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a customer’s needs and make your business stronger than ever for when the busy season hits again. Your team will be better prepared for the onslaught, and their extra precision just might pay dividends to overcome another slow month. The shortest month of the year is nothing to fear! With these tools, you can make this your best February yet.
With Valentine’s Day approaching, stores are filled with chocolates, stuffed animals, and cards for significant others. Love is in the air! Even though you may not realize it, your kids may also be feeling the pressure. Crushes, dates, and broken hearts are part of their lives, too, but they may struggle to talk with you about it. Thankfully, developmental experts have weighed in on how to approach these important and delicate conversations. NO LAUGHING MATTER Judith Myers-Walls, professor emeritus of child development at Purdue, urges parents not to treat their kids’crushes as silly. We may know these early expressions of love aren’t that serious in the long run, but to an adolescent, the emotions are very powerful.“They are very easily embarrassed about those feelings,” Myers-Walls observes,“so parents and other adults should be respectful and not tease about those issues.”Rather than make kids feel Also, commit your organizational energy to your business. What do you need for the IRS or an auditing company? What happened in 2019 to change how you approach things in 2020? What shifts do you need to make for 2021? By March, you’ll be settled from the whirlwind of responsibility the new year brings, and you can coast into spring. CHECK YOUR GOALS At this point of the year, you should have a clear idea for how the first and second quarters of 2020 will go. Because goals can shift, February is the perfect month to assess whether or not you need to make adjustments to the plan you made in 2019. Since business typically winds down to a manageable pace this month, consider how you could ramp it up come springtime. Do you need to press harder with your plans for 2020, or do you need to capitalize on what already worked in January? Compare your post-January projections to those of previous years to get a clear idea about what your next steps should be, and use February to implement them.
EMBRACE THE SLOWDOWN No one likes a slow month in business, but you can use it to your advantage. If February is a historically slow month for you and your company, consider how you could improve internally. Offer extra employee training, provide cross-training events, streamline processes, test new software, or ramp up education for your sales, customer service, or technician staff. Take advantage of the extra hours in the workday not devoted to
VALENTINE’S LESSONS Talking to Your Adolescent About Relationships
ashamed of these early romantic feelings, let them know you’re there to talk to them about it.
RESPECTING OTHERS Dr. David Anderson, a clinical psychologist at the Child Mind Institute, believes it’s especially important to talk to adolescents about respecting boundaries. “One of the big lessons we want to be sending to kids at any age is that there are two people to consider,” he writes, explaining that adolescents tend to only focus on their own feelings and need to learn to consider how their crush may feel about them. This awareness might prevent them from overstepping someone else’s comfort zone. RESPECTING THEMSELVES At the same time, kids and teens should know the importance of respecting their own feelings. Setting boundaries can be especially important when your child is confronted with
an unwanted Valentine’s Day card or request for a date and feels pressured to reciprocate. “Boundary setting is imperative to learn during adolescence because it is a time of identity formation,”writes Dr. Marilyn Price-Mitchell in Psychology Today.“Healthy boundaries allow teens to feel respected, valued, and empowered to build positive relationships in their lives.”It also helps them handle uncomfortable social situations with grace and maturity. Crushes and first dates are a part of growing up, as is learning how to contribute to healthy relationships. Much like a first step or learning to drive, patient, loving parental support makes all the difference.
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