RWL #202
planned happenstance, social media, lessons from a German teacher, and more!
Greetings from the University of New Hampshire - FOB LHH! Well, we made it. The administration set a goal of being in person through November 20th and we succeeded. I have to give kudos to the leadership of the university for planning, communicating, and adjusting. I did not think we would make it, but we did. And now we are all remote through the end of the semester. So that means I am officially back at Forward Operating Base Last Homely House (FOB LHH).
My wife and I went out for a run this morning - it was a balmy 45 degrees - shorts weather for running (my rule is wind pants when under 40 degrees - I don’t do spandex - not anymore - no one wants to see that). Now I’m sitting on our little kitchen couch sipping my coffee and enjoying the fall sun and writing to you. 2020 is a year for appreciating the small things, like being able to sit in a warm house in the sunshine and enjoy a cup of coffee. Life is still pretty good.
Stay well and stay safe!
Read
What: Journal of Counseling & Development, Planned Happenstance: Constructing Unexpected Career Opportunities
Why: In the post-practicum course I teach for our seniors yesterday we hosted Peter Wright , President of Bridgton & Rumford Hospitals and a member of the Central Maine Healthcare Senior Leadership Team, and Richard Corder , Managing Director at TiER1 Healthcare. Both have been podcast guests for me. The thing that struck me as I talked with both of them during the podcast was that neither one of them set out to be healthcare leaders, and yet both of them wound up being very successful. As I was setting up the post-practicum seminar and thinking about the themes for each week, I thought of this commonality between Peter and Richard. I initially penciled in "the unexpected career" as the theme for the week. But as I thought about them and their experiences, I scratched out "unexpected" and wrote in "authentic".
You don't know right now where your career is going to take you. Ask pretty much anyone who is successful if they have landed exactly where they thought they would when they were in college, and I'm pretty sure you'll get all sorts of stories about what they thought they would do. Through openness, exploration, and experimentation you will find your way to the thing (or things) you are meant to do.
I was motivated to write this topic today because, in a recent conversation with Riannon Nute, the CHHS CaPS advisor, she mentioned the theory of "Planned Happenstance", which I had never heard of before, so I went digging and found this article. It's written for professional career counselors, but it's very readable.
If you want to be happy in your work, which is the career goal I have most often heard from the current juniors and seniors, and is what I have most often heard from prior years, then you want to find a career that allows you to be your authentic self, the way Peter and Richard have. To do that, you need to be deliberate about generating opportunities for exploration and experimentation, because the right career choices might not yet have presented themselves to you. From the article, a list of skills that you need to develop:
1. Curiosity: exploring new learning opportunities
2. Persistence: exerting effort despite setbacks
3. Flexibility: changing attitudes and circumstances
4. Optimism: viewing new opportunities as possible and attainable
5. Risk Taking: taking action in the face of uncertain outcomes
The article has an appendix at the end that includes a series of questions they recommend counselors ask clients to explore planned happenstance. You can just ask them to yourself. If you look at nothing else, check those out.
I am really excited about this concept. I have been articulating something along these lines for several years, drawing particularly on the liberal education, Renaissance thinking, Taleb's Anti-Fragile, and other sources. This paper doesn't cover everything I think is important, but it gets at the core value of openness.
As usual, I thought I was on to something unique, and as it turns out there's a whole literature out there. That's one of the remarkable, but frustrating things about being an academic.
I really can’t recommend this paper enough. Managers, parents, coaches, teachers, and pretty much anyone who cares about other people’s development should read this article.
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What: The Conversation, The Matrix is already here: Social media promised to connect us, but left us isolated, scared and tribal
Why: I am not a big Twitter user - I post things to it every now and then, like the link to this newsletter, but I don’t spend much time on it. Maybe once a week when I have nothing better to do, I scroll through my feed. Last night was one of those times and pretty quickly I could feel my anger and anxiety rising as I read the latest criticisms of the political groups that I don’t like from the political commentators that I do like. I stopped and I thought, what the heck am I doing? What am I getting out of this? … and I kept scrolling for a bit longer because it’s hard to look away once you are sucked in.
This short article gets at the heart of why social media’s promise has gone so awry:
The artificial intelligence behind these platforms determines what you see based on your social media and web activity, including your engagement with pages and ads… Those algorithms tracking you are often triggered by your negative emotions, typically impulsivity or anger. As a result, the algorithms amplify the negative and then spread it by sharing it among groups. This might play a role in the widespread anger among those engaged in politics, regardless of their side of the aisle.
While I’m not much of a Twitter user, I do spend a fair amount of time on Facebook. After the 2016 election I decided to stop posting anything explicitly political to my Facebook account. I try to focus on sharing things that are funny or deal with self-development. I want people who interact with me on Facebook to feel like they are improved by our relationship, which I think is what friends are really for. I think social media still has a lot of promise, but we have to develop more norms about how to use it appropriately to help us be our best selves rather than our worst selves (our inner trolls).
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Watch
What:Developing a Growth Mindset with Carol Dweck (10 min)
Why: I mentioned last week that I have been chatting with some executive coaches about our work, and one of them recommended Carol Dweck’s work to me. A quick google brought up this short video about developing a Growth Mindset. The point of a growth mindset is to see challenges as opportunities for growth and learning rather than roadblocks. She uses examples from education, but really the idea applies to anyone in their everyday lives.
I know I can get frustrated and shut down when I can’t do something right the first time I try it. That was part of the purpose of my two years of making art daily. I knew I wasn’t very good at it, but I was going to apply myself to growing in that way. I wish I had that sort of openness in all of my daily activity. I think choosing projects like that do have spillover effects because it is a form of brain training. If you tell yourself you are not going to give up because you do something poorly right now in one aspect of your life, it's likely to result in more resilience in other aspects of your life. And the more aspects of your life that you apply a growth mindset to, the more generally you will have that growth mindset.
Here’s a Brain Pickings article on Dweck’s theory https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/01/29/carol-dweck-mindset/
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What: The Antidote, The Education Pivot: Going Virtual
Why: New podcast series on YouTube - the host will be interviewing people doing interesting things. I picked this particular episode because it features my friend Catherine Smart who is a high school German teacher in northern Virginia. Before you discount this video as “why do I need to hear about the struggles of switching to teaching high school German online?”, I think Catherine illuminates a lot of great lessons for engagement that managers and leaders can take advantage of. Plus she’s funny and honest, and there’s never enough of that. Especially now. I should mention Catherine is a former Army Military Police officer - so she’s been a leader in other circumstances, too. This informs her teaching, as well.
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Listen
What: Health Leader Forge, Chris Sloan, COO, Capital Medical Center
https://healthleaderforge.blogspot.com/2020/11/chris-sloan-coo-capital-medical-center.html
Why: My guest for the HLF podcast is Chris Sloan, the Chief Operating Officer of Capital Medical Center in Olympia, Washington. Capital Medical Center is a 107-bed hospital with about 600 employees. It is part of LifePoint Health, a for-profit hospital system headquartered in Brentwood, Tennessee.
Chris joined Capital Medical Center after retiring from the Army Medical Service Corps in September of 2019, with 23 years of service as a military medical logistician and hospital administrator. During his service he deployed to Kosovo and Iraq, and ended his career as the Chief Operating Officer for Madigan Army Medical Center, one of the Army’s largest hospitals.
In this podcast we talk about Chris’s military career, transition to leadership in the civilian sector, his leadership philosophy, and, since this interview was originally recorded in October of 2020, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Thanks for reading and see you next week! If you come across any interesting stories, won't you send them my way? I'd love to hear what you think of these suggestions, and I'd love to get suggestions from you. Feel free to drop me a line at mark.bonica@unh.edu , or you can tweet to me at @mbonica .
If you’re looking for a searchable archive, you can see my draft folder here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1jwGLdjsb1WKtgH_2C-_3VvrYCtqLplFO?usp=sharing
Finally, if you find these links interesting, won’t you tell a friend? They can subscribe here: https://tinyletter.com/markbonica
See you next Friday!
Mark
Mark J. Bonica, Ph.D., MBA, MS
Assistant Professor
Department of Health Management and Policy
University of New Hampshire
(603) 862-0598
mark.bonica@unh.edu
Health Leader Forge Podcast: http://healthleaderforge.org
'It is the small things, everyday deeds of ordinary folk, that keep the darkness at bay. Simple acts of kindness and love.' - Gandalf (The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey)