Supplement the learning environment with resources

Originally posted in our October 2022 Top of Mind Newsletter. If someone asked you if you feel anxious often, it’s a fair assumption that you would say, “yes, absolutely!” Anxiety, both the medical diagnosis and the general feeling, seems to have increased over the last two decades. In this piece from the BBC in October 2022, author Tracy Dennis-Tiwary discusses the role of strong emotions, namely anxiety, in how we interact with the world. “[E]motions are…

Originally posted in our September 2022 Top of Mind Newsletter. To close out this month’s Top of Mind Newsletter, let’s apply some of what we’ve learned about our individual minds to collectives. In any established organization, workers will have seen any number of “change initiatives,” from reducing waste in a corporate setting, improving customer feedback, or developing new programs to improve employee morale. And we often hear about how these initiatives do not work or how…

Originally posted in our September 2022 Top of Mind Newsletter. Those who follow ELI and other mindset leaders have heard about the power of resilience many times, but it is another thing to hear from someone who has struggled against tough odds about how they do it. In this podcast interview, Dan Oosterhous of the Air Force Academy shares his story of recovery from two strokes that impacted his career as a pilot and as a…

Originally posted in our September 2022 Top of Mind Newsletter. Thinking about the value of mind-wandering might lead you to reflect on times you’ve been guilty of procrastination. Everyone does it, but why? And perhaps more importantly, how can we combat it? In this Harvard Business Review article from 2016, we see a simple yet effective outline of how to get over procrastination. From simple tips like committing publicly to achieving a goal to visualizing how…

Originally posted in our September 2022 Top of Mind Newsletter. What causes our minds to wander? Is it helping us or hurting us? Researchers have found that the answer is more complicated than you might think. But, as the fields of psychology develop and shift, so too does neuroscience. We can now better than ever understand what parts of the brain are doing while we perform tasks or when we are prompted to think about specific…

Originally posted in our August 2022 Top of Mind Newsletter. As we see the start of the public school year throughout much of the US and other countries, let’s take a moment to reflect on the goal of education and how we might want to reframe it.  For starters, many of us believed that the path toward the highest paying and most rewarding job was a college degree. And while it is true that, on average,…

Originally posted in our August 2022 Top of Mind Newsletter. Thinking about the tumultuous changes to education, one might naturally consider how this impacts the job market. As has been reported for several years, jobs increasingly care about skills, mindsets, and experience over holding a particular degree. In this recent article from the Washington Post, we see an examination of the recent trend of ditching the degree requirement in a variety of fields, namely IT.  What’s…

Originally posted in our August 2022 Top of Mind Newsletter. In Virginia, Ohio, and across the country, schools are experiencing massive disruptions. While regionally, there are differences, many of the causes are similar: continuing COVID-19 complications, lack of funding, teacher burnout, and in some states, a massive teacher shortage. This shortage isn’t because there aren’t enough trained teachers, but instead from qualified teachers who have had enough.  In this article from Virginia Mercury, we see a…

Originally posted in our July 2022 Top of Mind Newsletter. How can we influence ourselves and others to overcome the most basic human barrier; fear? Fear is indeed the biggest barrier to innovation, with good reason. Innovation is by definition associated with ambiguity; even with a well-defined goal, innovators simply cannot know all outcomes of their efforts. So, as we close this month’s Top of Mind, let us reflect on how we are preparing our society…