Change

We have all heard the admonition to “be still” at various times in our lives. Usually, at least for me, it was when I was much, much younger and my mother or father or grandparents thought I was squirming too much in my chair at dinner or running around in the house, knocking into adults, or playing too rambunctiously with other kids. It was a physical thing.

Two days from today on the fourth Thursday of November, people in the United States will celebrate a national day of Thanksgiving. A similar holiday is celebrated on the same or other days by people in many nations.
 

Recently on TV, I was attracted to a Cascade dishwasher detergent commercial featuring child actress Sierra Richards, who seeing her “mother” rinse off the dishes before putting them in the open dishwasher asks, “just what does the dishwasher do?” This question is an example of thinking critically about what the “mother” in the commercial was doing.
 

Today’s Tuesday Reading is an essay by Monika R. Dressler. Director of Academic Technologies, in the LSA Technology Services group at the University of Michigan’s College of Literature, Science, and the Arts. She is an alumnus of the MOR Leaders Program. Her essay first appeared as a program reflection earlier this year. [Monika may be reached at <mdressle@umich.edu>.] 
 

Where are you on the burnout scale — exhaustion, cynicism and inefficacy — to fully engaged — energy, dedication, and absorbed?¹

In a 2018 paper, Seppälä and Moeller² introduce a young woman who is in a new workplace. She really liked her new job and was highly motivated to perform well. She undertook, and was highly successful at, organizing a large conference, accomplishing what was seen as a remarkable feat.
 

Several years ago, in a series of Tuesday Readings,^1,2,3 I introduced the idea that when we understand how our brain works, we can better understand why we react the way we do. I wrote, then, that an individual’s brain, in the days of our early ancestors, had one key goal – survival, avoiding threats and seeking food (rewards). And, avoiding threats had a much higher priority with five times more neural networks devoted to threat detection than to identifying rewards.  

Today’s Tuesday Reading is an essay by Dave Acheson, Network Operations, Information Systems and Technology, Chapman University. His essay first appeared as a leaders program reflection earlier this year. [Dave may be reached at  <dacheson@chapman.edu>.] 
 

In previous Tuesday Readings we have focused on the importance of planning,¹ on being intentional about how we use our time,² and on the importance of regularly moving items from our one To Do list to our calendar.³ Returning to this topic as the school year begins, seems particularly important. Each year our pace seems to be more hurried and our time more precious. It becomes increasingly easy to rationalize that you can “just wing it,” that you don’t need to plan. Nothing could be further from the truth. You do need to plan.

… How many have you asked today?

The importance of being able to ask and actually asking questions is verbalized in these four quotes: