I did an interview with Range, talking about how the fully distributed teams I lead at DuckDuckGo work. Read it here
Author: Cate
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The Battery
I keep coming back to what it means to recharge. The metaphor that has been working most for me lately is the idea of a battery. In the green, I have plenty of charge. Everything is possible. In the orange is the ideal place for “active rest”. But if that’s not an option, I can […]
When I changed jobs in 2020, I went from a low-process culture to a high-process culture (or: what I perceive as high-process, all things are relative). It was a bit of a culture shock. The process stressed me out. For instance, my previous job did not have performance review. You were supposed to submit feedback […]
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Co-Active: Synergy
The last course in my coach training journey – for now – was Synergy. This follows Fundamentals, Fulfillment, Balance, and Process. The final course, this tied everything together. We learned about the attributes of a coach (fierce courage, aliveness, and connection), worked on range (including silent coaching!) and the idea of “stories”. Going into it, […]
Woman of Influence (Amazon) is about building your brand as a leader and taking charge of your career. It’s full of actionable strategies for understanding how you’re perceived – and how to change it. My personal favourite is a long time favourite tool of Jo’s – the shadow org chart. This is the map of […]
My latest in Quartz… My partner and I had a hellish move recently. We were lucky in that our landlords are nice, reasonable people, and unlucky in that they were quite disorganized and hadn’t done everything they needed to, like ordering furniture and thoroughly cleaning up after the last tenant. So as this played out, […]
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The Intention
New Year’s resolutions are terrible because we are not a different person on January 1 (or 2) than we are in the last days of December, or November or June. They are also terrible because we over-estimate what we can do in a day, and under-estimate what we can do in a year. Today is […]
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Book: Big Magic
I started with the podcast: Magic Lessons with Elizabeth Gilbert, which I loved so much that I ordered the book that prompted it – Big Magic (Amazon). In the podcast, Gilbert takes people one at a time through their creative block, following up with a call to someone else who she thinks will be helpful. […]
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2021 Retro
2021 was not the easiest year for the world, but personally it was a good one in many ways. Career I hit the one year mark at DuckDuckGo (more on that in: 1 Year @ DuckDuckGo), and got promoted for the second time ever in my career (my last job didn’t have promotions). A lot […]
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2021 in Photos
Since 2017, I’ve been posting a photo every day to Instagram and photo.cate.blog. I kept that up last year, posting 361 photos in total. In 2021, the aesthetic monotony of pandemic life really started to get to me and this was probably the hardest this project has ever felt. I think part of the appeal […]