We are at the halfway point of 2009. It is a good time to assess where you are in relation to your goals for the the year. It is also time to take a break. Use the upcoming holiday weekend to put the ‘L’ back in WLB.

When faced with lost revenue, most organizations will downsize their staff. For those who remain, the work level increases along with the pressure to put in longer hours to avoid being the next to go. At some point individuals ‘burn out’. It is hard to be creative in a high pressure environment where fear is the primary motivator. After long hours, your brain does eventually go to sleep even if you don’t.

This is one of the few weekends each year when we all share a common holiday. Use the three days to rest and do some of your favorite things (not related to work). Connect with friends and family, participate in a 5K run/walk, read that book you saved for summer or just sit and watch your local fireworks. Step away from the routine.

If you are actively engaged in a full time job search, you deserve a break too. Do some of the things that make you an interesting person, things that will add to your story in an interview. Have fun.

Keep a some notepaper handy. New ideas will come as you relax. Jot them down and bring them to work on Monday, refreshed and ready to go for the second half of the year.  Happy Fourth!

This is for the person who believes they are the only one left on earth who is still undecided. Here is the good news – you have company. Now for the bad news – you have a lot of choices and today would be a good day to start eliminating a couple from the list.

Until you figure out what you want to do, here is the response you can use to answer any question about what you are going to do with your life. “I am considering a number of options, do you have some suggestions for me?” You have immediately switched the focus from you to your interrogator. And, you may get some good ideas.

This is just a diversionary tactic. You still have to narrow down your possibilities. Begin with a list of all the things you would never do. Next, write down why each of these options would not work. Now consider the opposites. If these don’t work, what will? This exercise will give you some insight into your preferences.

Now start thinking about where you could practice some of the things you enjoy doing. Don’t restrict yourself to a particular organization or industry. Tom Hanks employs a PhD in History at his production company to ensure he gets the facts right in his movies. If you are a history major who loves the movies, would you have even thought this was an option?

What are you doing this summer? If you are just taking time off and hanging at the beach, look around. Are there people working around you? What are they doing? If your work environment is important and you don’t want to be in a cubicle you may have found your place.

It is great to be undecided and enjoy the bounty of a liberal arts education. It is also stressful when your ‘type A’ friends are working 14 hour days in their summer internship. You may feel you are somehow lacking. Remember, there are things you enjoy more than others and places you would rather be. It’s a good place to start.

How many of you selected your major as a guarantee for a job after college? What if you found out that you could have been a theater major and be just a successful as someone with an undergraduate degree in business?

In an interview with the New York Times, Clarence Otis Jr., the CEO of Darden Restaurants (Red Lobster, The Olive Garden & Capital Grille) says that theater was what prepared him for building teams. “I would say that probably is the starkest lesson in how reliant you are on others, because you’re there in front of an audience. It’s all live, and everybody’s got to know their lines and know their cues and know their movement, and so you are totally dependent on people doing that.”

When he is asked what he looks for in hiring for his team he responds: “The most important thing to me is, you want to see someone who has passion, who really gets excited about the world around them and has drive. I like people who are energized by what they’re working on. I’m comfortable with people who are passionate, comfortable with people who are ambitious for the organizations they work in, ambitious for the function that they are building a career in, and want to make a contribution.

Being comfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty is a trait I look for, because those folks are pretty comfortable with diversity, and not knowing how people who have differences might react in a situation doesn’t unmoor them. They’re comfortable with it and may even like that. Those kinds of folks also, when they’re faced with ambiguity and uncertainty, they’ve got their wits about them, so they’re looking as much for the opportunity that’s inherent in that as they are for the risk.”

Did he talk about major? Does he ask about your GPA? No, as a leader he is concerned with building a team that values diversity. He wants people who will thrive in change and rather than resist, will draw creative energy from it.

Take a minute to read the entire article and then think about how you might prepare for an interview with Mr. Otis. It may give you a new way of thinking about your background and how you would describe it. And, it may help you to move from looking at only a few opportunities to a more broad view of possibilities.

What will be the most important lesson you take away from your summer internship? What will you learn about yourself?

It may surprise you that the founder and editorial director of DailyCandy.com believes that what prepared her to run her own company was the ‘grunt work’ of her first internship. Dana Levy in an interview with the NY Times under the heading ‘In Praise Of All That Grunt Work’ says “Most of what I learned was from my first job out of college, when I was an intern and then the managing editor’s assistant at New York magazine….In the real world, college doesn’t really teach you how to manage different personalities….I think learning to work for people is really important. I think to be a good leader it’s key to know what it’s like to be an employee, and to have had a lot of the different-level jobs where you’ve been the scrappy little nobody.”

Hopefully, this comes at a time when you are about 2-3 weeks into your internship and experiencing a bit of disappointment because you have not been given more responsibility.

It takes time to develop a level of trust with your employer. Observe how your boss treats the full time staff. If he/she is a micromanager, the fact your portfolio of work has not increased is not personal. He/ she doesn’t trust the staff to complete their work without interference. What can you learn from this? How not to treat your employees.

The most welcome attitude in any workplace is one of energy and responsiveness. Not just to the major projects, but in reaction to the more mundane, administrative tasks. At the beginning of your career you are creating the foundation for your professional reputation. When Dana Levy was asked what she looks for in a new hire she describes “someone who is just a good egg-someone who can make the right call, because there are a million decisions to be made every day and it’s just important that they have a strong sense of right and wrong and good and bad.”

This summer the most important things you acquire may have nothing to do with the technical skills or content of the work. You may just learn how to be a good employee with a strong sense of right and wrong.