Leadership Program Reflection

From time to time, as leaders we have to stop and press the pause button.  Gratitude helps us feel good because it inspires us to do good.

Learning from the book "Thanks for the Feedback: the Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well (even when it is off base, unfair, poorly delivered, and frankly, you’re not in the mood)"

My MOR cohort has been a lifesaver.  They have become an essential component of my work life that I didn't even know I needed.

The Queen song, Under Pressure popped in my head and made me smile. And love dares you to care for the people on the edge of the night, And love dares you to change our way of caring about ourselves... this is our last dance this is ourselves under pressure.  Doesn’t this ring true, especially at this moment in time?

The harsh reality is that personal and professional growth can be very painful.  One begins to realize that laced in all the undercurrents of “fake it till you make it”, the imposter syndrome, and the art of improv is the common understanding that everyone is going through some kind of sizable internal strife to push forward.

Now, I’m finding myself asking “Self? What if I stopped waiting for others to unstick me?” “What if I focused on me, how will that impact myself and others?” “What if I start chasing, rather than waiting for something to fall in my lap?”

By Maria Curcio, maria_curcio@harvard.edu 

MORLP 2016, August 29, 2016.

In his article, “Why Luck Matters More Than You Think” (Atlantic, May 2016), Robert H. Frank discusses luck in terms of wealth and success:

Mike Dewey is Director of Campus Services in the Office of Information Technology at Rice University.  He leads groups that provide desktop computing support and help desk services.  He is also interim director of the Teaching, Learning, and Scholarly Technologies group.

Monday, January 25, 2016. I hope everyone had a good weekend.  I, like the rest of the Maryland cohort, spent a good part of the weekend shoveling snow and digging out from the ~30 inches of snow that fell from late Friday and most of Saturday.  And then digging out again once the wind had settled down and the snow drifts ended. I cannot begin to describe how sore I am and how strong my desire to buy a snow blower is now.  With snow removal finished and campus closed until Wednesday at the earliest what better then to reflect on this program.

A mind is a terrible thing to waste.  Before I started the leadership journey, I was doing a lot of just that. Wasting a lot of my time and mind focusing on the immediate, the unimportant, the routine tasks that certainly were not going to make a significant difference in creating, influencing, or advancing the strategic mission and goals of the university.