WholeLife Mastery

Enough Already!

Long time, no blog. I just scrolled through my blog to see 17 draft entries. I'm growing into "Good enough" and today I'm writing and posting. Thanks to Hal Macomber for reminding me what makes a great blog: "Share everything you learn: 'Great web sites share everything they learn and hear (that's relevant of course) with their users...start a newsletter, and you'll get more than you give.'" Andrew B. King, What Makes a Great Website?.

I've been learning so much lately, that I needed time and space to process it before sharing it. So, here are some of my recent learnings:
* Solomon was right: "To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven" (Ecclesiastes 3:1). As farmers bring in the last crops, as trees shed their leaves and squirrels store up their acorns, Fall is time for me to harvest what I have planted, release all that no longer serves the evolving me, and store up ideas that will be the seeds of new beginnings in the spring.
* Exploratory experimentation is a useful activity for promoting successful spiritual and career evolution. I'm reading two books that brought me this learning. In Working Identity, Herminia Ibarra (2003), defines crafting experiments as "the practice of implementing the small probes and projects that allow us to try out new professional roles on a limited but tangible scale without committing to a particular direction" (p. 91). Such "probing, playful activity" is successful when it leads to the discovery of something there" (Schon, 1983, p. 145). Using that criterion of success, my exploratory experiments in coaching have been successful. I didn't feel that Until Today!
By sharing the story of her own journey of faith, Salzberg (2002) in Faith, (both the book and the spiritual quality) reminded me: "For our faith to mature, we need to weigh what others tell us against our own experience of the truth" (p. 47).
On this Thanksgiving day, I am truly grateful for these lessons and the teachers who taught them. I wish you a life full of soulful teachers and evolutionary lessons.

What's your philosophy of teaching and of life?

UNESCO has designated next Friday "World Philosophy Day". Yesterday in a workshop on teaching (and learning) enhancement, faculty members were encouraged to write a philosophy of teaching. How many times in my 10-year academic career have I sat down, inspired by some other workshop or book, to do just that only to get up an hour later with only a headache!! I'm working on it -- the philosophy, not the headache. Just as I urge my students and clients to write their personal mission statements, I believe it's important for professors to have a WRITTEN Philosophy of Teaching Statement, a sword to cut away all that is not valuable and essential and a shield to deflect what does not serve me and my students (That's how Laurie Beth Jones describes the uses of a mission statement.)

Next Friday, I'll be joining Koïchiro Matsuura, the Director-General of UNESCO, in reflecting, questioning, pondering, thinking, and searching "beyond the confines of what we think we know." Won't you join us?

The Dreading is Almost Always Worse than the Doing

For way too long, I had been procrastinating over a pile, actually an e-file, of student papers to grade. I hate grading. It is my absolutely least favorite part of being a University professor.....UNTIL YESTERDAY! I woke up deciding I couldn't, in good conscience, face my students again without having at least started grading their papers. Reading the Top Ten article The Top 10 Ways to Procrastinate When You Don't Want to Do Something, which was serendipitously deposited in my email box, certainly edged me over the hump. Well surprise, surprise! The first paper was so beautiful I couldn't stop smiling: mission statement following Laurie Beth Jones' 3 criteria for an effective mission statement and vision statement based on the "Future Self" visualization from Co-active Coaching. By the time I got about halfway through the e-pile of papers, I had enough momentum going to carry me through a paper that was so poorly written I couldn't grade it. ARGHHH!! How much time and energy I wasted in dreading instead of doing. Not to mention being out of integrity with my students!! We are, after all, reading Stephen Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People!! Inquiry: What are wasting energy dreading instead of doing?