Week Four Writing Assignment

Wow, week four already. Well, the good news regarding this week's writing assignment is that we only need to read one chapter from our text, Chapter 4 "Stamina."

My response to "Stamina":

For the most part I feel I do look after myself: I eat right, exercise, try to get enough sleep, and do what I can to keep my stress level down. I could do more, of course. Lately, in fact, I just haven't been getting enough exercise, but I probably do better than most people. And if I am sick and feel a doctor could make me better, I go (unlike Shackleton). If you will recall from my NP lecture last term, I am interested in living a long time so I try to take care of myself now so I will have more good years later in life.

As for taking care of others, here again I could do more but I do fairly well on the whole. As part of my job, I am responsible for social events for the ELP. We quite frequently have parties and other events to bring us together so we can relax and enjoy ourselves in ways that do not involve working. I believe that among the ICU faculty, the ELP parties are somewhat famous and others are envious of the good times and general good relations that we have.

I try to be attentive to my family and friends as well. As I live on campus, I can generally be home by 6:00 to help with dinner and take care of my kids until they go to bed at 8:00. Then I try to do something with my wife (usually watch a DVD or talk, or we each read). If I have work to do, like prepare for class or respond to blog entries, I do it after she has gone to bed. In the morning I get up early to help with breakfast and take care of the kids, and I take my daughter to school.

And "Summit Fever" is not a problem for me, even when I was a serious mountain climber. My philosophy when climbing was that the mountain would always be there. That is, if the weather was particularly bad or conditions particularly dangerous, you could always come back another time. I think this attitude keeps my stress level down too.

Finally, I do have a couple of good friends that I like to get together with and have a beer with and talk about work and life, and this seems to be very important for me, both for the human contact and for relieving stress.

What's my sentence?

As you know, we are each to think of a sentence for ourselves that encapsulates our life goal. I have thought about this deeply and come up with the following:

"He constantly strove to be a great teacher to his students, father to his children, and husband to his wife."

Maybe this does not seem so ambitious to you, but the reality for me is that doing this much is a real challenge. If I can go to bed each night thinking I was better today than yesterday in each of these categories, then I had a very good day.

I look forward to hearing from you your sentences.

Week Three Writing Assignment

For your Week Three Writing Assignment, choose to personally reflect upon either Chapter Two, "Symbolism and Personal Example" or Chapter Three, "Optimism and Reality." Read both chapters, as they are each important, but I personally found it easier to respond to the Expedition Log prompts in Chapter Three. 

My response:

Chapter 3, “Optimism and Reality” is an important one as optimism was one of Shackleton’s most noted characteristics. In addition to “You’ve damn well got to be optimistic” quoted in the text, Shackleton also once said, “Optimism is true moral courage.”

This second quotation is one that for years I have carried around in my head and try to live by. The word “moral” in this quotation suggests we have an obligation to be optimistic for the sake of those around us. This is true for me—as a teacher to my students, as a colleague to my peers, as a father to my family, as a friend to my friends. We have to believe that what we are doing is leading to something good, and, of course, such an attitude helps ensure that positive things happen. Perkins quotes Henry Ford (a famous American industrialist who started Ford Motor Company and many modern manufacturing techniques such as the assembly line): “Whether you think you can, or whether you think you can’t, you’re right” (qtd. in Perkins 43). The idea here is that our attitude (optimistic or pessimistic) directly affects what actually will happen.

It is also said that optimists, on average, live approximately seven years longer than pessimists.

So being an optimist is fundamental to my approach to life.

But it takes “courage” to be optimistic, and here, sometimes, I struggle. There are times when I lose my optimism, and I am not so good at getting it back. There are times—in my marriage, in my work (there are a lot of politics in the ELP), in the direction my life is taking—in which I lose my sunny optimism and find myself instead in a very dark place. Getting myself from the dark place back to the light takes some work. One thing I tell myself is that bad times are always followed by good times, and being older I have plenty of experiences that have proven this true. Another thing that helps me is a quotation from Lance Armstrong, the great bicycle racer (seven time Tour de France winner), who says, “Turn every negative into a positive.” The idea here is that negative experiences have to be viewed as opportunities, specifically opportunities to learn—about why you might be in conflict with someone else, about what caused you to fail in some activity and what you can do to improve, about how not to repeat the same mistake, etc. Because of our text, I am also interested in Martin Seligman (cited in Perkins 43), who founded the field of “Positive psychology” and is an expert on helping people become happier. To see more about him, please check out his bio-sketch, related links, and video at TED. I am currently reading a book of his called Authentic Happiness, which I have found enormously enlightening.

So that is me, and I look forward to you sharing your thoughts on how to deal with difficult situations in your life.

Dan Pink and Two Questions that can Change Your Life

As you will learn, I am a big fan of Dan Pink, an American author of several business related and personal development type books such as A Whole New Mind, Drive, and Johnny Bunko (in manga).

In Drive, Dan Pink suggests the following exercise:

Think of your life as a sentence. What's your sentence?

That is, when you die, how would you like your life to be summarized in just one sentence?

To see Dan's presentation of this idea, along with another, equally important question, see this great video clip.

Week Two Writing Assignment

Draw upon Chapter 1 “Vision and Quick Victories” to define your own Long-term vision and the Short-term Goals for getting there. Use the questions on pgs. 27 and 28 for ideas, but what you want to do is describe your hopes and dreams for the future, and the various steps along the way that will help you to achieve them.

As promised, I will do my best to do the same writing assignments as you.

In this case, as I consider a long-term vision and short-term goals, I would like to consider our course as an “organization,” with me as “leader,” and all of us together exploring terra incognita (unknown territory). Perhaps by me doing this you can get a better sense of what this course is intended to be and your part in it.

Long-term vision

Perkins talks about how Shackleton had to “be willing to find a ‘new mark’” (16) such as when he told his crew “So now we’ll go home” (16) when he lost his ship (and hopes of crossing Antarctica). This course, for me, is a new mark—I have abandoned the popular “Adventure Travel” course that I taught for many years in order to take an entirely new direction with this course.

My intention is to create a course that combines an interest in organizational development (how organizations and the people in them function, develop, manage change, etc) and such interrelated topics as leadership, negotiation, conflict resolution, etc. as outlined in the description and syllabus for the course. But these topics interlink with a wide variety of other social behavioral interests such as interpersonal communication, emotional and social intelligence, group dynamics, human motivation, etc. —all of which are also fascinating. The problem is that whole books have been written about each of these topics. It is a challenge knowing where to begin and what to include, while at the same time providing some sort of unifying theme for the course.

So…this course will offer a sampling of many of these aspects of human behavior in organizational settings, with an opportunity for you at the end (with your final presentations) to focus on an area of particular interest that you can present and share with the class. But to provide a unifying theme, we will focus on the topic of leadership throughout the course via our text and our blog entries.

Short-term goals

A big goal right now is getting all of us onboard with our blogs. By linking us all together we can then work as a team to share our thoughts, experiences, dreams, goals, etc. Thanks to the many of you who have already started your blogs and made such great initial entries.

Another, related goal, is to get a better sense of what each of you is thinking so that we can negotiate our way forward with this course based on your input.

Perkins mentions how Shackleton was able to “create engaging distractions”(26) to keep his crew motivated. I will try to do the same and I am already trying to think of ways to maintain your interest as we move forward. You can look forward to some chocolate-covered “snake eggs” as one such distraction.

This is enough for me for now, and I look forward to hearing from you.

Week One Writing Assignment

For this first writing assignment, please respond to the Expedition Log in the “Preface” to Leading at the Edge. My response is below:

I have been stretched to my limits numerous times: with relationships, with work, while traveling, etc.

But one situation in which I was absolutely stretched to my limits, both physically and mentally, was during a failed mountain climbing attempt in Antarctica (Nankyoku Tairiku). A team of three of us attempted to climb Mt. Erebus, which is about the same height as Mt. Fuji. Antarctica, however, is very remote, and an extremely cold place, so getting to the top of such a mountain in Antarctica is a great challenge. And we almost made it, but just before reaching the top a huge storm appeared out of nowhere and forced us to retreat to our tent lower on the mountain. This storm then raged for three days.

It was extremely cold, -35 degrees Celsius or so, and we suffered greatly.

But we survived.

What saved us?

First, we worked hard to ensure our survival. We moved our tent, twice, due to dangerous conditions, even though each time the snow was blowing so hard we could barely see more than a couple of meters in front of us. We forced ourselves to eat and to drink, as our bodies needed massive calories and liquids to keep from freezing to death. And we constantly attended to our tent, our clothing, and our equipment to ensure that everything was working properly.

Secondly, we believed in ourselves. All of us were experienced, and we had been through tough situations before. We knew what we needed to do, and never for a moment did we doubt our own survival.

Finally, we kept our sense of humor. Our situation was serious, but we were still able to make jokes and to laugh. We kept up our spirits by enjoying each others company and not letting the seriousness of the situation weigh too heavily on our minds.

Because we survived, I continue to believe that working hard, believing in oneself, and maintaining a sense of humor are the keys to getting through any tough situation.