Ken's Personal Vision Statement

For Friday, your assignment is to craft a personal vision statement that you will hand in to me typed on a piece of paper. You are, however, welcome to also post your vision statement as one of your blog posts.

Your mission statement can be very short (50 words or less) or longer (a couple hundred words). It can be written as a list such as this one of mine:

As examples, here is one that is similar to what we did in class.


I, Ken Enochs, living at my highest and best, am empathic, engaged, positive, and trustworthy. This is so that in my various roles—as a father, son, husband, friend, teacher, and colleague—a primary I can help others achieve their potential. But, of course, I must also find the space to pursue personal interests that feed and support my own development so that I might be a stronger, more whole, and more satisfied human being, for myself and for others.

Here is another example of a personal vision statement that I wrote a few years ago:

At the end of every day I wish to feel that I have been ...

productive

physically active

mentally challenged

important to those I care about

helpful to my family, friends, students, and colleagues

kind, caring, considerate, and honest, with myself and with others.

Someday I hope to have ...

raised two secure, happy, successful children

inspired hundreds of students through my teaching

ridden my mountain bike from Llasa, Tibet to Kathmandu, Nepal.

When I die I wish to be remembered as a good ...

father, husband, son, friend, teacher, colleague, and person.

So ... think and reflect deeply on who you are and what you want to be, and write up a meaningful statement, words to live your life by.

Text Post on Ch. 1, "Vision and Quick Victories"

Dear Dynamics,

This was a heavy reading week, but I hope you are starting to get into our text. With Chapter 1 we begin our journey through Shackleton's Ten Strategies of Leadership. Remember that you are to blog on at least one chapter per week, and the "Expedition Log" at the end of each chapter provides good, thought-provoking questions for you to respond to.  For example, from Chapter 1 "Vision and Quick Victories” you are asked to define your Long-term vision and Short-term goals for getting there. Use the questions on pgs 27-28 for ideas, but essentially what you want to do is describe your hopes and dreams for the future, and the various steps along the way that will help you to achieve them.

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” (although I'd rather see myself as "facilitator") and all of us together exploring terra incognita (unknown territory). Perhaps this can give you 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 a 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 a 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 on board with our blogs. We simply need to get in the habit of reading the text, making posts, seeing what others have written, and making a few comments. We are all linked together so we can work as a team sharing with each other our thoughts, dreams, goals, etc. Thanks to the many of you who are already off to a great start.

Another, related goal, is to get a better sense of what each of you wants 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 will provide you with web links, occasional short web clips in class, some fun activities, guest speakers, etc. which I hope provides inspiration and motivation. 

This is enough for me for now (probably more than enough!), and I look forward to hearing from you.

First Text Post (on the "Preface")

As promised, I will make blog entries the same as you. This way we can all feel like we are all participating and working together.

For my first text post, I will focus on the Preface to our text, Leading at the Edge. At the end of the “Preface” is a section called “Expedition Log.” Here our author, Perkins, asks if we have ever been in a situation in which we were “stretched to [our] limits of performance or endurance” (xix).

I do have a very dramatic survival story of an experience in Antarctica (Nankyoku Tairiku in Japanese) that involved trying to climb a high mountain and getting lost in a storm in extremely severe conditions. I’ll share this later, but you can click here if this interests you now.

But I have to admit that my current job, simply being the Assistant Director of the ELA has been surprisingly challenging. The instructors all come from different nationalities and cultures and everyone seems to have a strong opinion about everything. For the last couple of years we have been undergoing a reform process, and all these different points of view along with a great deal of factionalism have created a highly charged political working environment.

What has helped me get through this situation?

Empathy. Trying my best to listen and understand the various points of view has been very important. Everyone wants to feel like they are being heard.

Trustworthiness. Creating trust involves being honest, protecting the confidentiality of others, and trying always to do what I say I will do.

Optimism. Maintaining my optimism has been critical to both success and my sense of well being. There are occasional very bad days, and weeks, and even terms, but knowing that better times are ahead has kept me focused on going forward.

These three qualities—empathy, trustworthiness, and optimism—have helped me enormously. But these qualities do not necessarily come naturally, and I have had to constantly work at it.

So that is my first text post. I now look forward to hearing from you your reactions to our text and other related experiences you wish to share. For a text related post, consider responding to the same question that I have above, that is, have you been in a situation in which you were “stretched to [your] limits of performance or endurance”?

Welcome!

This will serve as our course blog. This is where I will make my own blog posts and include links related to our class. 

Each of you will also need to have a blog. 

To make a blog, go to Blogger and create one. Call your blog anything you like, but be sure to include your name in the title so we know who you are and can respond to your posts. Add the URL to our class member sheet in the link provided.

Each week you should make at least two posts. At least one post should be directly related to what we are reading. Your other post can also be about the text, or it can be something else (e.g. a summary of what you learned in class, an experience related to what we are discussing, or something from another class related to our class, etc.). These two required posts should each be at least 200 words in length.

But please feel free to make additional posts, and/or provide links, images, videos, etc. to anything that you find interesting and related to our class. It’s your blog, so be as creative and interesting as you wish.

For ideas, look at what your sempai have done with their blogs.

In addition to your two+ plus posts, can you also make two+ comments on other peoples blogs. Each week look at different blogs so we are all looking and responding somewhat equally.

I will also make blog entries so we can all feel like we are doing this together, and feel free to respond to anything I have to say.

I look forward to blogging with you.

Ken