Food For Thought (4/4/21)

Hi Friends,

Spring is finally here, and more and more people are getting vaccinated. It feels like we are finally starting to see the light at the end of this long tunnel. 

Last month I came across many excellent resources that I wanted to share with you all, but I had to hold myself back and settle for the ones below.

I hope you enjoy the read as you continue on this journey that is life and learning about yourself and those around you. 

One note: I would love any feedback, comments, likes, dislikes you could share with me to make these monthly emails more joyous and helpful. Pls, feel free to click reply and share your thoughts.

Thanks so much for reading :)

Articles:

The ambidextrous mindset: how to balance exploration and exploitation - People who can both innovate and optimize are an extremely rare breed. Innovating requires a taste for risk taking and experimentation; optimizing calls for an altogether different skill set, mostly reliant on refinement and efficiency. That’s known as the exploration-exploitation dilemma.

Why You Should Allow Yourself to Be Lazy at Times - Sometimes, it feels like we just need to slip into a proper lazy mode, lift our mental feet up, and let our minds wander. In these moments, it's as if we only have an appetite for daydreaming, relaxing on a sofa and simply doing nothing at all.

But, in the modern, fast-paced society, where you always need to be on the go, we struggle with allowing ourselves to be lazy. Even when we catch some free time to relax, we can't because we feel like there's always something more productive we could be doing, like checking our emails or finishing cleaning the kitchen.

Book recommendation:

No Hard Feelings: The Secret Power of Embracing Emotions at Work - From Humu’s Head of Content Liz Fosslien and organizational designer Mollie West Duffy: No Hard Feelings, a wickedly funny interactive guide to un-repressing your emotions at work, finding constructive channels even for jealousy and anxiety, demystifying digital interactions and coworker communication styles, and ultimately allowing readers to be the same person in work and in life.

Liz and Mollie also offer a great assessment on their website. They focus on three main areas: "You" assessments help you learn about your own emotional tendencies, "Your Team" assessments focus on evaluating your team’s emotional culture, and "Your organization" assessments will give you valuable insight into your organization’s emotion norms. You might be surprised by what you learn about yourself, your team, and your organization! 

Worth watching:

'In & Of Itself' Is A Study Of Identity And Magic - This was probably one of the best things I’ve watched so far this year. Thanks to a great friend’s recommendation. In & Of Itself is about seeing people and being seen by them, and about how your own narrative of who you are — I AM a novelist, I AM a gamechanger, I AM a creator — collides with stories about who you are that you didn't get to write.

The place of magic in In & Of Itself is not to amaze for amazement's sake, although I was certainly stunned by some of what happened. It's that the unreal is used to create the super-real: an experience you know not to take literally creates a truthful feeling of connectedness in an audience. 

I'm probably always going to want to know how some of this was done, but I try not to think about it. Do not tell me. I prefer to sit quietly with my not-understanding, which is to say, my wonder. I AM a skeptic; I AM a critic; I AM a writer; I AM satisfied.

Music for the soul:

Weak Heart by Ras Michael and Marcia Higgs - some of my favorite lyrics from this song: It takes a weak heart to judge one another. It takes a weak heart to judge those who suffer.

Picture highlighted:

A beautiful drawing by one of my favorite 10-year-olds reminding us all not to forget you are one in a minion ;)

If you’ve enjoyed this read and want to get our monthly newsletters in your inbox moving froward, be sure to subscribe here.

Until next time,

Dena 👋🏽