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I may have written about my gratitude practice before, but as we head toward the end of another rocky calendar year and a complicated fall semester, it felt like it was a good idea to remember to find time to be grateful. Now, I fully admit my journaling practices (yes, that plural is correct) could…

While preparing for a workshop I’m facilitating this week, I pulled an oldie but a goodie from my bookshelf. In 1987 James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner published The Leadership Challenge in which they named the five practices of exemplary leadership. In 1999, they published a book focusing on one of those five practices, Encouraging the Heart:…

Unsure what to write about, I decided to play Newsletter Tarot this week. I have a deck of notecards and on each one is a lesson learned, an idea, or a story. Someday I might figure out a way to string them together into a book, but for now they sit in my desk drawer. Twice…

This week I went to a family reunion. At least that’s what it feels like to me. Officially, the event was a professional conference for TACUSPA (Texas Association of College and University Student Personnel Administrators). There are many reasons it feels like a reunion to me. There’s longevity – I first attended this conference thirty-nine years…

Many summers ago, I was working in the only real legal job I ever had. I was serving as a law clerk with a small outpost of a large legal firm. The lawyers were part of the labor and employment law of this firm. I hadn’t yet taken those courses though they proved to be…

I was wondering about the topic or this newsletter and found this week’s quote in Seth Godin’s daily, yes daily newsletter. (And I’m a faithful reader. It doesn’t hurt that he mostly writes short essays, but I also find tidbits regularly.) And then I found out I’m currently hanging out in one of the many resting…

I’ve had a couple of conversations about burnout this week. On the one hand it’s much too early in a normal academic year for so many people on campus to be so worn out. But of course, this is anything but a normal year. What’s a leader to do? I’ve heard of several situations where…

What stories are you telling these days? What stories are your campus leaders telling? When I entered the phrase “storytelling as leadership” into the Google search bar, it told me there were more than 71 million pages to review. In other words, the idea that leaders need to be able to tell a compelling story is…

It’s almost too much to take in right now, isn’t it? The amount of change and disruption we’re facing at home, in our organizations, and in the broader world is overwhelming. And for many of us one way to cope is to focus on the immediate, on what’s right in front of us. We ask…

Many years ago, one of my colleagues who served our campus as the Equal Employment Opportunity officer and who had spent her career in the world of Human Resources, told me, “I used to think there were only two things we didn’t have to tell people about their jobs – you don’t sleep on the…