An e-newsletter for University of Minnesota staff

June 2009

Book of the Month

“Taming Your Gremlin”

Favorite Book of Janet Pelto, Career Counselor, College of Continuing Education

Reading the March 2009 “Book of the Month” review gave me the courage to admit that my favorite book is Taming Your Gremlin by Rick Carson. You may not expect to find a book recommendation about gremlins from someone at the University of Minnesota, but Carson is a well-respected therapist and former university professor. He artfully incorporates research, experience, and wisdom from Eastern and Western philosophies into a practical, helpful and insightful process to help you, as he says, “get out of your own way”. So who and what is your gremlin and how do you tame it?

Your gremlin is the narrator in your head. This gremlin wants you to feel bad. His goal is to squelch your natural, vibrant self. He is judgmental and determines how you feel, act, and interpret everything that happens to you. He perpetuates false myths about you and what is acceptable, such as asking for help is a sign of weakness, it is wrong to get angry, and you are not (good, smart, attractive) enough.

Carson’s method of “gremlin taming” is simple, but not easy. But, with practice and patience, can help you more efficiently and effectively tame our gremlin. His process involves three processes:

1. Simply noticing: Be aware and pay attention. Notice, don’t think. Thinking leads to judgment and other gremlin tricks for keeping you out of touch with yourself.
2. Choosing and playing with options: Open yourself up to the range of options and choices you have for all thoughts, feelings, and behavior. Explore! Experiment! What else might this mean? How else could you react? What else could you do?
3. Being in the process: Taming your gremlin is a lifelong process. You continue to evolve and grow, and new situations can trigger old issues in new ways. The good news, however, is that, with practice, you become more effective and efficient at gremlin taming.

So, start to simply notice, choose and play with options, and be in process. Taming Your Gremlin provides great strategies and concrete action steps in plain language that makes sense.

Seeing that intersection of pain and grace as beauty, as a gift, helped recast the meaning of wounds in my life. I can see that my creativity, even my spirit, has gained more depth and meaning when informed by my pain. That gifted intersection of pain and grace is now, for me, a "thin place," which the sages say is a place where the veil is temporarily lifted and we catch a glimpse of the Eternal.

Tame Your Gremlin

The concepts in Taming Your Gremlin give us a way to take control of our lives by changing our thoughts. Negative thoughts over time can lead to stress, and when added to other stressors, may eventually lead to health problems.

Our current economy has prompted many of us to feel stressed. The degree of which is dependent on our individual situation. If negative thinking is added to an already stressed life, it may contribute to a belief that we have no control over our lives. Changing our thoughts is one way to get back a sense of control. Another way can be found in the article, Stress: Stress in the Workplace by the American Psychological Association at http://www.apahelpcenter.org/articles/article.php?id=19.

You can learn more about thinking positively from Dr. Martin Seligman http://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu/Default.aspx and the University of Pennsylvania’s Positive Psychology Center http://www.ppc.sas.upenn.edu/

May 2009

Book of the Month

“Beauty: The Invisible Embrace”

Favorite Book of Janet Hagberg, Master of Liberal Studies Faculty Member

I read quite a bit and have a habit of underlining quotes I like and making comments in the margins of pages. There have been just a few books that, for me, exude such wisdom that I can’t write in them at all. Instead I mark my favorite quotes with lovely gold page markers. One of these special books is Beauty: The Invisible Embrace by John O’Donohue.

I came upon this book in a bookstore at a time when my dreams had shattered and I was searching for meaning in the sharp-edged pieces. I was standing at the intersection of pain and grace, which is precisely the place where I eventually found beauty, beauty in the form of courage, compassion, creativity and love. This book was a catalyst for easing me into that intersection. When I opened the book to glance at the table of contents I quickly scanned the chapter titles, then drew a deep breath and knew that this philosopher/poet’s heart would embrace me. The chapters included The Music of Beauty, The Color of Beauty, Beauty’s Embrace, The Beauty of the Flaw, Beauty and Death and God is Beauty.

Eagerly I turned to the chapters that attracted me most and began reading. Within minutes I came upon a stark sentence and had to take another deep breath, to allow the truth of it to sink in. "True beauty must be able to engage the dark desolations of pain; perhaps it is on this frontier that its finest light appears?"

Beauty, those moments of divine inspiration, of transformation, of wordless wonder, of creativity has visited my life, but to think of wounds as beauty was new to me. O’Donohue, the wise poet goes even further with his exploration, "The wound has left its impact. And yet after all this time, the dark providence of the suffering wants to somehow illuminate our lives so that we can now discover the unseen gift that it bequeathed. The labor and discipline of creativity refines our blemished seeing, and gradually the unexpected gift comes to light."

Seeing that intersection of pain and grace as beauty, as a gift, helped recast the meaning of wounds in my life. I can see that my creativity, even my spirit, has gained more depth and meaning when informed by my pain. That gifted intersection of pain and grace is now, for me, a "thin place," which the sages say is a place where the veil is temporarily lifted and we catch a glimpse of the Eternal.

April 2009

Book of the Month

“Composing a Life”

Favorite Book of Dee Anne Bonebright, Winner of the Women's Center 2009 Civil Service/Bargaining Unit (CS/BU) Staff Award

I've been doing a lot of self-reflection recently as I consider my career and what it means to be a leader at the University. In many ways, my life has not gone the way I thought it would when I graduated from college 25 years ago. I haven't followed the career path I designed for myself. Other goals and priorities have intervened, and I've done different things, many of which didn't even exist at that time.

Mary Catherine Bateson's Composing a Life is a wonderful affirmation of life as "a work in progress." She uses the stories of five creative, talented, and successful women to illustrate the way we all create our lives out of the building blocks that come our way. When she wrote the book, at about the same time that I was graduating, she argued that fluidity and the ability to adjust to new circumstances is a crucial response to changing environments. It seems to me that this ability is even more important today. I find many positive lessons in her stories of the way these women adjusted to circumstances to build not one linear career, but rather a series of productive and satisfying life experiences. It reminds me to always seek for new opportunities to learn and grow.

Leverage Your Strengths

Our current economy is forcing many of us to put our careers front and center in our lives. If you are looking for ways to take charge of your career and life path, here are two resources to help you.

A good leader concentrates on individual strengths and utilizing them to the fullest extent possible. But great leaders also focus on the weaknesses and find ways to support those shortcomings toward even more success.

• Top Five Tips for Leveraging Your Strengths and Supporting Your Weaknesses

Learn how others have made positive changes in their careers

• Ten Empowering Career Stories

March 2009

Book of the Month

“The Tao of Pooh”

Favorite Book of Trudy Canine, Keynote speaker for U of M Professional Development Fair

At times, we can get so serious in our mood of learning and approach reading with a sense of deep gravity. I believe we also learn when we approach study with a light-hearted, playful disposition. And so, I suggest reading a child-like book, The Tao of Pooh. There is a chapter called "Cottleston Pie" which presents three principles of being in a poetic way, fun way.

1. A fly can’t bird and a bird can’t fly. We each have our own unique inner nature; when we know and respect it, we know where we belong (and where we don’t belong.) The way of self-reliance begins with recognizing who we are, what we’ve got to work with and what works best for us.
2. A fish can’t whistle and neither can I. We each have certain limitations; we know what they are. Things are as they are. There is nothing wrong with not being able to do some things like “fishes whistling” but there can be a lot that doesn’t work when we are blindly trying to do what we aren't designed to do. “A fish can’t whistle” but it sure can swim! Birds don’t live in water and fish don’t live in trees.
3. Why does a chicken, I don’t know why. It is what it is. What is so important in needing to know why? How can we listen more to our intuition and trust what we hear? Sometimes a minus can become a plus…how do we build on that

The Tao of Pooh is filled with simple, yet meaningful revelations.

Remove Your 10 Blocks to Creativity

In this new world that has been created for us by our economy, we are called to handle change across the spectrum of our whole lives: our jobs, our families, friends and co-workers, our communities, ourselves. No one has escaped this new reality. Where we have no control, there is little we can do. Where we have control, creativity is almost essential.

Many of us think of creativity as being skilled in the arts. To get a different perspective and learn ways to 'unblock' your own creativity, we have included the article Remove Your 10 Blocks to Creativity.

February 2009

Book of the Month

“The Art of Changing the Brain”

Favorite Book of U of M Rochester Chancellor Stephen Lehmkuhle

I just finished reading The Art of Changing the Brain by James Zull. The author writes about the brain and learning, which taps into my two passions: how the brain works and how different students learn. Zull interconnects neuroscience and education research in ways that reinforced current best pedagogical practices, but also framed new directions to be explored that can promote learning with understanding, rather than resort to memorization to learn. This reading was timely for me as we design innovative learning platforms at UMR that are both effective and more efficient."

Workplace and Learning Styles

Learning styles show up in our workplaces as well as the classroom. How we take in, process, and act on information is different for all of us. To learn more about this topic read Getting the Learning Styles Right

Are you an auditory, visual, or tactile learner? You can check out your own workplace learning style at the Working Styles Pyramid.

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