Integrate!

In some ways, I have the ultimate credential. A doctorate is the end of the line, the highest credential in academics. Mine took eleven consecutive years of post-secondary study. The graduate study was seven years, twelve months a year. Now I am working in a field (NLP, but also coaching) where people think a credential is something to be earned in one year (at best) of part-time study. In the public sector, a rigorous (if not always adequate) process ensures that students only get a credential if they complete work to a specified standard. There are exams, and in good courses there are also assignments and projects and peer-review. There is an effort to ensure that some common standards are represented by the credentials earned. And lots of people fail. They don't make it through the process. There are lots of reasons to question the ethics and the wisdom of failure rates, but they do show that people are being judged not by what they pay or what they attend, but by what they ca...

Do you know that good bye began as "God be with you."  It's a good way to part company, much like "Fare well." When it's time to make an exit, what do you say? The modern way (there are endless Facebook variations) is "it's not about you. It's all about me. This change is good for me and I'm off to pursue my bliss." The focus is on the reasons for leaving. Whatever else is said, whether the rest is in anger or apology, the core message is "I am leaving now because that's what works for me." And the response to that tends to be "Don't let the door hit you on the way out" (with greater or lesser degrees of courtesy). This is inevitable, since the reasons for leaving are always insufficiency or brokenness or mistakes. When we look at the reasons, we cannot help but feel bad. And there's worse to come. Human beings are pack animals: we feel abandoned when someone walks away from our pack because we are ...