With one third of my year-long program completed, our cohort has been doing a lot of reflecting on what we’ve seen, learned, and applied. At the end of a week together in Hawai’i, we focused on some very real leadership challenges we’ve faced in a fragmented, polarized world, as well as how to encourage and empower others to keep moving forward toward a common goal.
As my climate change leadership program continues, we’re exploring important topics about who gets to make decisions, what approaches might be effective, and why people might be resistant to change. During our first four months of virtual sessions, I’ve been thrilled to see themes from my own work come up in discussions that are relevant across our cohort, whether we’re talking about theory or practice.
It’s been a long year, and I was feeling too burned out for resolutions (of which I usually make at least 10). But what if I made a resolution to have more fun… and backed it up with my own data on how to do that… and employed a color-coded spreadsheet? I’m embarking on something I’ve never done before: committing to one single resolution.
My cohort of climate leaders has already met a few times to kick off our year together in the Indo-Pacific Leadership Lab. I am thrilled and honored to be part of such an incredible group of people, and I’m already wrestling with some difficult concepts – notably that I can’t solve climate change on my own, and that we won’t solve it in our lifetime.
One thing we tend to skip over when organizing our lives is evaluating our actions to see what’s working and what isn’t – which is arguably as important as the planning stage! I had to learn that evaluation wasn’t about beating myself up for not getting everything finished, but rather about recognizing what small steps I took that day to work toward my goals.
When a friend asked me specifics about how I maximize my productivity, I laughed. I also started to plan this blog series to share what has worked well for me as I continue to learn. Your mileage may vary with planners and scheduling apps, but the real path to success appears to be setting goals and continually questioning what does or doesn’t support them.
“Work smarter, not harder” is a bit of a misnomer, as it is frequently interpreted as a call to accomplish existing tasks more efficiently. What we should be doing instead is questioning what our goals are and what the best methods of achieving them are. It’s likely that there is a disconnect between what we spend our time doing and what we’re actually trying to accomplish.
Heading into the new fiscal year at work, and heading out of a particularly hectic spring, I wanted to be more intentional about building some good habits around optimizing my time and defending my boundaries. Fortunately I happened upon several great podcast episodes on a recent drive, starting with the best possible way to become more efficient: thinking about what you’re trying to accomplish.
Last month I had the pleasure of attending a drag brunch at a local brewery. The event received some backlash from the local community, which created a lot of media buzz. While the threats ultimately amounted to nothing, that is not always the case. While opposition to the LGBTQ community seems to be on the rise, our actions can play a big role in combating bigotry.
We’ve made it through another Lent, and on this Easter morning, many are celebrating the end of a period of fasting. I am less celebratory as I consider how to move forward from a digital detox that I (surprisingly) loved. I undertook this project because I wanted to make a change, and I have some ideas on how to build a healthier relationship with the digital world.