Enthusiasm

1.    Retain and enhance my domain knowledge, putting customers first and finding the best ways to address their needs by working top priority items into the product roadmap and anticipating the future needs of the customers.

2.    Using leadership techniques and reflective listening, inspire and energize our team to help create a best-in-class work environment that provides growth opportunities and colleague success while facilitating efficient top-down and down-up communication.

3.    Collaborate with others across the environmental domain to help develop and implement a next generation architecture that extends the SCF common platform and supports future content integrations across other domains while supporting any potential off-shore initiatives as necessary.

4.    Facilitate the TFS implementations across the domain in a consistent way to help improve our correctness, completeness, and currency of how we deliver product updates to our customers.

5.    Work on coming across as confident, excited, while not being perceived incorrectly by people, especially not let my enthusiasm become off putting to people.

Someone recently told me “You think a lot” and it got me a bit spun out. But in the end it was emotionally productive.

Yes I think a lot.

I’ll think about a comment like “you think a lot” for days.

I haven’t gotten the “you come across as cocky” out of my head since someone brought it up the first time. In fact it keeps coming up and back into the front of my mind even more. I’ve talked to so many people I know about this because I’m concerned about it.

Wanna talk to a guy about how much I THINK about things and think through them? Talk to Victor Hermenze, lol.

That’s why sometimes I’ll laugh or get spun out about a comment somone might make in giving me feedback because immediately I’ll start to think and internalize. Sometimes being self critical, but not because I take people’s comments ill received, but because I take them seriously.

And you know… I’d like to clarify the difference between me taking something said seriously and my feelings getting hurt. I really don’t get my feelings hurt very easily. In fact the only way to really hurt my feelings is if I feel I’ve been disrespected. FYI, there are very few people who have ever in my opinion disresected me, and I generally make them know. So if know me and you feel you’ve ever hurt my feelings, that’s not the case, I just might take feedback and immediately start thinking about it deeply which might come across as me having my feelings hurt.

I guess, I’ve always been a social, emotional animal. It’s why I was beat up in school. It’s why I think I was shunned as a kid. Wanna talk about Spock complex, well my calculus didn’t hurt me, so I found comfort in logic. It’s why I got into programming because in my teens I hated working with people and just wanted to work with computers. I always cared about people’s perceptions of me and in doing so I go the extra mile to make sure people perceive me correctly. For a long time I tried to just say “don’t care about what others think” and then tried to shut down those feelings and become all logical. But I’ve at some point, maybe when I started taking up leadership tasks in my personal life, that my social and emotional side has come out and I’m captain enthusiasm as you see me today. As a result, yeah you know I do care about what others think of me and how others perceive me and that’s ok. Heck the DiSC training helped me realize and accept that about myself which is why I was so spun out about it. By the way, I was classified as an iDCS, way off from what I classified myself as.

I’d like to clarify that the Victor of today is not the Victor of 3 years ago. After my divorce, I went through a long and very crazy re-inventing of myself. I gained a lot of confidence in myself, was less of a pushover, and took control of my life, direction, and really that’s when some of my leadership skills were blossoming at the same time. So really a lot of the self analysis I do of myself is because I still don’t know how I tick right now. I’ve changed a lot over the last 3 years and I’m still getting used to some things and how I act and how I’m perceived. Hell I’m told that sometimes my eyebrows come across as intimidating and I am not aware of the perception give off by my facial expressions and body language. Noodle on that one for about 2 months when your girlfriend tells you that.

Some people who don’t know me too well ask what I do in my spare time? I think.

Or I do activities which allow me to SHUT OFF my thinking. For me whether it’s thinking about myself, thinking about the project that I’m focused on, thinking about the vision of where things are going, thinking thinking thinking. It doesn’t stop. Generally it doesn’t even stop in my sleep. I’ve many times woken up in the middle of the night thinking about a problem I’m trying to solve. So yeah I think a lot because I’m highly self critical, self analytical, and comments about my communication style which translate to my leadership style inevitably translate to not only work, but the leadership I do in my personal life.

So yeah… I  think. A lot. And that’s an understatement.

Many times I think on something because I want to do it the best I ever can. I want to do something in a way no one else ever has. To be the best and… ok now I’m just rambling. Really. Get it off your chest yet? Yeah ok, that’s way too much sharing at this point. Ok done now.

Well… back to taking finals!

I’ve been doing some light prototyping and really like the new Microsoft .Net MVC and MVP using the WCSF. I’ve also been really thinking hard about the merits of Crystal 2008 vs SQL Reporting Services, Oracle support, your opinions on LINQ to SQL, LINQ to Entitites, NHibernate, and even best practices with TFS and test driven development. Overally just experimenting with various technologies and getting up to speed with some up them so I know the pro’s and con’s. Either way I’m glad to be finally moving onto the LINQ bandwagon. The old days of having to store things in strings is over. Entity based modeling really is the future and it’s pretty bright!