Image courtesy of Julie Lavoie. Licensed under CC BY 2.0.
I spent this weekend in Miami, in a very fancy hotel, planning my 2014, reflecting on my 2013, and wearing a jaunty white hat with a glitter unicorn horn on it. It was a very nerdy, very delightful way to spend my post-Thanksgiving weekend after what has been, to put it mildly, A Year.
It turns out that career networking conferences are totally great when they’re full of Cuban food and delightful people from the internet. Who knew?
For those who I haven’t told about this approximately 8000 times in the last few months, I was attending BullCon 2013, the first (hopefully annual) conference attached to the career column (and now, store) Bullish, written by a woman named Jen Dziura for ladies who want to Get Shit Done. It’s a column (and a conference) for the sort of folks who think an article named “Maybe Work-Life Balance Means You Need to Work More” is funny and inspiring, rather than cause for alarm. The mascot is a purple bullicorn (bull + unicorn) named Sheila.
The full conference was covered in admirable detail by my roommate (also an Emily), whose articles you can read here. All of the panels were useful and fun and funny, but thinking about what I was going to write while sitting in the airport lounge waiting for my flight home, one part of the conference really stood out for me. In the middle of Jen Dziura’s panel on designing your 2014, sitting by the pool and filling out the truly gigantic worksheet packet that she had charged us with completing, I set about defining my values.