Career Development....for others

Lately, my job has taken center stage....literally. On Saturday, February 5th, I participated in a San Diego Paralegal Association panel that featured 3 paralegals. Our courts community outreach coordinator, when asked for a participant from the court, suggested me. I got to give a 30 minute presentation on my journey to becoming a paralegal, my current responsibilities and employment and finally 5 tips for paralegals just entering the field or wanting to move to a different area within the paralegal field. I thought 30 minutes would be hard to do, but I ended up talking for 25 minutes (with a power point slideshow as well) and then a 5-10 minute Q&A period. I got good feedback, so hopefully it was helpful to the participating paralegals. From there though, I got requests to write for the SDPA newsletter and then this next week, I get to participate in a high school career fair. It's getting kind of ridiculous. But I've been thinking. I just got called to my stakes Public Affairs committee and right after, I get to participate in all these community events. And my assignment on the Public Affairs committee is to create and manage opt in email lists for the community things the stake presidency wants the stake to know about. So, I get to hear about all the city council initiatives that they'll be voting on and what's of concern to the stake leaders about our community. First on our list...stores selling marijuana illegally. There's 180 in San Diego that are selling illegally, with a good half of them in the neighborhood of Pacific Beach, in my stake. Kind of crazy. So that's the first list to create. At our last meeting, I had a little bit of a run in with an older sister on the committee who started harping at me like I was the sole representative of all Young Single Adults in the stake. Pretty much telling me that she could never get the singles out to help or do what she needed them to do. I spent the next 30 minutes educating her how to talk to the singles. FINALLY, there was a breakthrough and she recognized what she'd been doing wrong all these years of talking to the single adults like they were children! (I remember her emails to my ward, they were very much, You're going to do this, you must come to help cause you're young and strong and can clean up after all of us older folks do the event..blah, blah). And the stake presidency member pretty much sat back and nodded to everything I said, and then after the meeting was over and we walked out, he said "And you were wondering why you're in this calling? That was one of the reasons Sister Christensen." Great. Calling fulfilled...