One of my writing goals for this year is to practice the art of brevity. And while I enjoy the teaser qualities of twitter’s 140 characters, that’s still too brief for me to express most of what I want to say. It happens these days that I wake up with 3 or 4 ideas for blog posts or topics I want to dig into. And then life intervenes: trip to the playground, return home sandy and tired, food manufacture of some sort, negotiation of the next round of screen time, rallying towards bedtime, deep sigh when all is said and done, twitter feed scan until lights out, sleep.
Without further ado, here is some much recommended reading:
1. Principals are People Too blog posts by some mutually supportive school leaders who share the challenges and rewards of being a building principal. (Links to the other posts can be found at the end of his post)
This tied in nicely with my previous post about trying on someone else’s shoes.
2. On Deadlines via The Chronicle of Higher Education. This brief blog post introduces some compelling effects of how we may experience various forms of scarcity (i.e., time, financial, and attention) in the case of dealines and the implications that can have for our performance, both professionally and personally. The most compelling quote for me was this:
A deadline is not just a note on the calendar, or the date on an invoice. It is experienced as part of a much larger network of resources and scarcities that are interconnected in the brain’s responses. Simply recognizing that interconnection can be the start of a compassionate response to your own situation as well as that of others. And, given their findings about cognitive “bandwidth” scarcity as an effect of other kinds of scarcity, seeking support or advice outside your own mind can often reveal alternative solutions to a problem that you wouldn’t think of on your own.
This is why coaching can be so productive and useful: it can offer support that allows you to step out of your own head and create space for alternative viewpoints and potential solutions.
3. This piece by Alain de Botton, a philosopher with a superb sense of humor, Why you – probably – need to go see a therapist, speaks with remarkable clarity and beauty about why therapy should be as routine and high priority as dental visits for most of us really.
Read these gems and reap the benefits. These were just too good not to share widely.
Oh yeah, and Yoga is taking over the NBA.
Still working on the brevity thing…
edifiedlistener 