Do Yourself Proud

In my class, we spent the last few weeks learning about the concept of a "personal brand".  Students have gone through a variety of lessons and exercises designed to help them come to a greater realization of what attributes they possess as a student and a member of this community, and how to translate that into an intention about their future.  Just to make the context clear, these are high school students at a school with a college preparatory curriculum. One of the activities was borrowed from the business world, asking students to perform a gap analysis.  In our version of gap analysis, students were asked to come up with five words that describe themselves.  They had to also ask ten people that know them to supply them with five words that describe the student.  Finally, the student would compare their self-created "profile" to the 50 words supplied by their friends and family.  A high level of agreement between those two sources of information sugge...

How many of you believe that you are capable of multitasking?  For the sake of this post, we will define multitasking as concomitant attention to two or more tasks or actions.  Agreed?  Great. So back to the hands?  50%?  75% of you?  Try less than 5%.  In fact, researcher David Strayer   of the University of Utah believes that as few as 2% of the population are what he terms a supertasker - those people who thrive in environments that require them to attend to multiple tasks in the same time window. So what does that mean for the rest of us, as we drive, eat a breakfast sandwich, listen to the forecast on the radio, and text Mom to say we are sorry we haven't called in a while?  Doesn't that count?? Yes, and no.  Part of the problem is in the definition.  The fact is, you are not really doing those things simultaneously.  Your brain has to stop one task, shift, then start a new task.  The other side of the prob...

My father, whose name I bear, had a saying he used to put into cards and letters from him to me.  He would sign off with this maxim: " Do yourself proud... be a leader. "  As a teenager, and later as a young adult, I found pressure in those words.  Pride was something that other people have in you, not you in yourself.  If my father was to be proud of me, I would need good grades, trophies, achievements... I would need to be lauded in my endeavors.  Did my father say this to me?  No.  I made these assumptions up myself, and constrained my life with them ever since.  Being a leader?  That means things like being the team captain in sports, or class president.  Maybe jumping out of a foxhole and demanding that your fellow soldiers follow you forward, bullets whizzing by your head...  Turns out that's not what he was looking for either.  Once again, my assumptions at play. It's now many years later, and I am close to the sam...