Ken's Response to Writing Assignment #2

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 hope to explore his works further.

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

Ken's response to Writing Assignment #1

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 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, team building, 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 us all onboard with our blogs. I can then link us all together so we can work as a team sharing with each other our thoughts, dreams, goals, etc. Thanks to the many of you who have already sent me your blog addresses.

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. I hope our chocolate-covered almond “snake eggs” served as such a distraction. I will search for more as we move forward.

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

Getting started is hard to do!

Hi members of The Dynamic You,

Sorry for this blog being so slow to get off the ground. But this is new for me, blogging, and it took some time for me to get up the courage to get on Blogger and actually try to make a course blog. The dream, and I will need your support to realize it, will be for all of us to have blogs and for me to be able to post the links to your blogs here. This way we can all see what each of us thinks about a number of issues that will come up in this class, most of which will be related to our course text, Leading at the Edge.

This blog is very primitive now, but I hope for it to evolve as we learn from each other what is possible with blogging.

So, what you need to do is go to Blogger, make your own blog, and send me the link. Then I can post your link and we can start communicating our thoughts to each other through our blogs.

Ken