I am a perpetual student and I love learning. This is my most recent formal education adventure complete! Never stop being curious and wanting to learn!

emergency management certificate

About 10 years ago I spent several months developing my own personal mission statement. I did some reading, I asked family, friends and colleagues key questions and asked them to validate my own perceptions.

I have used this mission for a decade – to help me find my footing, to help me make decisions and to be my north star. The statement is on my desktop and bulletin board, and it is always referenced on my annual vision boards. My statement is below:

As a Mother, I am on a journey of discovery and adventure together with my son. My goal is to raise Toadie to be a man who is resilient, compassionate, self-aware and confident with a conviction of faith and the ability to see many truths.

As a Friend, I am on a journey through life together with the people I care about. My goal is to be a source of enduring support and encouragement to the people I love. I want to live my life with the grace and acceptance of Gran, living into her legacy of roots and connectedness.

As a Leader, I am on a journey creating the future with my colleagues. My goal is to make a difference to clients, staff and the system through the work I do (what) and the way I bring myself to that work (how). I want to be a leader who is mindful of complexity, who honours past accomplishments and facilitates change happening in a generative and integrated way.

I do not want to change my mission statement, rather my experiment is to help calibrate and discern how I will live into my mission more intentionally in the coming years.

My experiment was launched with an email to about 25 people – family, friends and colleagues. I asked them a single question:

If you could take control of my life tomorrow , what would you change? (credit to James Clear)

The responses have already started to come in and I am so excited to get this feedback from which I can launch. Stay tuned for what I learn and how I will use the experiment results!

I have been observing myself, my colleagues and my friends over the last while and am noticing how close to the edge we all seem to be managing at. One little thing tip us over, one small aggravation gets on our very last nerve and a change in the plan crashes everything. Up goes the hands, down goes the head and for me there is often an expletive – or two.

Everyone knows about big stress and what it  does to our bodies. The pump of adrenaline, the flood of cortisol all getting us to fight, flight or freeze mode. Your body also adapts after the big stress response to allow you to recover and return to “normal operating mode.” Micro-stress is different in that your body does not register it in a way that activates a response and a recovery and therefore your body and brain are not protected in the same way. This means that the reality of cumulative micro-stressors is often much harder on you than we give credit or allowances for.

So, pay attention to the little things you and others are dealing with in life and offer a little more grace to yourself and others as an antidote to micro-stress.

Word of the Week – Procrastiworking

No definition required! The word perfectly describes situations in which I decide to clean out my desk drawer despite a lengthy list of to dos or situations where I am “busy” doing my emails and re-writing even when I know there are important things that deserve my attention.

Planning and preparation are useful until they become a form of procrastination. - James Clear.

James, that is just cruel!

It may be rationalizing, (and feel free to call me on it) but I believe that sometimes when I slow the hamster wheel and do something calming yet “productive” – such as writing my lists or cleaning out my email, I create space for other, deeper thinking about the more important issues I need to attend to. I think the busyness of organizing staves off a feeling of guilt about wasting time while the brain that might otherwise ruminate is used (and soothed) with my lists.

Anyone else catch themselves procrastiworking this week? Have you looked at why?

Lake Superior State University published 10 words that should be banished in 2023 but the word I was hoping was on the list is not.

The list from LSSU includes: GOAT, inflection point, quiet quitting, gaslighting, moving forward, amazing, “does that make sense?”, irregardless, absolutely, and “it is what it is”. As it turns out there are many annual lists of words that are overused or should be banished.

From the above list I would give runner up status to “it is what it is”, although I have been known to use it when I have nothing positive to say about the situation but feel I must say something. I suppose honorable mention would go to irregardless. I was under the impression that it is not even a word but when I checked it is being listed as a synonym of regardless.

The word I really, really want banished is unprecedented. It was a word that you hardly ever heard before the pandemic and now everything from weather patterns to market conditions and political events are unprecedented. I am trying to decide if we are hyping something up using this word or if we have just become lazy in using our vocabulary to describe extraordinary, never before seen, miraculous, unparalleled, uncommon, and anomalous things we are seeing in the world.

Do you have a word that should be banished?

I was reading an article this week that looked at workaholism. Workaholism has a fascinating place in our culture. Working excessive hours is often revered in our culture – the self-made individual who puts in 16 hour days, is tied to their devices and who never take a vacation show up a lot in the media, in film and in legend.  The article I read outlined that workaholism is actually an addictive behaviour and like drugs, alcohol, sex and shopping can be used as a distraction from hard to face life challenges or to self-medicate to dampen the impacts of a larger mental health issue (depression, anxiety etc.). In the past it was often thought that extreme work hours was the cause of many mental health problems – something the article turned upside down with the notion it was a salve to and not the cause of this mental distress.

I also read an article this week that studied the impacts of treating a regular weekend like a vacation. This study looked at two groups – 1 which treated their weekend as they normally do with chores and obligations along side a group who were purposeful in carving out the weekend to be a vacation/staycation. The vacation group spent slightly more money than the other group but even accounting for this the positive impacts felt by the vacationing group, both mentally and physically were statistically significant. The article was clear that these weekend respites were not a replacement for a long vacation away from work but rather an opportunity for an interim pick-me-up. These vacation weekends could be as simple as strolling through a downtown area to window-shop or grabbing a cappuccino on the patio of waterfront restaurant.

Note to self – STOP hiding behind work and START planning a vacation weekend!

I was listening to one of Simon Sinek’s podcasts this week and he mentioned that when you used to get your news and updates from newspapers or magazines you would cruise through the headlines and read in detail what caught your eye. In today’s world most of your information is curated through the mysterious algorithm of the internet. It is so obvious and yet so subtle you can easily be lulled into not seeking that other perspective or topics mysterious and unknown to  you – yet. Of course, I have my favourite go to topics – mostly health, finance, business, and science – I wonder what I am missing and how I can curate more curiosity in my newsfeeds.

The Toad and I had a conversation about curated new feeds this week as well. He has started to contemplate future education and career choices. I researched and subscribed/followed some of the companies and leaders in the fields he is looking at, and I am now sharing with him news from that newly curated feed. I am grateful his differing interests and fresh eyes on the world help me to expand my learning and my world view.

The Toad and I have started the new year with a daily gratitude practice that takes less than 10 seconds in the morning. Everyday in January we have answered a gratitude question that is posted on the fridge.  The questions are simple but draw our attention to something we are thankful for. Sometimes we answer the question the same and sometimes our different answers create a conversation or a shared laugh.

Examples of the questions we have answered include:

What song are you most grateful for?

What place are you most grateful for?

What about your body are you most thankful for?

What small thing do you use daily that you are grateful for?

These questions have brought a bit of lightness in a month that can often be dark and difficult.  As the month draws to a close, I am contemplating what our shared gratitude practice will look like in February!  All suggestions welcomed.

Welcome 2023!

In all honesty that may be a more exuberant greeting to the New Year than I am actually feeling. Perhaps just a nod of the head to acknowledge 2022 and 2023 passing at midnight is more in order. To be clear I am not feeling pessimistic about the year ahead – in fact there are several things I am looking forward to in the coming months and I recognize every day the great blessings in my life even on the hardest of days. But still there is a sense of flat. Flatness comes not from my life but from watching people throughout the world and here at home struggle with so many hard hard things and also watching people I love also struggle. Watching someone you love struggle or suffer is far harder than to endure a hardship yourself. To watch and know there is nothing you can do dampens your own spirits. The countermeasure to my flatness is to choose a “Word of the Year” that speaks into the possibility of 2023 exceeding my current assessment.

My 2023 Word of the Year is FLOURISH! Flourish is defined as (of a person, animal, or other living organism) grow or develop in a healthy or vigorous way, especially as the result of a particularly favorable environment. This is what I want for myself, my loved ones, my community and the world.

Succeed – Thrive – Grow – Prosper – Blossom

So I say to you 2023 – Bring it!

Happy New Year!

A mantra is a repeated motivational word or phrase. An example is the Little Engine that Could saying “I think I can, I think I can” in the children’s story.

Ever since the Toad was wee, we have used the family mantra of “Don’t panic – think it through!” It started when his blankie or a favourite toy was not immediately found, and frantic panic and upset was setting in. I knew the mantra had stuck for him when I was driving around a bit lost in a different city and from the back of the vehicle, I heard him calmly repeat my words back to me. “Momma, don’t panic – just think it through.”

When the Toad got a bit older and was more articulate with his inner thoughts and feelings our conversation would sometimes turn to uncomfortable feelings like sadness, grief and worry. He has definitely inherited my predilection to duck, cover and shove those challenging feelings away. There are many benefits of being an older mom and wisdom from lived experience is one of them. So, I fessed up to trying that avoidance tactic and that it really did not work. This conversation and our shared commitment to trying to do it differently led to another family mantra – “Name it – Claim it – Reframe it!”. So now when discomfort comes along, we say those words and most times it takes some of the power and sting away from the experience. This can sound like “I am feeling sad. I will sit with sad for a while. Sad is reminding me of something important.”

Does your family use any mantras?