GOOOOAAAL!

Goals change as you change. Goals should be reflective of your skill level and personal growth. Goals should keep you captivated and fully engage your talents and interests.



Excerpt from the: Putting Gears in the Dream Calendar

Live Free

The life of a dreamer is a life of freedom. Freedom to explore the far reaches of potential and talent. The entrapment of one’s spirit is often caused by an inability to dream and believe in unseen realities. Bound by the confines of the visible and tangible, people often succumb to the relentless pressure of conformity. The drudgery of daily routines, devoid of passion and personal connection slowly draw the magic out living.

Life’s mysteries degenerate into items of mere curiosity. Living the life of a dreamer, whose nostrils breath in the amorous scent of life, requires one to resist the call to relinquish one’s heart to cold conformity. The invocation of career and comfort are often used to subdue the unruly binding them inconsequential activities and patterns of thought. The dreamers are the freedom fighters, the revolutionaries who seek to live life on their terms.

Excerpt from the upcoming book, The 5 O'clock Coup

The Emboldened Champion
Where doth destiny lie, in the cathartic explosions of my pen? My mind’s eye sees the prize in which I strive. I must resist the tides of Boredom and Fashion. Enough about you, see through the distraction gain traction on the cherished dreams and wishes in your life. Rely upon the real and vivid. The auction of truth for shadows must end.

Excerpt from: A Chinese Kid Named Santiago, pg. 9

Play Your Game

Shape the business environment to compliment your strengths. The rhythm of one’s daily routine should reflect this. Strive to understand the complexities of personal style and proclivity. One must first understand oneself before one can understand how to utilize the environment to one’s advantage.

Book of Success: 3rd reflection

Fear creates the Phantoms in the Dark
The internal model in our minds and hearts fill in the gaps
that exist within communication. These paradigms are the
glasses through which we see the world. Operating from a
sense of deficiency and inadequacy paints a picture of a
hostile world in which everything is an offense. Fear, lack
of confidence and low self-esteem creates people who are
hypersensitive to the world around them, jumping at every shadow and darting from every rustle in the brush.

Book of Courage: pg.8

Randy Pausch Lecture: Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams

Servant Leadership

Leaders perhaps operate best when they seek to serve the needs of the people who serve the organization. In my view, one must take care to facilitate the growth and development of one’s employees, as it is one’s employees who are the face of the organization.

Servant leadership is built on the solid foundation of transformation, seeking to evolve the others into leaders as well. A servant leader is one 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).

As an educator, one makes a choice to facilitate the growth of others. The choice to educate is the choice to serve, a characteristic found within the paradigm of the servant leader (Greenleaf,1977).



References:

Cunningham, W. G., & Cordeiro, P. A. (1999). Educational Leadership: A
Problem-Based Approach (2nd ed.). New York: Allyn & Bacon.

Sendjaya,S. ,Sarros,J.(2002).Servant Leadership: Its Origins, Development,
and Application in Organizations. Journal of Leadership &
Organizational Studies,9(2),57-64.

Contemplation

Is it not the way if it is difficult? Is it not the truth if it is painful? For if the way is wide and the road easy does this manifest truth? One must think on these things when weighing the gravity of one’s choices.


Excerpt from: A Chinese Kid Named Santiago

Building Efficacy

Seperation of the Person and the Experience

In striving to learn new things one may encounter learning experiences in the form of failed attempts and setbacks. This is a natural occurrence as all achievements were first met with many unsuccessful attempts. In handling disappointment one must resist the temptation to internalize the experience.

You are separate from the circumstances which befall you. To truly understand this division enables one to withstand the growing pangs of growth and knowledge acquisition. One's worth as a person is not attached to an outcome, but rather to internal attributes.

The search for meaning and purpose in life is one of the major driving forces within the lives of individuals from all ages and eras. The search for uniqueness and of individuality leads one down the path of self-discovery. The process of self-discovery encompasses the trials of reflection and introspection, seeking to truly understand oneself amidst the backdrop of life and one’s internal experience.



Implied within the path of self-understanding is that for one to be truly faithful to the journey one would be required to evolve into a leader. Acknowledging one’s gifts is also an acknowledgment of their benefit to the world at large. Exercising one’s talent with conviction is also an exercise of one’s capacity for leadership. Assuming responsibility for one’s expression in the world and its impact upon self and others is a tremendous step down the path of leadership.

Sayings of Krishnamurti

Self-knowledge is not a thing to be bought in books, nor is it the outcome of a long painful practice and discipline, but it is awareness, from moment to moment, of every thought and feeling as it arises in relationship. Relationship is not on an abstract, ideological level but an actuality—the relationship with property, with people, and with ideas. Relationship implies existence and, as nothing can live in isolation, to be is to be related.

Our conflict is in relationship, at all the levels of our existence and the understanding of this relationship, completely and extensively, is the only real problem that each one has. This problem cannot be postponed nor be evaded. The avoidance of it only creates further conflict and misery; the escape from it only brings about thoughtlessness, which is exploited by the crafty and the ambitious.

My Thoughts on Vision

All great things endeavors, triumphs and victories start with a dream, a vision. What has stood out to me most in recent days has been just how important one’s vision is to achieving one’s goal. Fidelity of purpose and clear articulation of goals have been of the utmost importance to me as of late.

What I have found is that within articulation of purpose one will find the means by which success can be had. Clarity of vision, leads to clarity of means; an understanding of how something can be accomplished is dependent upon acknowledging a destination. I have come to understand to understand that clarity of vision is how the machinery behind the dream is built.

Time Management

Time is precious. How are you using it? Take a day to monitor how you spend your time. Write down everything you do, including dressing, eating, travel, relaxing in front of the TV, shopping for groceries, running to the library, picking up from the soccer practice. If you organize these tasks effectively, you may be amazed at how much available time you have.

As a student, it is helpful to look at your time management at TWO LEVELS.
A LONG TERM PLANNER helps you to see the BIG PICTURE of what you have to get done. Start with the big assignments, quizzes and exams. Use a monthly calendar and fill these in first.


Now, working backwards, fill in some preparation times which you will need in order to be ready for the big days.

Practices from Spiritual Direction that Deepen Civic Engagement

JoAnn Campbell, Minnesota Campus Compact

Journal of College & Character VOLUME VIII, NO. 1, November 2006

Students can benefit spiritually from their work in civic engagement and service learning if encouraged to appreciate the mystery involved in every human interaction, especially with people different from themselves. The ancient art of spiritual direction offers practices that can deepen reflection and integrate service activities with the students’ values and lived experiences.

The 2004 UCLA Higher Education Research Institute’s study of College Students’ Beliefs and Values found that 75% of current college students are "searching for meaning/purpose" in their lives (4). The principal authors, Alexander and Helen Astin, write that "higher education represents a critical focal point for responding to the question of how to balance the exterior and interior aspects of life more effectively" (iii).

I want to suggest that a key strategy for helping students balance the exterior and the interior is reflection, and that the act of reflecting can be strengthened or made more potent and powerful by borrowing techniques, stances, and practices from spiritual direction.

Building Efficacy
Conditions of Learning (R. Gagne)
tip.psychology.org

This theory stipulates that there are several different types or levels of learning. The significance of these classifications is that each different type requires different types of instruction. Gagne identifies five major categories of learning: verbal information, intellectual skills, cognitive strategies, motor skills and attitudes.

Different internal and external conditions are necessary for each type of learning. For example, for cognitive strategies to be learned, there must be a chance to practice developing new solutions to problems; to learn attitudes, the learner must be exposed to a credible role model or persuasive arguments.

Gagne suggests that learning tasks for intellectual skills can be organized in a hierarchy according to complexity: stimulus recognition, response generation, procedure following, use of terminology, discriminations, concept formation, rule application, and problem solving. The primary significance of the hierarchy is to identify prerequisites that should be completed to facilitate learning at each level. Prerequisites are identified by doing a task analysis of a learning/training task. Learning hierarchies provide a basis for the sequencing of instruction.

Learning is Power: The transformation of adult learners through education

Tech Teacher: Cut Through the Web Noise
RSS feeds help sort out the new from the mold.

by Geoff Butterfield

edutopia.org

published 6/19/2007

One problem with the Web: It's too darn big. Who has time to keep up with its immeasureable updates? You could spend all day trolling around online, looking for the freshest headlines and content on your favorite sites. Wouldn't it be nice if there were a way of gathering all the new things on frequently updated sites (like blogs, news feeds, or podcasts) and sending them out to you?

Hang onto your cowboy hat, because that's where Real Simple Syndication (RSS) comes in. Odds are you've seen the little orange button with either the letters RSS or XML, or sometimes a little radar-looking symbol, on at least one of your favorite Web sites (like, for instance, the Edutopia.org RSS Feed). The button means that the Web site offers its content as an RSS "feed," which is simply a list of new articles, usually with just a title and a short description. The little button is a link to that feed.

Subscribe to these feeds and these sites will get in contact with you electronically when they offer new content.

Authors@Google: Daniel Goleman
Daniel Goleman discusses his book "Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships" as a part of the Authors@Google series.

An E-lightened Moment
Realities and Illusions

Move past setback and illusion of futility. This is not you....

You are a manifestation of your greatest reality. Fear no challenge, worthy of it all, challenges befall in order to prepare. For where else can the mettle in one's core be found?

Profound thoughts arise out of feeling of deficit. Success is always held at the cusp of defeat. Find yourself striving among turmoil and activity concerned not with possibility of fatality.

For the lessons of the path have always been the prize.

-R.L Adams

Teachers who get police training could get extra pay, carry guns
By Emily Richmond Las Vegas Sun

A proposal that Nevada teachers be allowed to carry concealed weapons garnered a lot of notoriety but little traction among state lawmakers this year. Now comes this idea: Give bonus pay to teachers - from kindergarten to college - who would be trained and armed as reserve school police officers.

Faculty-turned-campus cops would supplement the thin ranks of campus police and be in position to respond quickly to campus emergencies, the two champions of the idea say.
Others worry about allowing teachers to be put in that kind of position.