Juggling with a Little Help from Sodexo Benefits

by return guest blogger, Michele Posehn

There I was, wearing a rainbow colored wig, polka dot jumpsuit with white ruffled collar, and big floppy shoes. I could hardly see past the big, red, foam nose plunked in the middle of my face.

I was a senior in high school, playing the role of a clown in the school’s spring musical. Dressing for the role wasn’t a difficult task – about 15 minutes to add the makeup to my face – red to exaggerate the outline of my lips, big blue circles drawn around my eyes. It was learning how to be a clown that took some time.

The director of the play decided that each clown in the play would need to demonstrate some sort of talent, I guess to make it more “realistic.” So, while some clowns had dogs jumping through hoops and some rode teen tiny bicycles, I was told I would be juggling. One problem, though… I didn’t know how to juggle.

With the help of my dad, I set out to learn how to juggle. To this day, I don’t know what circumstances led my dad to know how to juggle but I’m glad he did. We started with tennis balls. At first, it was just practicing throwing one ball up in the air and catching it with the other hand, all the time keeping my arms relatively still. The key, I was taught, was not to watch the ball go from one hand to the other, rather keep my eyes focused on the middle of the arc the ball traveled and trust that my hands would instinctively know when and where to catch.

After mastering catching one, I moved on to two, then three - that middle of the arc always acting as my indicator as to when to release the next ball. I got pretty good at it and eventually moved on to juggling rings and brightly colored sticks. By the time the curtain went up on our school play, I was standing on one leg while doing it.

Flash forward 16 years (wow, am I really that much older?) and I’m still juggling but now, it’s not tennis balls on stage. I work full time, I own a home that always seems to need something done to it, I am a mom to a two year old and…well, that last one should be enough to get my point across. I am busy. My days are defined by grocery shopping, laundry, teleconferences, naptimes (for the two year old, not me), cooking dinner, resume review – whatever life is throwing at me.

The great thing about the Sodexo is that it understands that juggling can be really hard, especially when you have more tennis balls in the air than you do hands to catch them. Programs like LifeWorks and flexible work arrangements may not be able to help me balance a purse, diaper bag, three stuffed animals and a sippy cup, but they can help balance the demands of work and personal life.

With all that we have going on in our lives, a ball is bound to be dropped every now and then and in my current role of mom/wife/employee/all of the above., I admit there have been times when I lost sight of the middle of the arc and let myself lose focus. But just as I did when I was a clown, I know that a dropped ball is an opportunity for me to start all over again and improve upon my talent, learn from where I went wrong and remember next time what I did right.

Just as I learned writing this blog entry which was started 3 weeks ago but only now finished as I sit in a hotel room in Maryland, working on a department project, trying to catch which star has danced their last dance on TV, all the while with the phone to my ear saying good night to my little girl.

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Michele Posehn started with Sodexo as a Senior Recruiter in February 2007. She currently recruits for culinary related positions for the Hospitals division in the New York metro area. Michele welcomes anyone out there looking for a company that is diverse and full of opportunity to follow her on Twitter.