Keith Ferazzi: How to Expand Your Network

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Using social media to drive knowledge management

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ILA Memories

My time at the International Leadership Conference in Boston was fantastic! I had a great time and enjoyed representing the University of Phoenix, School of Advanced Studies. My doctoral research was well received and I learned much from the experience.

Deeply Felt

"Everything that the human race has done and thought is concerned with the satisfaction of deeply felt needs and the assuagement of pain. Feeling and longing are the motive force behind all human endeavor and human creation, in however exalted a guise the latter may present themselves to us".

Albert Einstein

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The Influence of Suggestion

All suggestions take effect sooner or later. We develop our good or bad life according to our constant suggestion.

The following are the forms of suggestion:

1. Physical Suggestion   (experiences of the physical body and its movements)
2. Suggestions of Senses ( perceptions of hearing, sight, sound, taste, touch)
3. Verbal Suggestion (vocal repetition of ideas and thoughts)
4. Mental Suggestion ( suggestion repeated only in the mind)
5. Environmental Suggestion (influences of the subjective and objective realms)
6. Autosuggestion (spontaneous self-suggestion that can take any suggestion form)

-Rammurti Mishra, M.D. (Fundamentals of Yoga)


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"The greatest power of nature is the power of suggestion. It is as old as nature and as powerful as nature. We are constantly moving every moment by our suggestion. First we think, then we do. First we plan, then we accomplish that plan".

Rammurti Mishira, M.D.

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The roles we take on can bring out our talents and can nurture our reinvention.

-Warren Bennis

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Comfort within Discomfort

I do not have to be comfortable with the process of  peronal development and that is ok. I am realizing that basing my actions upon how I subjectively feel about them can lead to limitations in my growth. Pleasure and pain though important concepts to consider should not be the sole determining factor regarding my decisions. There has to be a more encompassing intelligence upon which to guide my actions. My exploration into Education and Yoga is helping me to be ok with my path and practice. I am where I need to be. The barrage of constant self-evaluation and calculation of progress can take me away from being “present” if I let it. Presence in practice and action is essential to personal advancement.


When I am not present, I can feel it immediately in my training. My sessions start rough, I am not able to feel as deep or as smooth as I had desired. When these moments occur, an instant litany of judgments soon populates my awareness precluding any chance for me to engage. Even now as I document these experiences, the words seem pre-planned and calculated not really expressing how I feel in the truest sense.

Honesty is the root of embracing life and practice more fully. I am learning that fear prevents people from being honest with themselves about who they are, what they want etc. Perhaps this is caused by a fear of discomfort and pain. If one could tackle discomfort, render it helpless to the point where it no longer held its sway, what great things could be accomplished?


“There is nothing to fear if you refuse to be afraid”.
- Ghandi

Howard Gardner of The Multiple Intelligence Theory

The Art of Coaching in Business

John Wooden: Coaching for people, not points

Practice

Thoughts are controlled by practice and detachment. Practice is a continual effort to master thought waves of the mind. Practice becomes firmly rooted when cultivated uninterruptedly over a long time with devotion and skill.

- Patanjali Yoga Sutras (1.1 - 1.4)

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Stronger

Do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men.


John F. Kennedy

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Relaxation and Breathing with Rodney Yee

  Beginning of My Practice

I never intended to walk the path of yoga. I picked up the Heart of Yoga book by T.K.V Desikachar, a chance and random occurrence, and poured through the book's contents. I was amazed by what I read. I never realized the transformative potential the discipline of Yoga held. At the writing of this journal entry, I am 6 months into my focused use of Yoga. It is strange but I am excited about the new prospects that are emerging because of this practice. Already I am seeing a subtle difference in the manner life opens itself to me. I feel a sense of synchronicity between my goals, the person I am becoming and the manifesting events of my life. I feel as if I do not have to try as hard to engage in the authentic expression of myself.

In the Heart of Yoga, Desikachar mentions that one can witness the evolution of one’s practice by observing the state of one’s relationships. Desikachar elaborates that a person will grow in the level of engagement and harmony experienced with other people. The changes I have noticed in my own personal interactions both professionally and personally mirror this statement.

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Mind & Body

I never knew the encompassing nature of Yoga. I had always thought of it as a supplementary and soft practice used to support another discipline. I have been researching the practice and now find it to be much broader than I had initially thought. I see in Yoga the potential to bridge the gap between physical and mental performance. The art form sets a platform for the practitioner to develop his or her human potential to a greater degree, creating synergy between mental and physical competencies.

What I am also interested in is the enhanced state of self awareness that Yoga cultivates. An awareness that helps a person address flaws and shortcomings previously outside of concious awareness. With awareness comes the ability to maximize areas of talent removing self-defeating barriers that limits expression.


"Yoga cannot guarantee us this or that particular benefit if we practice diligently. Yoga is not a recipe for less suffering, though it can offer us help in changing our attitude so that we have less avidya (misperception) and therefore greater freedom from dukha" (suffering).

-Desikachar

What the Next Administration Can Do to Address the Skills Sh

Geoffrey Canada interviewed by Julian Bond: Explorations in Black Leade...

Using Assessment to Improve Instruction

Bennington president Liz Coleman delivers a call-to-arms for radical reform in higher education. Bucking the trend to push students toward increasingly narrow areas of study, she proposes a truly cross-disciplinary education -- one that dynamically combines all areas of study to address the great problems of our day.

Patrick Awuah on educating leaders | Video on TED.com

Patrick Awuah makes the case that a liberal arts education is critical to forming true leaders.

Education scientist Sugata Mitra tackles one of the greatest problems of education -- the best teachers and schools don't exist where they're needed most. In a series of real-life experiments from New Delhi to South Africa to Italy, he gave kids self-supervised access to the web and saw results that could revolutionize how we think about teaching.

Values

Break the mentality of utility when viewing your values and principles. They are not to be used just to open up once inaccessible doors or to take us to places we never been before. They are not a set of cars keys, but rather a means for us to remain true to who we are. Creating for us a sense of peace.

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Living

The art of living lies less in eliminating our troubles than in growing with them.

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Get Involved

If every person with moral reservations about power refused to exercise it, power would not cease to exist. Rather, it would be exercised only by those people who lack moral reservations about it. The result would be more abuses of power than exist today, and those who refused to exercise power on moral grounds would be partially responsible. Thus, the refusal to exercise power because of its corrupting potential is itself an unethical exercise of power.

 

 

Frances C. Fowler

Day

Enjoying the day with family.

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The Basic Unit

The basic unit of goal attainment is awareness. Subjective and objective worlds, the realms of dreams and reality needs to be explored. A constant relationship with life must be established for one to harvest potential.

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Breaking the Mold

We do not have to be anything. The limiting walls of self-concept wall us off from true engagement with the world. Our urge is to preserve notions of self, the very urge that constrain us to pre-programmed patterns of behavior and ways of being. People and events are not viewed based on their own merit, but rather as accomplices in our charades of identity and self-preservation. The consequences of this limiting behavior are uncomfortable states of one-dimensional inauthentic interactions.

 

 

Servant Leadership

Servant leadership is built on the solid foundation of transformation, seeking to evolve the layperson into a leader as well. A servant leader is a leader whom operates guided by an internal compass of ethical judgment. Greenleaf spoke of servant leaders as being characterized by virtuous distinction. “A servant leader’s ability to lead with integrity depends on his or her skills for withdrawal and action, listening and persuasion, practical goal setting and intuitive prescience. The focus is on goals, success, learning, and assisting”. (Cunningham, Cordeiro ,1999,pg.196).

Excerpt: Way of the E-lightened Mind

“...I feel that the period will sooner or later arrive when I must abandon life and reason together, in some struggle with the grim phantasm, FEAR.”
-Poe

Fear is the foe of a thousand lives and shapes for it
manifests in our lives in so many expected and unexpected
ways. The greatest accomplishments the world has ever
seen are the products of people who have conquered their
fears. Within all endeavors, a decisive moment arises, a
moment when a person must come face to face with their
deepest fears.
 
Excerpt: 4 Steps to Conquer

Concentrate

The first law of success...is concentration: to bend all the energies to one point, and to go directly to that point, looking neither to the right nor to the left.

- William Matthews

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Point to ponder

Does the type of encouragement desired vary from a person who is a high achiever and a person who is not?

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With Love

Accomplishments of note can only be attained with Love.

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Plan and Be Fearless

Plan your vision and execute. Are roadblocks really roadblocks? Or perhaps it is fear in disguise? Fear clouds judgement and causes one to base actions on false premises.

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D’Amato on Fear

CUS D’AMATO TALKS ABOUT FEAR
Posted by MMATraining.com Staff

Cus with Tyson in the 80s


Fighters are the most exposed athletes in the world. During a fight, the crowd observes every twitch and movement. Still, spectators rarely see fear in a quality fighter. “That,” says D’Amato, “is because the fighter has mastered his emotions to the extent that he can conceal and control them.”

But whatever a fighter says, the fear is there. It never goes away. He just learns to live with it. “And the truth is,” D’Amato continues, “fear is an aspect to a fighter. It makes him move faster, be quicker and more alert.

Heroes and cowards feel exactly the same fear. Heroes just react to it differently. On the morning of a fight, a boxer wakes up and says, ‘How can I fight? I didn’t sleep at all last night.’ What he has to realize is, the other guy didn’t sleep either. Later, as the fighter walks toward the ring, his feet want to walk in the opposite direction. He’s asking himself how he got into this mess. He climbs the stairs into the ring, and it’s like going to the guillotine.

Maybe he looks at the other fighter, and sees by the way he’s loosening up that his opponent is experienced, strong, very confident. Then when the opponent takes off his robe, he’s got big bulging muscles. What the fighter has to realize,” concludes D’Amato, “is that he’s got exactly the same effect on his opponent, only he doesn’t know it. And when the bell rings, instead of facing a monster built up by the imagination, he’s simply up against another fighter.”

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Generous

Be generous with your practice. Do not skimp on the investment you make into anything you classify as "your craft". Generosity is the root of competency and prosperity.

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Stop and Listen

Look around, there are sources of strength everywhere. Stop and become aware. Aware to the subtle presence of opportunity that lies just beneath the surface. Hidden by the loud clamor of the obvious.

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Strength in Diversity

The economic situation forced companies and workplace learning and performance professionals to focus on improving performance--not just an employee's poor, adequate, or superior performance in the workplace, but also an organization's vision about talent management, human and environmental sustainability, and the work environment.

The trend, a move toward an organizational approach to performance, examines the health of the whole organization, including the work, the worker, and the workplace, to find where it is weak and not performing. The most successful companies during this recession aligned people, processes, and systems to effectively manage their overall performance.

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Try Harder

Continuous effort-not strength or intelligence-is the key to unlocking our potential.

Winston Churchill

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Let Go

Most of our energy goes into upholding our importance. If we were capable of losing some of that importance, two extraordinary things would happen to us. One, we would free our energy from trying to maintain the illusory idea of grandeur; and two, we would provide ourselves with enough energy to catch a glimpse of the actual grandeur of the universe.

Carlos Castaneda

Learning in a Tough Economy

The economic situation forced companies and workplace learning and performance professionals to focus on improving performance--not just an employee's poor, adequate, or superior performance in the workplace, but also an organization's vision about talent management, human and environmental sustainability, and the work environment.

The trend, a move toward an organizational approach to performance, examines the health of the whole organization, including the work, the worker, and the workplace, to find where it is weak and not performing. The most successful companies during this recession aligned people, processes, and systems to effectively manage their overall performance.

Source:
ASTD.org

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Refusal

There would be nothing to frighten you if you refused to be afraid.

-Ghandi

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Education, Experience and the Cultivation of Human Agency

Education is an outgrowth of what a given society views the nature of the world to be. The defining characteristics of any academic system are merely a reflection of society's paradigm of itself and its neighbors. A belief in the personal capacity of people and commitment to embracing human agency is also an outgrowth of paradigm. Curriculum built upon the belief in human capacity will challenge learners to engage the world in a meaningful fashion. A "curriculum of belief" will value the ideas and insights of learners and use them as catalysts for further student growth and evolution. A "curriculum of belief" is a pedagogy firmly committed to the notion that learners possess the capacity to assess reality for themselves taking responsibility for where their path to discovery takes them.

 

 

Excerpt:

Adams, R (2008) Education, Experience and the Cultivation of Human Agency.

Question Thinking™

is actually a theory that posits that thinking occurs as an internal question-and-answer process. What people typically think of as statements are actually answers to questions that they’ve asked themselves. That links questions and statements, which are the two parts of language, in relation to each other.

If you think of a statement as an answer to a question, then it starts to get very important and interesting to notice what questions are being asked. Because questions basically program and direct how we think, feel, behave,relate, and even the results and outcomes we get.

-Marilee Adams

Source: ASTD.Org

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Difficulty

It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that things are difficult.

Seneca

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Career Development

"Traditional images of achievement do not capture today's more complex career development realities. Approaching career development as a long-distance expedition can help professionals in addressing the strenuous challenges they face, in seeing that a career can be built in many ways, and in taking a long-term view of their journeys. Skills are like muscles, self-efficacy is like sturdy boots, advancement how-to's are like maps, and mentors are like trail guides. Among the tasks each hiker faces are selecting destinations, navigating through rough terrain and weather, and balancing their packs. To further their hikers' resilience, departments should pay more attention to the career development ecology, including improving access to qualified trail guides and to alternate paths".

 

Source:

Bickel, J. (2009). Career development as a long-distance hike. Journal Of General Internal Medicine, 24(1), 118-121.

Small

Life shinks without Love.

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Mindfulness in the Workplace

Mindfulness will be like the introduction of seat belts in cars; at first no one thought they were important and now they are a safety requirement. Mindfulness may become the seat belt of mental health and one day it will be taught in schools for all people to practice.

-Diana Winston, Director, Mindful Awareness ResearchCenter, UCLA

Dhiman, S. (2009). Mindfulness in Life and Leadership: An Exploratory Survey. Interbeing, 3(1), 55-80.

Mind Your Emotions

...emotions evolved as signaling systems that need to be sensitive to environmental contingencies. Failure to switch off emotion is due to the activation of mental representations of present, past, and future that are created independently of external contingencies. Mindfulness training can be seen as one way to teach people to discriminate such “simulations” from objects and contingencies as they actually are.

Source:
Williams, J. (2010). Mindfulness and psychological process. Emotion, 10(1), 1-7.

Duality

At some point you will play both the hero and the villain keep your heart.

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Love

Love drives achievement.

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Created

Limitations to achievement are shaped by our dominant thoughts and reinforced by our emotions.

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Context is King

The manner in how we view life experiences is everything. Our views can either confine us or free us.

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Lessons

There is nothing wrong with falling short of a goal. Everything is a means through bringing about creative action. The challenge is in not letting resistance and denial restrict the flow.

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Self Talk

In learning new things internal criticism or negative self talk will diminish the quality of execution.

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Limitation

Fear limits creative action and restricts the possibilities of personal expression.

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Question

What do you love more than your own comfort?

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Produce but do not possess.
Advance without dominating.
These are called Subtle Powers.

Tao Te Ching no. 10

No printed word, nor spoken plea can teach young minds what they should be. Not all the books on all the shelves – but what the teachers are themselves.


Rudyard Kipling

Practice

Abhyasa is unconditional. It is the dedicated, unswavering application to what you believe in...I do believe Abhyasa is not something we earn or achieve through force of will; rather it is an innate human capacity that we awaken through practice, through our willingness.

Rolf Gates (Meditations from the Mat)

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Bold Action

In Harvard professor John Kotter’s book, A Sense of Urgency, he contends that a “winning strategy combines analytically sound, ambitious but logical goals with methods that help people experience new, often very ambitious goals, as exciting, meaningful, and uplifting—creating a deeply felt determination to move, make it happen, and win, now.” In other words, not all change strategies are created equal. And a good change strategy is not good enough if it isn’t supported by those whom it affects.

Source:
Astd.org

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Sometimes

Sometimes what's needed is to sit in silence and seperate from self.

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My vision

My ultimate goal is to create learning engagements from which people can create professional and personal success. Educational experiences that challenge people in a holistic way, touching upon all areas of human competency is critical for creating lasting success. What good is it to learn how to be a leader without also learning how to be a better person? How well can I truly manage others if I cannot first manage myself? The compartmentalization of life is an illusion that compromises goal attainment if not addressed. What one does, in one area of life can and will influence how one performs in another. The only solution is to challenge oneself to grow in all areas of life.

Emotion is the seed of decision

It is 9:46 PM on a Saturday night and I am working on a paper on self-reflection. ESPN highlights flash in the background as I am just trying to make sense of this panorama of stimuli. Something I found to be interesting in my research was that true reflection touches upon elements of emotion. Contemplating upon the direction of our lives and even the premise upon which we create our worlds is characteristic of deep thought. How we feel about the many aspects of life are the bricks and mortar of our reality. I have never really contemplated how my emotions either facilitated my growth or imprisoned me to limiting circumstances. I have issued a challenge to myself to begin this process.

A Carl Rogers Insight

I want to talk about learning. But not the lifeless, sterile, futile, quickly forgotten stuff that is crammed in to the mind of the poor helpless individual tied into his seat by ironclad bonds  of conformity! I am talking about LEARNING - the insatiable curiosity that drives the adolescent boy to absorb everything he can see or hear or read about gasoline engines in order to improve the efficiency and speed of his 'cruiser'. I am talking about the student who says, "I am discovering, drawing in from the outside, and making that which is drawn in a real part of me." I am talking about any learning in which the experience of the learner progresses along this line: "No, no, that's not what I want"; "Wait! This is closer to what I am interested in, what I need"; "Ah, here it is! Now I'm grasping and comprehending what I need and what I want to know!" Carl Rogers 1983: 18-19

The Catalyst

Education is a tool, a catalyst upon which a learner can evolve capability and vision into higher levels of effectiveness. "Personal mastery is the discipline of continually clarifying and deepening our personal vision, of focusing our energies, of developing patience, and of seeing reality objectively" (Senge, 2000, pg. 17). Learning curriculum, which emphasizes holistic growth, through a focus on the development of subjective understandings and interpersonal interaction, is most effective in accomplishing this end. Education is a mirror by which one can reflect upon the internal and external worlds in which one is immersed. Learning curriculum should encourage a balance between all parts of a learner's experience, as development in one area nurtures the growth in another.

Motives for learning

'Ideally', Jerome Bruner writes, interest in the material to be learned is the best stimulus to learning, rather than such external goals as grades or later competitive advantage' (ibid.: 14). In an age of increasing spectatorship, 'motives for learning must be kept from going passive... they must be based as much as possible upon the arousal of interest in what there is be learned, and they must be kept broad and diverse in expression' (ibid.: 80).

Source:
http://infed.org/thinkers/bruner.htm

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Employees Are Full of Feedback

March 13, 2010 6:10:00 PM
TD Editorial Staff
ASTD.org

If you have a suggestion to make in the workplace, do you make it or do you keep your mouth shut? Many people take advantage of their right to express themselves.

Fifty-seven percent of employees say they regularly make suggestions in the workplace, according to a survey by Right Management. In fact, 27 percent of employees report that they make more than 20 suggestions per year. Another 30 percent made at least 10 suggestions per year. Only 6 percent made no suggestions at all.

The poll, which was conducted on LinkedIn and included 614 participants from all over North America, found that the most vocal employees are those in management and C-level executives.

Other interesting findings were that number of suggestions does not vary by company size and sales people were the most likely to make suggestions at 50 percent followed by those in HR at 28 percent. In addition, workers ages 55 and over were more likely to make 10 or more suggestions at 76 percent as compared to their colleagues ages 25 to 34 at 51 percent. Women, at 61 percent, were also likely to make 10 or more suggestions as compared to men, at 46 percent.

"Our findings suggest a surprising number of employees go the extra mile by making suggestions in the workplace," says Deborah Schroeder-Saulnier, senior vice president of global solutions at Right Management. "At the same time, however, in our experience there is little evidence that companies really listen to employee suggestions—or, more important, try to benefit from their perspective and enthusiasm."

She advises that companies should not only listen to their employees, but make sure their ideas are acknowledged and acted upon.

Businesses need to remember that communication is a two-way street.

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Do Not Fret

Even the saintly were hated. Just do good work.

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The Disappearing Career Discussion

March 29, 2010 10:33:00 AM
TD Editorial Staff
ASTD.org

According to a recent survey by Right Management, more than one-third of all employees (37 percent) never discuss their career development with their managers and another 30 percent have that discussion just once a year.

Why are employees so hesitant to talk about their career aspirations with their managers? Is it because they are too busy to think about their future or do they lack the skills to ask the right questions?

Although individuals should take the responsibility to manage their own careers, managers should reach out to employees to discussion career objectives because that is a key step in keeping employees engaged in the workplace.

Are your managers equipped with the skills to discuss an employee's strengths, growth opportunities, and developmental needs? If not, do you have a strategy for how to teach those skills to your organization's managers?

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Education is life

The notion of learning through life is hardly new, as a glance at Plato's Republic reveals. However, with the development of a self-consciously 'adult education' came the view that education should be lifelong. In what Waller (1956: 22) describes as a report without parallel, the Adult Education Committee of the British Ministry of Reconstruction concluded:

(A)dult education must not be regarded as a luxury for a few exceptional persons here and there, nor as a thing which concerns only a short span of early manhood, but that adult education is a permanent national necessity, an inseparable aspect of citizenship, and therefore should be both universal and lifelong. (1919: 55)

Infed.org
http://infed.org/lifelonglearning/b-life.htm

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paralysis

To demand perfection is to deny your ordinary and universal humanity, as though you would be better off without it.

-Bayles (Art & Fear)

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mirror

We have meet the enemy and he is us.

-Pogo

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fast and slow

The artist's life is frustrating not because the passage is slow, but because he imagines it to be fast.

-Bayles (Art and Fear)

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Reality of things

Vision is always ahead of execution.

-Bayles

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Be

Be your own light.

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no shame

No shame in being wrong. Better to live with conviction and err than to flounder about in doubt.

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thought...

Life is a series of commitments.

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...

Our time eventually must end. Do work of a quality that will allow you to transcend. Make the intention.

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Acceptance

It's easy to accept responsibility when things are good. Accepting your role when things are not good is a different story. Learning to do this. Can't say I have this perfected. No change can happen until this occurs.

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reflection in action

In each instance, the practitioner allows himself to experience surprise, puzzlement, or confusion in a situation which he finds uncertain or unique. He reflects on the phenomena before him, and on the prior understandings which have been implicit in his behavior. He carries out an experiment which serves to generate both a new understanding of the phenomena and a change in the situation.... He does not keep means and ends separate, but defines them interactively as he frames a problematic situation. He does not separate thinking from doing... Because his experimenting is a kind of action, implementation is built into his inquiry. (Schön 1983: 69)

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earn it

Competency is the foundation upon which authenticity stands.

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clarity

Journaling challenges people to explain their world with a deep clarity. Having a clear vision contibutes to goal attainment. Painting the picture with emotion is essential. Emotion clarifies the priority level of a goal. Logical decision-making is about navigating through competing priorities.

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with feeling...

Emotions are how we make sense of the world. The under current of logic are emotions. Journaling activities that make use of intellectual reflection and emotional discourse perhaps holds the greatest potential for personal growth.

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realest thing i ever wrote...

Back to reality tomorrow. Great insights were attained from the residency. Most important was the need to be authentic. For me this realness keeps a person from being swept away by the tides of fad and fashion. Living a life of coviction is a path requiring courage. James Baldwin once said to be commited is to be in danger. This resonates with me. I would add that a person living a life of authencity will be required to believe in their path and in themselves even when no one else does.
Authenticity demands a person to proactively act in accordance with his or her values, without compromise.

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a challenge...

I was challenged to find my authentic voice. Dr. Lobell's lecture was stirring requiring action on my part. It is not enough to simply go through life fitting in and adhering to the images we are supposed to be. Even the "rebel" can be an image...what I find is needed is to reflect on who we are and commit to living it.

Authenticity requires a vigilant self-awareness and the courage to stand alone. Being ever willing to sacrifice convienience for conviction.

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reflection

My research is about human reflection and if this activity cultivates a deeper level of human angency. Early findings would indicate that it does. There is a power that comes about as result of reflecting upon goals,actions and ones emotions. The act of journaling offers one avenue to assess the assumptions and pardigms which govern our lives. What happens to us is a result of how we think and what we think. Often times this thought process is invisible to us unless we reflect upon these things.

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teach

Walking through the Phoenix art museum. The art of Ansel Adams moves me to dream. The life of an artist and educator reminds me of the importance of emersing oneself in the path. This is true for any discipline.

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do it...

Learn to sacrifice. Without the willingness to do this there is no strength.

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Today was a good day....

So much better to open up and spend time with friends. You cannot embrace the world by yourself.

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Silence

We are held equally accountable by our moments of silence as we are by our words. Inappropriate silence degrades your light.....

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Rough

Retreating from discomfort accomplishes little. The pang of boundary walls will again force you to confront that which bars your growth. No delusion should exist that you can somehow avoid overcoming your limitations.

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Examination

I have become more aware of the fact that our habits are the bricks and mortar of our lives. We can't change until our habits do. This process may feel uncomfortable as we get to the work of reprogramming behavioral patterns.

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Today

Today was the first day of my doctoral program's third year residency. I was struck by discourse that occured. We discussed leadership and the challenges one faces in maintaining a balanced perspective. This can only occur through reflective action.

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Reflection on Purpose


Purpose is a crucial component of success, for it permeates every activity a person engages in. Even the mundane tasks a person must engage in are ascribed a compelling importance to a person who believes in a purpose. I was watching Fox Sports Arizona the other day and it was highlighting University of Arizona basketball coach Sean Miller. I was impressed by his approach to coaching and building a successful program.


The thing that stood out to me the most was his definite sense of purpose. The clarity Sean had was impressive. It is clear that belief in your purpose cannot be something luke-warm. It is not something that can be intellectualized with cold calculation. Purpose…for it to be a force of compelling transformation must be charged with emotional energy. An energy strong enough to transcend the barriers of doubt, fear, fatigue, opposition, etc.

Un
Into the Maelstrom!

Until one is willing to step out into the uncertain reality, supported only by the dogged strength of one's will and courage…

Until one is willing to brave the tumultuous tides of life's temperamental disposition…

 Until one is just as willing to live with defeat as one is with victory….

ONe Will Not be Free

For freedom requires something much deeper than acknowledging current conditions and circumstance…

Freedom requires the determination to transcend them…

You are bigger than that

You are not what befalls you…

Me We

-Ali

Power of the Written Word

I am sitting at my favorite café, reggae dub mixes pulsating through my head phones. I find it easier to write listening to its slow, melodic grooves as opposed to lyric laden melodies. Anyway I have been doing a bit of reflection since I made a brief change in my dissertation focus. My area of investigation will be the written word and the connection this has on a learners' overall academic success.

For the past few days I have been researching the power of journaling. As a person who enjoys poetry and prose I have always had an appreciation about the power of words. I have viewed this activity from the perspective of the writer's message and the power contained in the words. The influence of the written word on the reader is fascinating. However what is the impact of the written word on the author?

This monumental question was accentuated by the deep rumbling drums of King Tubby

"Come Down Me Selecta!"

Alright then…so I have never viewed writing as being a transformative process for the author. My research has really challenged my thinking on this issue. Interesting thing is that it seems the power behind writing is in the reflection. The act of composing a piece of literary work challenges a person to think about his or her lived experiences. Thinking and writing about the experiences in our lives, actively engages our minds, challenging us to make concrete assessments about how we feel about our lived realities and the influence it has on us.

This process tends to make writing a cathartic release as internal questions and existential concerns are given voice. This does not happen as frequently as one might think. This reflective process is important as submerged under the surface of our conscious thought; life experiences form the subjective reality which dictates the direction of our lives.

For me this investigation will allow me to understand the role writing has in academic success. However from a much broader context this investigation will allow me to understand the role writing plays in human empowerment. This is an incredibly broad and grandiose aspiration, yet I say….."Why Not?" LOL

I am tired…time to hit the gym and recharge a bit. I have a long process ahead of me.