What is your grip?

Being a tennis player, spending a good amount of my life on tennis courts, clubs, tournaments built me to who I am today. So this is my blog Grip Shape , totally personally driven from my passions, learning and experience and inspired by tennis.

It took me a while to name my blog and have decided on Grip Shape for some  reasons. For tennis there are certain ways you would hold a tennis racket. These can be numerous names  called eastern, western and continental,grips. They all would get you somewhere. You can still hit the ball and it will go over the net. Every tennis player will grow into a grip depending on how they are taught and how comfortable they are with the hold. I don't think anyone can judge if a certain grip will bring you success or one is superior to other.

Grip shape is my voice, the way I hold a tennis racket. I am hoping you will enjoy the articles that will bring you some life long learnings or  perspectives of me.

Just scroll down and enjoy! If you feel it will be useful to anyone, don't hesitate to share.

Best
Isil Cayirli Ketenci

Analytics today and in the future with Haig Nalbantian

I started to think lately that it’s a shame not to share what you best know to new generations and  to societies.  How are we going to progress if we keep the good information to ourselves  (good information in the sense that; outstanding expert advices, books read and quotes that helped our lives).

Did you ever think that maybe with few words you put in writing or few moments you spend  with a person  can have a huge positive impact?  This is my motto now #shareyourbest 

So here I am thinking what could best fit to this topic and I am  thrilled with the idea that I need to share some videos of my dear colleague Haig Nalbantian.

Haig is a Senior Partner at Mercer and he is also the cofounder of Workforce institute for the company. He is the guru in my eyes for the topic of analytics and one of the best consultants my paths have crossed.

It was only a few months ago I squeezed an interview with him on the topic of “analytics today and in the future” as  its often I am running into questions of  "what the future holds for students on this area, how important it is and do we have the luxury to neglect this topic? "

 

I myself couldn't agree more on the essence of this topic. Every project we work on starts with the KPIs and  what we want to achieve. No surprise that KPIs always aim for improved results for recurring projects and analytics is our greatest support with context  added on top of it. As little as sending a mass email at a certain time or measuring the open rate of a long text content versus a short text content can be the game changers that you might be looking for. Analytics is the key for all this.

While you enjoy the responses first hand from Haig; WEF’s Future of Jobs report confirms that the rising star jobs  are  going to be taken over by data analysts.

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What motivates you?

For some time now I’ve wanted to share with others my personal experiences in career, sports, life, thinking and thanks to my husband’s motto: “never delay what you want to do in life”, I finally sat down to write my inaugural blog.  Just in time to kick off one of the resolutions I have on my 2019 list. Have you made your resolution list yet?
This piece will center on motivation-the biggest and strongest drive in my life.
It was this year that my friend, Dr. Sertan Kabadayi, invited me to speak at Fordham University at their “Industry career speakers series”. In preparation for my speech, I reflected on the many aspects of my career. While I will share in future blogs more about some of those reflections, for this one I wanted to focus on motivation. It was the end of my speech at Fordham, during the Q&A session, that one of the students asked me “what motivates you?”. The question struck me as I wasn’t expecting it based on the topic of international careers. Without much thought, I replied, “success motivates me.”
I realized success is just a term I give to different outcomes I achieve in different circumstances. In sports it’s easy, you become the champion and that is a clear success. How about the runner ups? Don’t they feel successful? Often in sports I felt unsuccessful when I lost a tennis match to an opponent that I thought I could beat. But when faced with opponents much better than me then even winning a few games would make me happy and again that was a motivation for me. In this case, failures are secret successes; in these situations I excelled compared to what I perceived I could have achieve.
 When this thinking is applied to day-to-day business life it’s often a more complicated story. On a daily basis at work it’s hard to find a success story; a business place can be an environment hard to define what success truly looks like. It could be even more failures than successes given the circumstances. For this I set long term goals, long term successes that I can achieve over time and work towards. That motivates me.
 Million-dollar Manhattan Condo as motivation?
Whether its success, giving, sharing, health, happiness, a nice Bentley car, million dollar Manhattan condo on the 5th  avenue or an expensive Bordeaux wine , it’s important to find what motivates you. I have secretly found what it is for me with a question that came out of the blue and mine is ‘feeling successful’. I find motivation and hope directly correlated leading to positive thinking and driving stellar outcomes for one’s self.
Maybe this is a moment to think what motivates you? And if you are one of the lucky ones that identified it you already have the power in you.