Book Review: The Napkin, the Melon & the Monkey: How to Be Happy and Successful at Work and in Life by Simply Changing Your Mind

I was given the opportunity to review a new book that will be coming out, and I thought I’d break from the standard here and ask a friend of mine to help me out and write the review for me:

The Napkin, the Melon & the Monkey: How to Be Happy and Successful at Work and in Life by Simply Changing Your Mind.  By Barbara Burke.  Northfield, MN: Front Wheel Learning, 2006; pp. 1+138.  $16.99 softcover.

Reviewed by Katherine Weinstein, Ph.D.

It’s no secret that customer service work poses its own special challenges on a very personal level.  Assisting disgruntled customers on a nearly daily basis can test and even dishearten the most positive and stalwart employee.  Barbara Burke’s The Napkin, the Melon and the Monkey provides both helpful advice to lift the emotional burdens of stressed employees and guidelines for better communication in the workplace.

Burke’s sage advice is packaged in the story of Olivia, a struggling customer service rep at a power company, and Isabel, the wise co-worker who takes her under her wing. Under Isabel’s guidance, Olivia learns to emotionally step back from stressful situations and have a SODA—Stop, Observe, Decide and Act. She begins by taking time every day to mentally “unplug,” and finds that the daily breaks help her to find calm in the middle of workplace turmoil.  Once Olivia is able to stop taking her customers’ angry outbursts personally and actually helps them, her life at work and at home takes a positive turn.

The Napkin, the Melon & the Monkey is jam-packed with Olivia’s 22 “aha!” moments which are repeated over and over throughout the book.  These include nuggets of wisdom such as “A simple apology works wonders” and “Winners don’t just point out problems.  They fix them.”  According to the book’s cover, the author has a customer service training program that incorporates the lessons of the book.  You can almost see the Powerpoint presentation in your mind as you read along!

Burke’s book clearly has value as a tool to help employees communicate better with difficult customers and deal with the emotional stress of their jobs.  However, some of the books “aha!” revelations are of the pat variety you might find printed on an “inspirational” poster next to a picture of a waterfall—ie. “Real freedom comes from letting go of the outcome.”  The Napkin, the Melon & the Monkey gives us a laundry list of such platitudes, but doesn’t always show how to apply these concepts in everyday life in a meaningful way.

Thanksgiving Shopping Insanity Test

Holidays are especially rough when you don’t live near family. You look out the window and see that everyone’s driveway in the neighborhood is full with visitors. Meanwhile, your house is nearly empty. Just a tad bit depressing. My parents know this, so whenever they can, they try to spend some of the holidays with us. So I’m really glad they’ll be coming for Thanksgiving this year. They won’t be able to stay too long, just the long weekend – but I’ll take what I can get!

My mom usually cooks dinner – even if it’s at my house. I don’t mind. I’m not the greatest cook, so my daughter and I act as her “sous chefs” 😉 But because they won’t be here until the night before Thanksgiving, I’ve been tasked with going out and getting all the ingredients. As fate would have it – I just haven’t had a ton of time to get out and do this task and have scheduled to do it tomorrow morning. Wednesday. The day before Thanksgiving.

I know, I know… it’s going to be insanity at the grocery store. I’m just hoping that everyone else in this town is more organized than me (which is probably not too far from the truth). I DO at least already have the turkey! It’s been sitting thawing in the Fridge – so I’m not completely out of my mind. (I already made that mistake one year. If I recall correctly – we had to try to “quick” thaw the turkey with hot water. NOT an easy task with a huge turkey!!) But the rest of the ingredients are staples that I just can’t expect to suddenly disappear from the shelves. Green beans? Sweet Potatoes? I don’t really want all this food sitting around my house until we need it. We don’t have room!

Maybe this will be another year a “lesson” is learned. I’m hoping not. Either way, the available time just isn’t there.

In any case, I’ll be enjoying company the next few days. (Hopefully with all the food we have planned! LOL!) Hope you all have a Happy Thanksgiving!!

Whirlwind week+

Sam’s been gone for over 10 days now on a business trip. The schedule we have now, though, demands that I need help. However, we have, once again, lost another babysitter. (long drama-ridden story! OY!) So, I had to go it completely alone while he was away. In some cases that meant literally needing to be in two places at once, with those two places being a good 40 minutes apart. That was not a good day, let me tell you!

I’ve said it before (on my old, archived blog) and I’ll say it again. You single moms – I don’t know how you guys do this without help. You must be super-woman or something, because I am counting down the minutes until I can catch a break!

But in the end, I survived. I managed to to be in those two places 40 minutes apart – nearly at the same time. Even when the universe kept throwing even more unexpected obstacles in my way. I did it. And even though the house is thoroughly trashed at this moment (and I have 0 interest in picking any of it up), I am much less stressed than I was at the start of this adventure. (Maybe it’s the knowledge that the worst is behind me!! LOL! Who knows!)

We’re in the middle of getting the closet worked on – so my week included having an electrician come and rewire the cable we found that was stapled to the wall of the closet (that was apparently the only source of DSL for the office), and then a painter coming in to strip all the existing hardware out of the closet, including the baseboards, then clean it up and paint it. Zach’s day care was closed on monday, so I couldn’t work that day, then on Tuesday my email died thanks to Postini. My clients contact me via email for projects they want me to work on, so nothing came in until late that evening – and then it came flooding in – so I was desperately trying to play catch up the rest of the week.

Yeah… it’s been fun.

In any case, life returns to normal come monday. Whatever “normal” is…

It’s not about failure, it’s how you recover from it

You can’t have success without failure. It’s not just that success wouldn’t taste so sweet – it’s that you wouldn’t know it when you landed on it if you didn’t know what it was like to be somewhere else. It’s good to fail once in a while. Just because you fail once in a while does not make you a failure. (Obama says so! And it’s so true! By the way, I love that speech he gave.) What defines a person is what comes after that failure. How do they recover? Do they shrink and hide away? Do they become the failure? Or do they rise above and conquer it? In conquering this “failure” – the failure ceases to be a “failure”, and instead merely a stepping point. A stone from which to rise above and become better.

So why all this talk of failure? Well… yeah. I was able to maintain my weight for a few weeks. I did a pretty good job at it too – but then work consumed my life and exercise drifted into an afterthought, and then I spent a week eating and eating and eating. While I didn’t really gain a significant amount of weight (maybe 2 lbs?), the “habits” and healthy lifestyle I worked hard to build into my life dropped into oblivion. I’m not ashamed. I saw it happen. I let it happen. I’m not even sure what I learned from the experience. At least at the moment, I’m not sure I see a lesson in all this.

The end result, is that I’m ready to get back on track. I need to get running again. It’s been weeks now. I need to get logging again. It’s been weeks on that too. That lion has his eyes on me… and he’s looking hungry.

Before I forget…

Finally tracked down our elusive babysitter so that Sam and I can escape tonight for some alone time. There’s been about a million things I keep meaning to tell him, but someone always interrupts, the phone rings… something happens and I never get to finish my thought. But finally, tonight, there won’t be anyone else to bother us. It will just be him and me. And I can sit across the dinner table from him, peacefully without any interruptions … and completely forget all the things I had meant to tell him throughout the week. =sigh=

Seriously, with mommy brain, how am I supposed remember these things until date night??