Thanks Paul!

Career, Community, SQL
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What I’ve noticed this year is that there’s really not another group of people like the SQL Community.  Earlier this year Paul Randal ( b | t ), in the name of community, offered his services to mentor to a small group of people. Check it out here. Crazy as it may sound he went ahead and offered mentoring to everyone that submitted here and I was on that list. Here’s my blog post submission

If you don’t know Paul, he’s a very open and honest person, exactly what you’d want in a mentor. Mentoring isn’t just one person pontificating upon another person about how things should be done. Mentoring is about getting to know each other and asking the hard questions that you, as the mentee, may not know yet or have been putting off. Through this process you gain clarity on where you want to take yourself/career.

Paul asked me those hard questions and here’s what happened this year…

  • Learned To Set Barriers – as a consultant, you can just work and work and work. You need to set a reasonable limit on how much you work. This goes for people who are full time employees to. You need to enjoy your job. I love what I do, I get to do the one thing I’ve always wanted to do…work with computers. I’m lucky.
  • **Got involved in the SQL Community **–  expanded blogging, Twitter participation, went to PASS Summit, Friend of Redgate
  • Starting Public Speaking – I’ll be speaking at the January meeting of the Chicago SQL Server User Group and SQL Saturday Pensacola #491
  • Developing Training – Also became a Pluralsight author this year, currently developing a course for the Redhat Enterprise Linux RHCE certification

So 2015 was pretty cool, but we need to look forward to 2016…

  • Expand education – blog more, complete more training courses
  • Mentor someone – a friend, a client…could be you. Drop me an email if you’re interested.
  • Continue Speaking – Paul wanted me to have three speaking engagements, I currently have two. I plan on speaking as often as I can in 2016!

The funny thing is we didn’t talk one bit about the technical innards of SQL Server and that’s OK…they’ve got training for that. Check my thoughts on that here ;)

To sum it up, we gained clarity through questioning, set goals and achieved those goals. Simple as that. In 2016, you should do the same…reflect on your goals, develop a plan, and execute that plan. What do you want to do this year? If you like, add them to the comments on this post!

Take a minute and say thanks to Paul and also to yourself, the SQL Community, chances are if you’re reading this you’re active in the Community. It’s pretty cool to be a part of this!

Also I’d like to say thanks to Ed Leighton-Dick ( b | t ) for the #sqlnewblogger challenge, this motivated me to blog much more consistency this year. And also Brent Ozar ( b | t ) for taking the time to throughly review a blog post for me and helping me develop my target audience.

Thank you!