SeaTac CLOSED

Here is the Seattle Times report on SeaTac and the snow/ice today:

At Seattle-Tacoma International Airport this morning crews are scrambling to de-ice some 70 aircraft to get them ready for take-off.

Runways were completely shut down between 4:30 and 7:30 a.m. because of the icy weather, said airport spokesman Perry Cooper. When one runway reopened at 7:30 a.m., a Boeing 777 cargo plane landed. A second runway remains closed with no estimated time of opening, Cooper said.

Airport officials say that passengers need to check with their airlines before heading to the airport.

Cooper said that nearly 10 planes slated to land at SeaTac were diverted to other cities. The rest of the planes slated for Seattle were grounded at their airports of origin, he said.

Well this should make tomorrow interesting.

Brother Has Landed

After spending 19 hours in the Taipei airport, my brother finally arrived in Hanoi. Why 19 hours you wonder? I will address that quickly. See my brother is cheap. Very cheap. So cheap in fact that he would do his laundry in his dorm rooms in college in a bucket and hang them on strings in his room instead of paying the dollar to do it in the machines. Therefore, when he got a flight to Vietnam that required him to be at the airport before the buses would pick him up, he decided that he would just take the bus to the airport the night before and sleep in the airport to save money. Great idea. Only problem was that come morning his flight was delayed however many hours. So he sat and sat and sat in the airport. Enough said.

I'm glad he got there safely. He said he took the shuttle to the hostel and warned me that it should only cost me $2 when I take it. In all seriousness, I'm super excited to be traveling with my brother and so appreciative that he is giving me this heads up. Unfortunately, I land at 10pm on Saturday evening after the shuttles stop so I set up to have the hostel send a driver. You would think that this would be the safer option. However, I did have to laugh when I got this email from the hostel:

PLEASE BE AWARE OF THE FOLLOWING SCAMS

Please be aware that taxi drivers and some shuttle buss drivers for that matter, are paid commission to take customers to other budget hotels and these hotels will tell you we are full, close or they are our sister hostel, this is completely untrue. They sometimes even use our flyers or signs - making you believe that you are at the right spot or they are there to pick you up. If this happens to you stay in the car/bus and wait for them to take you to your destination or shuttle stop or find a taxi a different taxi and show them the address on the booking sheet or the download the flyer on our website.

Unfortunately, I'm going to have to take back the idea that I don't need to have a clue where my hostel is because I'm getting picked up by a hostel driver. :) Darn.

Kenny says the hostels great and the city is crazy. No rules was how he put it.

He is there scooting out potential day trips for us and trying to get a lay of the land. We came into this trip having some idea of what we wanted to do but knowing that we had to be flexible. And it's a good thing too.

Chinese New Years. The most important of the traditional Chinese holidays begins on Sunday.

All of a sudden I feel like I'm back in Morocco. Kenny tells me that tours are few and filling up quickly. "What should we do?" he emails me.

We shall see.

Prep Work Begins

My trip is less than a week away and I'm spending most of this weekend preparing what to bring. I still have my huge backpack from previous adventures but I went to REI today for some additional necessities.

• A Watch - Not having my cellphone, I will need to know the time and have a functioning alarm. Weird.
• Bug Spray - I went to a Travel Medicine clinic. They recommended that I always wear bug spray and take Malaria pills.
  
• Sunscreen - The malaria pills make you more sensitive to sun but the sunscreen counteracts the bug spray. I was told that I needed to put the sunscreen on 30 minutes before the bug spray. Let's see if I can remember to do that.
  
• A Camel Back - My backpack has had a spot for it from the beginning but I decided to buy one specifically because my brother and I are thinking about going into the Cat Tien National Forrest. I'm not sure what type of resources there are but I'd hate to be out of fresh water while hiking around.
  
• Iodine Tablets - Just in case.
  
• First Aid Kit - Do you know my brother?
  
• Travel Towel - It tries quickly and will probably come in handy more often than I anticipated. We'll see.
  
• A Power Adapter - I will be bringing my camera and phone so I will need to be able to charge them.
  

If I'm missing anything that might be particularly important, please let me know.

For me, personally, this is the most unnerving part of the trip. I'm pretty good when it comes to dealing with situations on the spot but I'm bad at planning. Knowing that and how unpredictable the trip will be makes my stomach flip just a bit (that could also be caused by the Typhoid vaccine that is in my system right now). However, the feeling is temporary and passes quickly.

I'm getting more and more excited for my trip by the day. I cannot wait to see my younger brother, whom I have not seen since the summer and I look forward to exploring a new country.

How To Decide On An Itinerary

Having traveled a few times, I know what a big mistake it is not to research an area before visiting. I also know that if you plan a trip too specifically you might miss opportunities along the way.

Once my brother and I decided that we were going to Vietnam, the first things I started researching were the geography of the country, the location of the major cities/international airports and then I looked very specifically at transportation. This is key when you are exploring a new country. How are you going to get around? How long will it take to get from point A to point B? What modes of transportation are available? Plane? Train? Bus? Hired car? Mop head?

After familiarizing myself with the layout of the country, I looked at how many days I actually had in the country. 15. Vietnam is an incredibly long country. You don't quite realize it until you have to look at it on a map and 15 days goes by quickly. There is a lot of space to cover between the two major cities, Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon). We want to see as much as we can while there and I've heard that North and South Vietnam are very different so it's important that we go to both areas. That's why we came to the conclusion of flying into Hanoi and out of Saigon.

SIDE NOTE: You don't have to go through a travel agent to do this. All you need to do is go on Kayak.com and click "Multi-cities" at the top.

That gave us our initial outline. Definite dates. Looking closer at the map, we realize that we will be spending a lot of our time en route from one destination to the next. Time is tight so our next decision is to cut out some of the travel time in between by taking a domestic flight.

My brother and I actually had a lot of trouble booking our original flight to Vietnam. I bought my ticket first. However, after my flight had been purchased, Kenny realized he was going to have to travel to Vietnam from Taiwan during the Chinese New Year, which is very difficult and expensive.

I made the executive decision and bought us plane tickets from Hanoi to Nha Trang. I wasn't originally interested in Nha Trang because it's a big tourist destination due to the beaches but looking at the map I realize that it will save us a lot of travel time and anxiety. Nothing is worse than realizing that you're not going to make your flight out of the country.

That gives us 7 days on both ends of the country. Next, the fun part where Kenny and I get to start putting together options for us for both parts of our journey. I say options because again if you decide everything down to the day, hour, etc. you will not leave a lot of room for flexibility. I'm calling it piecemeal planning. Many different things can change how you want to approach your travels. Weather. Holidays. You realize that a cool festival is happening on a certain day. So you want to be able to take advantage of these opportunities at any point during your trip.

I will explain piecemeal planning in my next post.

NEXT STOP: Vietnam & South Korea

It looks like my last traveling adventure (I define this as spending a longer than normal period of time in a foreign country that you've never been to) was in 2008 when I went to Sweden, Estonia, Finland, Russia & Latvia with my fantastic travel companions Monna, Sven and Claudio. According to my Facebook timeline.


It has been awhile. Too long in fact. My skin is itching and my body is experiencing symptoms of withdrawal. Fortunately, I have lined up my next adventure.

To Vietnam.

My travel companion this time? My fantastically awesome brother.

The reason? My brother is in Taiwan, studying abroad and learning Mandarin Chinese. He has over a month long break coming up in January so we decided to go on our first sibling adventure.

Our route? Currently all we know is that we will be in Ha Noi -> Nha Trang -> Saigon. We have a number of days in between each of these locations so we're looking for recommendations on where to go during that time period.

So far we've been told to go....

Sa Pa....


And Ha Long Bay.

Any other recommendations?

#WakeUpWed: Holding People Accountable

I remember two years ago, right before Josh and I started Project Bionic, I'd hear people talking about company Twitter profiles as a nice-to-have. "Just grab your profile username now. You don't need to do anything with it until you figure it out." I'd smile and chuckle. They'll figure it out eventually, I thought to myself.

I was wrong.

And now it's starting to bother me...

I've reached out to a number of aliases in the past week with questions, concerns, etc., who have not responded to me. These alias range from local businesses to artists to medium-size brands, most of which are producing content at least once a week (although a lot of it is just Facebook regurgitation).

Now you might think I sound like a crybaby right now. Which I can completely understand! Who the hell do I think I am? And why do I deserve any acknowledgment whatsoever? All valid point!

First of all and most importantly, I'm trying to spend money with these people.

Secondly, if Mari Smith, who has 103K followers on Twitter, can take the time to respond to me, then these guys have no excuses.

Anyway, all of this got me thinking about how the Twitter community can get these profiles to wake up and do what they should be doing on Twitter, engage with their consumers. That is when I thought about doing the opposite of #followfriday, where users call out profiles that they like and are contributing to the space.

I came up with #WakeUpWed. The idea is similar to #followfriday, you list a profile or two that you mentioned (directly not indirectly) that you'd have liked responses from, who have not responded to you in over a week. If other users have experienced similar situations with the alias in question, then they can retweet your post.

This is not meant to be like you are giving the profile the middle finger, it's simply to give that profile a little nudge and motivation to respond to your question and be more active in the community.

What do you think of the idea? I'm seriously interested in feedback.

2011 Women's Leadership Summit

I hate the color pink so when I received the registration forms for the 2011 Women's Leadership Summit, I became immediately skeptical.



What had I gotten myself into? Was I going to spend a day with a bunch of woman talking about feelings and singing kumbaya in support circles?

Looking back on this reaction, I have to laugh. This conference was one of the most eye-opening experiences I've had and I almost passed it up because of a lack of self-regulation (we will get to that in a minute) and color.

The summit was put on by Shandel Slaten. She is an executive coach "who helps business professionals realize their personal and professional goals" and the Founder of True Life Coaching. Up until now, when I thought of a business/life coach/therapist (yes, they all blended together) the character from the movie First Wives Club immediately popped into mind, "Learn from love. Grow from love." Again another poor stereotype.

Shandel changed my viewpoint on coaches the moment she kicked off the conference. I don't know her personally but her stage presence, confidence, honesty and transparency was definitely far from the First Wives Club character I had just described.

The description of the summit was as follows: The 2011 Seattle Women’s Leadership Summit has the overall objective to teach women to lead confidently with purpose and wisdom. However, the main focus of the day was on understanding your Emotional Quotient (EQ) or "your ability to sense, understand, and effectively apply the power and acumen of your emotions and the emotions of others in order to facilitate high levels of collaboration and productivity".

This Emotional Quotient has a number of layers that each speaker addressed throughout the day:

1.) Self-Awareness - The ability to recognize and understand your moods, emotions and drives, as well as their effect on others.

2.) Self-Regulation - The ability to control or redirect disruptive impulses and moods and the propensity to suspend judgment and think before you act.

3.) Motivation - A passion to work for reasons that go beyond money or status, and a propensity to pursue goals with energy and persistence.

4.) Empathy - The ability to understand the emotional makeup of other people.

5.) Social Skills - A proficiency in managing relationships and building networks.

Now, prior to the days events, we were asked to take a survey online to measure our EQ and these specific layers of our EQ. I'm not going to share the specific results of my survey but I will tell you that while I have work to do in all categories, I was particularly surprised by my Empathy score. That will come up later though.

Shandel kicked off the summit at the base level of the Emotional Quotient, Self-Awareness. Using an analogy, she demonstrated how our emotional state is like a glass of water. When calm and rational, the water is "clear". However, as we run into more and more obstacles (red food coloring) throughout the day, our state begins to become "cloudy". When the obstacles overwhelm us, we become "flooded" emotionally and instead of calm and clear, our glass is now "red".

According to Shandel and later, Dr. Leslie Parrot, when we reach this emotionally flooded state, our brain literally shuts down our rationality and we operate in the same way we would if we were in a fight or flight situation. Another interesting insight is that it takes roughly 4 hours for our emotional state to return to clear after becoming flooded, which means you spend 4 hours operating in a suspend state of rationality.

It makes all the sense in the world to me now why I would want to avoid every reaching that state if I could.

This leads us to the topic of Self-Regulation and identifying disablers (those things that take you to "red" or emotionally flooded in an instant) and enablers (those things that bring you back to calm). For me, I identified "waiting on people (which inevitably resulted in being late)" as a disabler and the following video below as an enabler. Particularly moment :35 seconds.



My biggest takeaway though from Shandel's session was something she said about our response to being in an overwhelmed emotional state. Basically, the point was that venting in that state does NOT actually relieve the "flooding" but simply prolongs it. On top of that, you're very likely to pass on your emotional distress to the person you are venting to. Yuck.

During lunch, there were two break out sessions. Melody Biringer, a start-up junkie whom I particularly admire, was hosting a session on Motivation and Melissa Benaroya was hosting a session on Empathy. Since Motivation was my highest score and Empathy my lowest, I decided while I really, really wanted to listen to Melody, that it would be more beneficial for me to spend lunch with Melissa.

The Empathy session had a specific focus on children so it wasn't as relevant as I had hoped but I still had a couple great takeaways. Specifically,that one can reinforce good behavior by acknowledging the effort, instead of praising the outcome. This point was actually driven home that same day when I went to the gym after the summit. Long story short, the gym likes it when you bring your shower towels down from the locker rooms. I realized that the woman at the reception desk understood this idea of "acknowledging effort" when she said to me "Thank you SO much for bringing your towel all the way down here." I smiled and felt good about myself. I had not received a reward for bringing the towel down or been punished for leaving it upstairs, my behavior was simply reinforced by that comment of acknowledgment. Cool.

The last session was lead by Carol Olsby, an amazing woman who has "over 20 years of HR and business experience providing HR leadership, operational, and tactical solutions to her clients." Her session on Social Skills and Servant Leadership, hands down, had the most profound impact on me and was probably to hardest session to listen to. As a leader and manager, my employees are my most important priority. I know from experience that I do better work and work harder when I think that the person I'm working for has a vested interest in my growth. I have always kept my employees and there well-being at the forefront of any decision I've ever made for the company so I initially felt as if Carol was preaching to the choir. However, as the session progressed I realized that my sentiment for my employees was being lost in some of the policies I myself had put into place. What a tough realization. That being said I'm so thankful to have been made aware of this and I have a chance to change it.

Shandel will be sending me the slides from Carol's session in the next couple of weeks and once I have them I will add them here as well as posting them separately so that you can get a better understand of the ideas she discussed.

Beyond the sessions, there were some incredible woman at this event and unfortunately, I think this post is long enough, otherwise I would talk about them as well.

Overall, one of the most important things I learned today about your Emotional Quotient is that you can have an impact on it. You can develop skills to deal with your emotions and those around you. I think this is one of the most encouraging points of the summit and something that I've committed to improving.

So as you can see, I gained a lot more from this conference than I had originally anticipated. Thank you again to Shandel for putting on this incredible event. I really appreciate the insights that you and the other speakers have just given me.

I will leave you all now with a short snippet of the quote Shandel left us with:

"Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness had genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Good night!