Liza Marie Garcia

Speaker, Author, CEO

  • HOME
  • ABOUT
  • 4 YEARS OF GRACE
  • Press
  • BLOG
  • MOM TIPS
  • SPEAKING SCHEDULE
    • LIZA MARIE TV
  • CONTACT

Tip #1012: Getting Organized for school, with a capital “O”

August 8, 2016 By Liza Marie Leave a Comment

getting organized for schoolTips for organizing and getting your kids ready for back to school:

As we get ready for school beginning this week, all our energies are towards one word….. this our last weekend until it all starts again….

Organization!

I’m excited for this time of year, the deadline of starting school this week, drives all my overdue organization tasks.

One of these tasks is to have my girls go through all their clothes and find those clothes that they have out grown. Typically we do this 3 times a year, once before school starts, once when school ends for the summer and the last time sometime around December or January to move in winter clothes.

This year we left for summer vacation early in May, so we didn’t clean out our dressers, so this afternoon we started this task.

Second, we review and filter through to organize school supplies for homework and extra study. We use pages from our last summer workbooks for “extra study” throughout the year. We find all our highlighters, pens, colored pencils and other supplies and get them “ready” and separated by type.

Last, we’re back on schedule with our bedtime sleep routines and we have been working to trying to keep our meal times more consistent with school, but mainly we have been talking about getting back into school and all that involves, in terms of my expectations for them and their own expectations of themselves. We have talked about what awards they want to achieve this new year and how they will go about it.

My children are “organizing” their minds!

For me, the word “organization” is a great thing!

Filed Under: Life, Mom Tips, Parenting Tagged With: back to school, mom tips, organizing for school, working moms

Accepting Responsibility

July 22, 2016 By Liza Marie Leave a Comment

It seems to be a question as to when or if at all to accept responsibility these days.

For children this is one of the most important early lessons of their lives yet as they get older it seems like this lesson fades a bit. As adults, why does it seem like there is a question as to whether we will or we won’t accept responsibility?

I liken this question to years ago when I worked with a certain Project Manager who did not know his job. He was actually the husband of the installation manager and she wanted to put her man to work so she said he could manage a project that very clearly was completely over his skill set.

At the very first meeting I attended as part of his team, it came time for him to speak with the clients and vendors, he said “We have to take care of the telco” and then abruptly sat down.

For any telecommunications/VoIP professional we know this isn’t a really correct statement or question really. He was right that the issue of Telco needed attention and we needed to make sure all was in order, but calling it “telco” did cut it, there were very specific technical details surrounding “telco” that clearly he had no idea of.

Since I was a member of his team (actually quite embarrassed about it)  I didn’t speak up during the meeting however after the meeting and with our internal team only I asked him to explain what he meant by that statement during the meeting. It was then that I figured out that someone had told him he needed to manage Telco, and he clearly had no idea what this meant.

Very unapologetic, this project manager would not admit he had NO idea what telco was. He would not accept responsibility as far as I was concerned. Big surprise he didn’t last long on any team as a PM.

Why didn’t he just say to his team “hey I’m not familiar with telco, can one of you help me out”?

Why do we as professionals worry that someone might find out that we don’t know 100% of all we do? Why is it, we don’t take responsibility in our job, take responsibility in our relationships, and finally why can’t we take responsibility when we fail with life lessons?

There are so many ways we can fail. We fail by not telling the truth. We fail by taking the wrong approach to deal with a situation. We fail by inaction or fail by taking the wrong action? Either way I’ve learned this lesson, sometimes in a repeated fashion but at in the end I learned.

I learned the lesson of NOT taking responsibility which then means I accept the consequence.

I try to teach my daughters the VERY best thing they can do when they fail or make a mistake is to take full and complete responsibility because it is from there that we can move forward.

If I’m about nothing, I’m about always “moving forward”!

 

Filed Under: BUSINESS ADVICE, BUSINESS LEADERSHIP, Life, Main Blog, Parenting Tagged With: accountability, leading by example, parenting good practices, responsibility, setting an example

Interview on Good Things Utah KTVX 4

July 21, 2016 By Liza Marie Leave a Comment

Click here to watch the video on Good 4 Utah’s site
 

book cover liza garcia - CopyI will be talked about my book: “Never Drink Coffee During a Business Meeting” with the Good Things Utah hosts in advance of my book signing event at Barnes and Noble in Murray, UT on July 29th and did more in depth discussion on traveling with kids tips for the vacation time.

My book Never Drink Coffee during a Business Meeting is a business book which gives advice to people both entering corporate America and it provides tips to people in order to advance in their current career. As an employer for over 20 years, my mentoring of my employees has translated into my deliberate parenting of my children.

In discussed my book with Emily Clark and I had some timely #MomTips for this summer’s traveling, based on my life experiences.

Filed Under: BUSINESS ADVICE, Interview, Live Apperance, Press Tagged With: book signing author, business advice, business meetings, mom tips, traveling with kids

Tip #1011 – Here’s Why I Think I’m a “Better” Parent

July 19, 2016 By Liza Marie Leave a Comment

momtips-1First maybe we should look at what “better” means. It does NOT mean “better” than any other parent. It does NOT mean I’m a better parent than my parents, who by the way I believe are great parents.

I learned long ago that it never pays to compare any part of who you are to others. So as a parent I subscribe to this concept and my yearly goal as a parent, now 11 years is to be a “better” parent than I was last year.

So I feel not only am I a better parent due to time and lessons learned while doing “the job” as parent. I also believe I am a better parent BECAUSE I am a single working parent.

Let me explain, as an engineer for really all of my career, when you implement a new VoIP platform for a client you use your frame of reference from past installations to guide you to success, however with all new platforms or technology solutions may come together in a new ways. So this challenge stretches you to really understand the new technology, how it operates, how it was put together on a base level and really understand how you can take your current expertise and maximize not just institute new capability and features for your clients.

Back to parenting, I feel that each year my challenge is to understand my daughters better in this new and changing world, environment, climate and community. Because I take my job as parent as the most important part of my life, I have evolved to apply how I tackle my career goals and aspirations to succeed in parenting. I’ve learned research into their physical and mental development at their given ages is key and exchange of information among other parents with same aged children is important.

I believe as a single parent, the entire parenting responsibility is left to me, so therefore I believe this makes me a “better” parent year to year only because I step up to this responsibility that I take very seriously!

 

Filed Under: Life, Mom Tips, Parenting Tagged With: bettering oneself, engineering life, engineering parenting, mom tips, working mom tips

Tip #1010 – Make Friends!

July 18, 2016 By Liza Marie Leave a Comment

friendspic1Today I picked up my daughter from a 5-day, day camp in Washington state. When she went to camp last monday she didn’t know a single person, by today’s pickup she had about 6 phone numbers written in sharpie (much to my disliking) all over her arms and hands.

These were the phone numbers and emails of her new friends. In less than 40 hours, while kayaking, riding horses, swimming, dancing and general camp type activities, my 10 year old made friends. These friends vowed to call each other as soon as they were home, just hours from saying goodbye today and I can tell you, they did.

It got me thinking about how easily children make friends no matter the setting, and no matter really the age. At least from my viewpoint, my daughter Liv has always had the ability to be friendly and welcoming from the time she was very little until now at age 10.

How many times have you been at a business networking event or a social party and you don’t leave with 6 new friends? And these venues supposedly are the perfect venues for making new acquaintances or in other words friends. I would say it wouldn’t be hard to believe that most of us don’t make even one new friend or any “friends to be” at most of these events.

Is this good, or is this bad. I’m here to say it is bad. For many reasons but the one I want to stress is this.

When you open yourself up to new friends entering your life, you open yourself up for self examination. This examination might come from this new friends observation of who you are, or at minimum a new person in your life requires that you explain who you are, what your values are and basically why you do what you do in this life.

So the value in bringing new people in your life is that it may force you to examine your life in its current state when perhaps the last time you looked in the mirror was long ago.

I hope to be more like my daughter and I subscribe to the idea that I don’t think a person can have enough friends!

 

Filed Under: Life, Mom Tips, Parenting Tagged With: kids and friends, making friends, summer tips, working mom tips

Liza Marie Working Moms & Mom-preneurs on KING 5 TV June 8th, 2016

July 17, 2016 By Liza Marie Leave a Comment

kingkong5-6king5tvlogoLiza Marie Garcia was interviewed on Seattle’s KING 5 TV’s  “The Morning News” @ 7:15AM PDT 6/8/2016 for two segments:

Segment 1: Working Moms and Mompreneurs. The balance of a working parent.

  •  Why I think I’m a better parent because I’m a working mom
  • It takes a village AND a well built network to help care for your children (mother’s network)
  • We have no “work” days  in order to fully be plugged into our family time. My daughters have strict rules about their time with technology also.

Segment 2: Summer and Kids/Balance for single parents, and how to keep your children engaged during the summer.

  • Our Summer now turns  a “part time” job into 24/7 position in the summer. How I prepare all school year for this time.
  • Choose your summer camp carefully – camp could be to “stretch” your children
  • Just because it’s summer doesn’t mean all structure/schedule goes out the window
  • What is gained by playdates with a purpose
  • Build/Grow/create your own “summer Mom network”

 

Filed Under: Interview, Press, Television Tagged With: Personal Apperance, Radio, Television

  • « Previous Page
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • …
  • 10
  • Next Page »

FOLLOW ME

Twitter
TWITTER
goolgeplus
GOOGLE PLUS
insta
INSTAGRAM
facebook
FACEBOOK
linkedin
LINKEDIN
pinterest
PINTEREST

UPCOMING EVENTS

LIZA MARIE GARCIA COPYRIGHT © 2015-2016, WEBSITE DESIGN BY SHAKE CREATIVE