Leadership
Understanding Budget
Today I decided to try a new way of coming up with a topic for the newsletter – Writing Topic Tarot. No it’s not really a thing, but it’s how I picked today’s topic. A few years ago, one of my ideas for a book was a series of essays about various lessons I have…
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 MoreCold, Hard Leadership
I was scheduled to teach my undergraduate leadership class at Trinity University the evening of September 12, 2001. I didn’t know whether or not students still needed to talk about what had happened the previous day, but I started the class as I usually did asking them about the leadership or lack thereof they had…
Read MoreSnow Days
I wasn’t certain that there would be a newsletter this week. We had intermittent power yesterday, but full power today. And sometimes we have connections to the internet and sometimes we don’t. We’ll see what happens. I grew up in Oklahoma City and we had real snow then. Not often, but I do have a memory of…
Read MorePublic and Private Leadership
On Monday, Seth Godin’s blog caught my attention. He was writing about famous conductors. What we see is an hour or two of them standing on stage “wear(ing) expensive clothes, mak(ing) dramatic gestures and receiving(ing) ovations.” We see the public version of leadership. But Godin follows that with a list of actions and behaviors that we…
Read MoreAccepting Responsibility
“Yes, I was throwing eggs, but I didn’t throw THAT egg.” said the graduate student who had been joyously riding around in a car with his friend lobbing eggs at cars and passersby. “That egg” was the one that had attracted the attention of a campus police officer. The student was convinced that he didn’t deserve a…
Read MoreTitle Waves
As you might imagine, I debated for a bit before I decided to wade into the topic of titles today. If you’ve been on social media the past few days or the op-ed section of many newspapers you know there has been, well, let’s call it a discussion, about the use of the title ‘doctor’…
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 MorePatience and Persistence
As of Monday, I began weaning myself out of the boot and I posted that news on Facebook asking people who have had that experience to share ideas and lessons learned. I got several messages of good will and lots of good advice. There were some definite groupings – Take things slowly, listen to what…
Read MoreChanging the World
Today I’d like to share a story with you of someone who is a contemporary of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and who broke ground and cracked class ceilings in her own way. Also born in 1933, S. G. P. was born in Oklahoma and spent her high school years on the family farm outside of Guthrie,…
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