, but we've got some strong candidates to schedule for second interviews when my boss is available.

The other recent challenge was creating an online training module using Adobe Captivate.  I've played around with Captivate and have watched some online training videos, but hadn't yet published a training module using Captivate.  It was hard to learn how to perfect the timing of each component and get everything to work just right, especially while conducting interviews and providing live training to new employees.  While I welcome feedback, it was overwhelming to get a whole page worth of corrections from my coworker who reviewed the training.  Mainly because I had to learn how to fix the problems and find the TIME to fix the problems.

I survived, though.  I put in some long hours (and sadly that means I didn't make it to the gym).  I prayed.  I did my best.  I feel good about what I did and the experience that I gained.  Go me!  :)

3 comments:

Amy said...

Thanks for sharing!

Lena said...

I don't know what was happening but your blog wasn't showing up on my blog list :( But I updated it again :) I'm glad you survived the last long few weeks. I hope they will hire a helper for you very soon, and your load will get a little easier :)

Jaime said...

I'm always amazed at what you can do. You fully utilize your brain and life!