Year-End Review: Thinking about Your Use of Time
The year is winding down. Many organizations are near the halfway point of their fiscal year. This is the right time to take stock on your work and processes. You have time to improve processes for the second half of the year. Where should you start when you take stock? You might start with the …
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Working on Imposter Syndrome
Impostor syndrome is the inability to internalize successes and strengths clearly, focusing instead of feelings of inadequacy or fear of failure. There are many of us who sometimes feel like an impostor, but don’t make it to the clinical definition of impostor syndrome. Those people, the majority of us, are the ones I am addressing. …
#MCN2018 Recap
Most years, on my plane back from MCN, I am furiously typing up notes from sessions. This year, I was volunteer co-chair and Human-Centered Design SIG co-chair. As a result, I was ever-present but not always there when it came to sessions. However, I had a better sense of what people felt about what they …
Focusing on Self-Care is Good for Business
I had the pleasure of doing the keynote talk for the Pennsylvania Museums Association conference in April, 2018. Below is a summary of my remarks. Summary: We all need to take care of ourselves As managers, you particularly need to take care of yourself You also need to advocate for your staff and to help …
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(Online Course) Self-Care For Mission-Driven Professionals
Mission-driven professionals are not in it for the money. They place their desire to fulfill the mission over themselves. Doing mission-driven work can be gratifying. But, this work is also incredibly draining. The rewards can be minimal both emotionally and financially. With these challenges, the mission-driven professional finds themselves feeling empty and exhausted. Self-care is …
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Trust the Revolution
Museums need a revolution of trust. The word trust is a common one in the museum field, embedded in mission statements and uttered by venerable directors. However, in both instances, museums use the word most commonly in terms of their holdings. Museums keep collections in trust for people. Spend a moment considering that language. Museums …
What if I’m Burned Out? Counteracting Workplace Burnout
There are days when all of us feel a little tired. But, sometimes, you find yourself dead-tired day after day and the thought of going into work makes your brain feel like it’s going to short-circuit. The former might just be garden variety tiredness, but the latter sounds like burn out. With the real possibility of working …
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Self-Care: Appreciative Inquiry
Appreciative Inquiry is a positivity-focused planning process that allows teams to build on the best of their past to dream of the best future. This strategy can be helpful in organizational problem-solving. You start with a goal (rather than a problem, as in problem-based learning or design thinking), and then you go through five steps: …
Agile Thinking to Manage Change
Agile was a buzzword, drawn from software designers who came up with an effective means of developing, testing, iterating, and launching in the most efficient manner. There are plenty of posts that talk about using Agile (and related iterative processes) for personal development. For me, I find agile particularly useful when thinking about weathering change. …