Get to Know ME with Pat Benninger
At Motivation Excellence, our fellow employees become our friends. In the case of someone like Pat Benninger, who has been at ME for more than 25 years, they also become mentors and trainers and when needed, a shoulder to cry on. We appreciate our team and love helping you get to know them better. Take a few minutes to read about Pat!
What’s your title and how long have you been at ME?
Performance Management, Sr. Program Manager and I’ve been with ME for 25 years 3 ½ months.
What’s something special about working at ME that you’d like to share?
The employees are like family. They are awesome TEAM players.
Have a special story about a client interaction that you still smile about?
My experience on site at a tradeshow was one of my best experiences. We had a booth where I was able to answer questions about our incentive business along with running a couple of different sweepstakes. The people were so much fun and very interested in the program we were currently running for their company.
What’s an unknown or odd talent you have?
I enjoy making jewelry. After a couple of classes I was hooked.
What motivates you to accomplish things in your life (work or personal)?
Clients motivate me to give 100 +%. I want to exceed their expectations. In my personal life, family motivates me.
What do you enjoy doing outside work?
Spending time with family, especially my grandchildren. I also enjoy cooking and reading.
One thing that always makes you laugh is?
When I have a Girls Day or Girls Weekend with my friends. We love shopping, eating, reminiscing and laughing.
If ME didn’t stand for Motivation Excellence, what could it stand for?
Most Excellent!
What’s the most interesting former job you’ve had?
I worked at a textile company in the laboratory testing materials for fire resistance, burst, heat, and tear specifications. I’m still friends with many of my former coworkers including management.
Get to Know ME with Josee Lunk
At Motivation Excellence, we take pride in our coworkers; not only their work ethic but also what makes them unique and shine as an individual. This month we’re featuring one of our newer team members, Josee Lunk! You can read and watch all about her in our most recent Get to Know ME feature.
What’s your title and how long have you been at ME?
Customer Award Service Representative for the last 2.5 years.
What’s something special about working at ME that you’d like to share?
From my first day, I felt welcomed. It’s like having a second family. Everyone is friendly, helpful and you have a very positive energy around you even on bad days.
Have a special story about a client interaction that you still smile about?
Not everybody is good with computers, and sometimes some of our customers have trouble navigating through their electronic devices. One particular customer had trouble printing digital gift cards and did not have anyone around him to help him with it. He really was looking forward to those for his road trip coming up with his brother. After working with him on the phone for almost a week I decided to print them myself and expedite them to him to his home address. 2 days later I got a call from him, telling me that I was the best and that he was never expecting me to do this for him. It put a smile on my face for the rest of my week.
What’s an unknown or odd talent you have?
Many years ago, I realized that there was a lot of waste in this world, so I decided to try resale shopping. I love finding treasures, refinishing furniture, it is amazing what you can find that was never hardly even used.
What motivates you to accomplish things in your life (work or personal)?
The people I love and care about. My family, my friends, my co-workers, I don’t want to disappoint anyone, so I give my best every day.
What do you enjoy doing outside work?
Spending time with my family, traveling, fishing, kayaking, reading, cooking, sharing great meals and wine with my family and my friends.
One thing that always makes you laugh is?
My boys, they are very funny!
If ME didn’t stand for Motivation Excellence, what could it stand for?
Marvelous Efficiency
What’s the most interesting former job you’ve had?
I was an ESL teacher for adults for several years. It was very rewarding!
How long have you lived in the U.S and what brought you here?
I moved to the US from Canada in the summer of 2000. I was a Hotel Restaurant Manager for Accor Hotel Group and they were opening a new hotel in Chicago. There was an opening for me to relocate, so I seized the opportunity of a new adventure!
Self-Care is Here to Stay
The philosophy of self-care has been around for decades, but in the last two years, it’s truly taken off as a widely-accepted attribute to overall health and wellness. When I started writing this particular blog, I kept thinking back to our friends in the airline industry who always encourage passengers to “put your own mask on before you help someone beside you.” It inspired the creation of our Motivation Excellence May “MEme” (say that five times in a row). Coupled with May being associated with moms, AND being eight-plus weeks into a pandemic where masks are now a fashion statement, I think we hit the trifecta here.
Better self-care means better everything!
Numerous studies show how effective self-care reduces stress and anxiety while boosting worker productivity and overall mood. Taking a short break to breathe, rest, walk, or chat with a friend may help you refocus on an important task you’re struggling to get through. Of course, you need to make sure you’re not crossing the line into “procrastination-land!” Being deliberate in your self-care practices can and will reap rewards in your workplace or home.
At Motivation Excellence, we encourage our team members to take a 15 minute “kinetic energy break” every day to make sure everyone is getting up from their desks to move. Since working from home has become the new standard, it’s especially important to take breaks to make sure we are exercising and getting outside for a breath of fresh air or a quick walk around the block. Getting the blood pumping, even in short spurts, can revive motivation and rejuvenate the spirit in these very trying times.
If you want to jump on board with us this month and look out for your own mental well-being, we invite you to join us during our May “Wellness Challenge”. The goal is to incorporate three basic and minimal health and wellness activities into our daily routine. For each activity, we achieve we earn one point. At the end of the challenge, accumulated points are deposited into our personal employee engagement accounts to spend as we choose on a huge array of reward options.
Making self-care a priority: here, there and everywhere
We all know it’s important, but self-care is often the first thing that gets axed off the to-do list on a busy day. But it doesn’t have to be that way: There are simple things you can do to make sure you get some recharging time daily.
- Schedule it: whether it’s yoga, a run, reading, or cooking, block it off on your calendar and protect it.
- Pay for it: it’s harder to let go of something if you’ve already paid for it. A painting class, a massage appointment, a new piece of exercise equipment – you want to get your money out of it!
- Make it handy: download an app, make sure you have walking shoes with you, carry a book around – we often have little chunks of downtime we can use to rest, read, exercise, or just breathe.
I used to bike during my son’s guitar lessons and run while my daughter was at voice lessons. I’d bring a book with me for their orthodontist appointments or to bide my time while waiting for an after school pick-up. If you regularly think ahead and can be flexible with the “how” and the “where,” it does get easier to incorporate self-care breaks 5 minutes here, and 15 minutes there (sounds like a great Dr. Seuss book).
Self-care is for everyone obviously, but since it is the month of Mother’s Day and women tend to land in the role of caregiver to many others, we’d like to give a shout out to all the ladies. Be sure to read next month’s blog on work-life balance, when we’ll tip our hat to the men out there.
We All Have It within Us to Motivate and Be Motivated
Motivation is a desire put in motion; a want that makes you move in a positive direction.
Get to Know ME – A Conversation with Debbie Potempa
Debbie Potempa, our Purchasing Production Manager, has been with us for 23 years. She shares with us what makes working at Motivation Excellence so special, how helping others keeps her motivated, and the one thing that always makes her laugh.
Engagement at Work: A Life Ring to Keep Business Afloat
Engagement is an emotional commitment, not only to your company, but also to its values, mission and goals.
Motivation Excellence™ Named One of the 2019 Best and Brightest Companies to Work For in the Nation®
Motivation Excellence™ is excited to announce a new award recognizing the company’s innovative and thoughtful human resources approach.
Company Sustainability and Green Initiatives: The Future is Now
How do you incorporate company sustainability and green initiative practices? Take some tips from our very own David Jobes.
Get to Know ME – A Conversation with Michelle Lien-Burdick
Michelle, our Merchandise Buyer, has been with us for 22 years! She shares what she loves about working at Motivation Excellence, her favorite memory of a client interaction, and how her dog makes her laugh.
On Your Marks, Get Set, GOAL!
Between 2015 and 2018, I strung together more than three years of daily exercise. It was more than 1,110 days actually, and no one was more surprised by it than I!
My original goal was not that lofty. I knew I wanted to add more exercise into my lifestyle. I happened to exercise every day for a week at one point and wondered if I could do 30 days in a row. I hit that milestone and crazily thought, “Could I do this every day for a whole year?”
I’ve already given away the end of the story: I did! And then kept going for two more years. In that time I learned some critical things about setting goals, staying motivated and achieving success. Whether you’re looking to conquer goals in your personal or professional life, here are some ways to help you get from step one to step DONE!
Write it down, AND share it
I know you’ve heard this before. And if you haven’t: do a simple search online and you’ll have a plethora of articles from self-help coaches, leadership gurus, and published studies to peruse for the rest of the day.
The bottom line here is: if you can write down your goal in a detailed way, you’re already one step on the journey to achieving it. It’s a small step perhaps – but as I’ll write about next, it’s great to celebrate the little things too!
Even better than just writing your goal down? Share it! Personally, I still share my exercise goals on social media and love the feedback I get from other people with their own goals. Finding a community of others working toward a similar achievement can be quite motivating. I post frequent post-workout selfies to keep myself accountable. They’re certainly not my most flattering photos, but I see them as a way to not only keep my fitness goals alive and present, but also inspire others on their own goal journey.
Celebrate the small stuff
Your ultimate goal might be something HUGE! If that’s the case, you can identify several smaller goals that will lead you up the mountain to the BIG ONE.
Perhaps you’re undertaking a new playbook for your sales team in 2020. The definitive goal will be to turn over a comprehensive collection of product information and how best to represent it in the market. That’s a huge chunk of work to chew on all at once. Figure out how to break it apart and tackle one piece at a time. If you write down each of these smaller steps, then cross them off as you go, you’ll see progress and keep the motivation flowing to the end!
I’m a huge believer in celebrating the small victories. It’s a much more effective motivator than beating yourself up for all your small failures.
With my exercise streak, I counted any day that I put at least ten minutes into personal fitness endeavors. I didn’t need to train for a 5K every day – I just needed to put in the effort. Overall I averaged more than thirty minutes a day, but I certainly celebrated busy days when I could only fit in a power walk or ten minutes of body weight exercises.
Get it done right away
Have you heard about the “eat the frog” analogy? It was new to me, but makes sense in a number of ways (other than the actual visualization of eating this poor frog – that makes me go “eww.”)
Mark Twain is quoted as saying something along the lines of, if you start each day eating a live frog, it’s probably the worst thing you’ll have to do all day. Thus the rest of your day will be better, or at least, less gross.
What does this mean when it comes to your goal? Often, we tend to push certain items down on our to-do list because perhaps they’re overwhelming or time-consuming, or other little things pop up and get in the way.
As we push our goal down our priority list, it tends to feel heavier and we set ourselves up for losing momentum, focus, and desire to get it done. For me, this still means getting up early and getting my exercise done before work. Not only do I always feel good about getting it out of the way first thing, it also makes me feel productive right off the bat and I carry extra energy and drive as I head off to work. If I push it off until after work, I often just don’t have the energy or stamina to follow through.
So, plan to tackle something related to your goal right away each day. You may be surprised how it drives you to accomplish more than you expected and gives the rest of your day a boost in attitude!
Start TODAY
Don’t wait for Monday or the start of the month or after your birthday. If you want to achieve your goal, just start already. A Tuesday in the middle of February is just as perfect a day as any other. This goes for losing weight, drinking more water, starting a résumé or creating that aforementioned sales playbook. If you have a goal you want to achieve, don’t put any more distance than necessary between it and the finish line.
And if your goal involves lifestyle changes like cutting sugar, adding more veggies, or like me, increasing your exercise minutes, then no one day of the week, month or year holds more significance than another. In fact, the day you start now becomes a day of huge importance, because it’s the day you made the active decision to go after something you want!
Keep evolving
This can’t be stressed enough: the path to your goal might fluctuate and you need to be able to evolve to stay on the road. Things out of our control are always going to throw up obstacles.
Back in the 80s and 90s you could lose an entire file because it didn’t get saved properly on your PC. Today, technology offers a myriad of other less-than-fortunate situations to throw us off our game (no wi-fi, internet crashes, syncing problems…ugh!).
Lifestyle changes, like eating better, can be easily derailed by a mood swing, Halloween, or a Super Bowl party.
Being able to take a step back, reassess the situation, and move forward in an unplanned direction are invaluable characteristics to have when in the pursuit of a goal. Remember that celebrating the victories, even the small ones, will help keep you motivated to continue. Failures, either self-made or thrust upon us by outside forces are inevitable. Getting back on track is always commendable! Save that work on a flash drive and bring your own healthy snacks to the party.
For me, just shy of my three year anniversary of daily exercise I hurt my ankle playing soccer and was put in a boot for two weeks. I was undeterred. I still took my dog for a walk around the neighborhood. I hula hooped while watching TV. I lifted weights and used resistance bands. Then an MRI showed I had actually broken my ankle and I was non-weight bearing for six weeks! I still persevered for another week, doing exercises from a chair or the floor.
Celebrate your success
I did end up giving up the streak. I just couldn’t do it with crutches and all the challenges of being one-footed. It was a difficult day, but I eventually saw it for what it really was: time to adjust and go in a new direction. I had met my goal times three and that was reason to celebrate! To this day, I still workout 5-7 days a week, so the ultimate goal for me is still being achieved: making exercise part of my lifestyle.
Now, it’s your turn to take on something you really want to achieve. I hope what you just read gives you a little kick into action! Feel free to share your goal with us at Motivation Excellence. Maybe we can help, but for sure we can cheer you on. Good luck!
