We live in turbulent times, in particular if we are language professionals, translators or technical writers.

Product and innovation circles are changing as fast as everything else (customers, suppliers, habits, values, trends). This makes us nervous, hectic, nuts.

Language professionals, in particular translators, are used to hectic and turbulent times. Everything is changing all the time in the language industry. But the number and speed of these changes are sometimes overwhelming.

Think about machine translation. Think about Artificial Intelligence. Think about less time for more customers who are not willing to pay more for more work. Think about all the time consuming misunderstandings in diverse and remote teams you are dealing with.

How to stay cool? How to learn and practice serenity?

First of all, I think it’s important to embrace change and diversity.

Why?

First, you can’t change it anyhow, so make the best out of it. Also nasty things change, nasty clients, nasty trends, etc.). And second, you can use change and diversity to come up with innovations.

How?

By surfing the waves of change, we avoid the risk to drown.  We should use diverse teams to invent new cool stuff (Question: How many female software programmers do you have? And how many male language workers?)

Tell your customers, bosses or yourself, that change and diversity are wonderful resources to design new solutions. Bio diversity, Human diversity, diversity of design to make things safer, etc., are all resources we can use for innovation.

Many of us live already on diversity (of corporate languages, tools, concepts and terms, etc.). Use this diversity to better argue, sell and design your language and terminology solutions and needs.

To be able to embrace change and diversity in order to innovate and survive, we need serenity.

When we learn to practice serenity and embrace change and diversity, we’ll make our products and services (and our people!) more resilient in turbulant times of crisis, break-downs, budget cuts, sales decreases, etc.

One of the best ways to learn serenity is meditation.

There are many ways to practice meditation – and there is no one fits all solution. But there is a meditation that fits your personality, your mood and your time for all of us.

I recommend to start with a guided meditation. Just try it out and find the right meditation for you.

To start, just open www.ecosia.org (and plant trees while searching and browsing the Internet) and enter “guided meditation for serenity”. Enjoy the diversity of meditations offered.

Or go to Youtube and try out this search: “how to meditate” – a lot of cool and useful stuff will pop up.

So, no excuses, there is a meditation out there for you, yes YOU.

Enjoy practicing and stay cool,

All the very best,

Gabriele

Head of the TermNet Group

P.S.: You could still join us at TermNet’s

Terminology Summer School from 9th to 13th July

in Vienna, Austria!

This blog post is part of TermNet’s Anniversary Challenge.

It is about #3 SERENITY- The Top 10 Must Haves in Terminology

It is 27 weeks until TermNet’s 30th Anniversary on December 12th, 2018


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