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tanja(at)tanjalau.com

+41 (0)32 511 20 09

Bern, Switzerland

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Allgemein

Tanja Lau / Allgemein (Page 3)

Showing Up

The other day it took my new friend Cem about a week to reply to my message. "So I wanted to reply right away after your message but I realized I did not know the answer to the question how I am doing", he told me once he got back to me. The simplest questions are often the deepest. How are you?A question we are used to ask and being asked a tousend times per year, often not even taking more than a split second to think about our reply. It's only when we know the other person is in deep pain that we suddenly hesitate to even ask. When they just lost their job, their partner or even their child it suddenly feels uncomfortable, shallow...

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Debt

Back in the days when I was still actively managing products like e-commerce shops, I used to be worried about what we call tech debt all the time. It's a certain kind of risk you accumulate for prioritizing short-term goals (like releasing new features) over long-term stability (like test coverage and refactoring).Nowadays, to me there are two kinds of debt: the one that I can happily ignore for now - which in our case is the loan we took out when we bought our house. I am quite confident that one way or another we will be able to pay back this money someday and it does not keep me up at night. What does affect my sleep is the second kind of debt. The one...

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Pre-Mortem

A vital part of learning consists in looking back on our actions and reflecting in order to adjust our future behavior if needed. In product management, when everything goes to hell, we conduct what we call a post-mortem. It’s like a little funeral for a project, a feature or even a product where everyone gathers to discuss what went wrong and how to avoid this outcome in the future. (Actually, my product friend Sascha told me about a company that literally suits up in black and burries an actual prototype or product item close to their company building… 😉). While this is a valid and useful way to accelerate your learning curve, you still lost value which is especially painful when the stakes are high. In this...

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Transitions

My summer was all "in between". In between ending and re-starting kindergarden. In between day trips, visiting relatives and even our first real camping get-away with the kids (which felt like five minutes at the lake wrapped in two days of packing and two days of unpacking...

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Home

A few weeks ago I hired a cleaning lady. I thought the difficult part would be finding someone I trust who is efficient, autonomous and flexible. That part turned out to be quite easy. Within four days I had found a great match. The tough part, however, is figuring out whether I really want a stranger cleaning my house. Whether to put yet another fixed appointment in my calendar. Whether to let someone take a close look at each and every corner of a lovely, but pretty imperfect home. Not an easy taskf or me. It turns out I'm the kind of person who cleans before the cleaner...

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True Colors

The greatest people I know are currently becoming the truest versions of themselves. M is spending a lot of time in prayer with Jesus, soaking herself in a feeling of love and belonging. J recently started a sexual liberation, entering unknown territory and tearing down the walls of monogamous relationships. L is slowly and steadily writing her way out of the business world into a place less polished and more true to her. E is no longer trying to please everyone at her own expense and S is radically rethinking the importance of her job, breaking the chains of perfectionism and unfruitful comparison, giving herself room to breathe. There is no one way of cutting through the noise of voices that are not our own. But whenever...

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5 Stages of Grief

Today, I was supposed to board a plane to Morocco, to do some yoga with my dear friends Judith and Stefanie and to put some daylight between myself and my every-day life. Instead, this morning I had to go for a run in the *freaking* snow next to my house. I am surrounded by my every-day laundry and my every-day kids.  For weeks, I had this feeling that something was about to go wrong with this trip. I have extensively been wearing face masks, got tested several times and planned every little detail about this trip. I am literally sitting on a perfectly packed suitcase with a negative PCR test, a triple-checked excel packing list and a pre-filled entry form for the airport in Morocco. The one tiny...

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a little goes a long way

This is the first time I missed my bi-weekly Friday slot to send out my Butterflies. It's also the first time we ever took in a refugee family.  After weeks of feeling overwhelmed and helpless looking at the terrible war in Ukraine, we had an opportunity to make a difference for someone in need - and it turned out to be one of the most rewarding experiences I've ever had. We had registered on several platforms at the beginning of the war, offering a room for a small family, but the moment I received several Whatsapps from strangers asking whether they could stay with us made me quite nervous. Was I underestimating the support they would need? Would the kids get along and be able to...

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Clay Man With No Ears

I don't know about you, but I have the hardest time finding butterfly moments these days looking at the pain and misery inflicted on people right outside our door steps. I am not saying I am no longer experiencing joy with the kids and at work, but everything feels tainted right now. So I was not even sure whether I wanted to send out a message at all at this point in time. The news tickers are bursting with updates, lots of humanitarian projects are bubbling up on social media, everything seems to have been said and it feels like I am lacking the right words to express my feelings anyway. Whenever that happens, I turn to poetry instead. For days, a line from a poem by Joy Harjo has been ringing in...

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Your Day

I have to admit: I sometimes envy people without kids. Not long ago, I used to be one of them. Choosing how to spend my evenings instead of falling asleep at my toddlers' bedside. Waking up after a full night's sleep. Finishing an entire meal in peace. Making plans for the day without planning around someone's naptime. Before I had a family, I wasn't even aware of how much me-time I had. So as I said: I sometimes envy people without kids...

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