Creativity
Being Whimsical (Seriously)
“Okay, so it’s summer time again, and while not as hot as last summer, when the drought was so heavy that UTSA lay under the horrendous heat like coal that has been buried for millions of years, under thousands of pounds of pressure creating diamonds that glisten like ice in the glass of sweet tea…
Read MoreOnce Upon a Time (Part 2)
Last week, I shared part of the keynote presentation I gave this month at the Professional Development Day presented by the Academic Counselors Association at The University of Texas at Austin. Today, I’ll share the rest. In preparing for this speech and looking up information about stories, I came upon the idea of the monomyth,…
Read MoreTwo Contradictory Ideas
As I began thinking about this week’s newsletter, I thought about a conversation I had recently with a client. Her college needed her to grow her program, but they were at capacity for classroom space. And of course, one had to wonder why this was urgent because who knew when they would be in the…
Read MoreRuts, Routines, and August
Several years ago I wrote a paean to fall on campus. I waxed poetic about the energy of the fall semester and the start of our new year. I wrote about empty campuses suddenly filled with students, parking lots that had been deserted now filled with cars, and sidewalks bustling with students – some new and…
Read MoreGabriella’s Song
“Among the winding canals and streets of Venice, something wonderful is happening! There’s a sweet song on everyone’s lips – a song that began with a little girl named Gabriella. It’s a song that makes the baker laugh, brings the widow to tears, and causes the gondolier to swoon. And it’s just the tune that inspires…
Read MoreLeadership Dance, Leadership Yoga
Both the Leadership Dance and Leadership Yoga workshops came about in the same way. I was teaching undergraduate courses in leadership at Trinity University and taking ballroom dance lessons or yoga teacher training. (Not at the same time – yoga teacher training came first). But in both situations, I began to see new ways to…
Read MoreCreating Community
Last week I wrote that creating community is leadership work. This week, I’d like to share some of my experiences as a leader working to create community in organizations. Colleges and universities are complicated places with multiple systems of governance. Divisions have completely different values and reward systems. There are departments with widely varied purposes and…
Read MoreImagination as a Leadership Skill
Photo by Thomas Schweighofer on Unsplash My graduate program required us to take nine hours outside of our department. I chose to take a course in the MBA program called “Leadership, Literature, and the Individual.” Professor Floyd Brandt’s syllabus described the course this way: “The course begins with the postulate that novels and plays are…
Read MoreWhat is creativity?
There are so many ways to answer this question, I’ve struggled to even start writing this blog post. Spiritual, neurological, psychological, intellectual, artistic – there are definitions of creativity that are specific to each of these realms. And, as you would expect, some of them contradict each other. There are myths and belief systems built…
Read MoreMeeting my teachers: Julia Cameron
“‘How can you teach creativity?’ They want to know. Defiance fights with curiosity on their faces. ‘I can’t.’ I tell them. ‘I teach them to let themselves be creative.’” Julia Cameron Julia Cameron, author, screenwriter, playwright, teacher – her list of accomplishments is prodigious. I was at a yoga retreat in 2003 when someone mentioned…
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