If Not Now, When?
February 3, 2025
Things have been quieter in my work life the last few weeks and that’s a new thing for me. For my whole life I have connected my worth to my productivity. Yet, for the last few months I haven’t been so productive and yet, I am feeling pretty good about life. My ‘doing vs. being’ balance needed an update. Death of a loved one will do that to you.
Yet, society, at least here in the USA, is about crossing off items on check lists and doing posts and getting likes and feeling productive – which people then post about and get more likes. Not a good way to measure one’s worth or ‘success’, whatever that means.
In the shade of grief, I have had more time to just be and see what emerged. I didn’t have something on my calendar every hour and the silence provided at those moments has been a gift. I have been able to ask myself, “Now that I really see how short life is, how might look at life differently? What is a life of value? How, at this time in the world, might I contribute?”
With this slower pace, plus a kick in the butt from Jamie Lee Curtis, as well as Annie Mahon, I clarified a few things about myself and my work offerings going forward.
- I wrote a personal bio to add to my website where I share more about what has shaped me, and what I am focusing on as I design my life moving forward.
- I have reshaped my website offerings to communicate more clearly what I might offer to others in terms of professional support, coaching and facilitation.
- In my intentional quest to be a bigger part a community doing like-minded, forward thinking work in our field, I am including a Suggested Consultants and Resources section where I will highlight colleagues, podcasts, articles, and websites that align with my work around adult development and creating professional, healthy work cultures. We are all in this work together.
- I am also now including a Partial Client List because educators in these schools are also part of my community. I look to these colleagues not only as thought partners, but as fellow travelers on the journey of development and I want to highlight their work as well.
Our ability to communicate effectively and our willingness to engage respectfully matters for the health of our workplaces and the collective well-being of all within it. To that end, I am intentionally building a consulting practice that works with schools over time – to create systems that are more professional, robust, humane, and healthier for all within them.
We need self-awareness, emotional intelligence and systemic readiness for change. It’s going to require inner and outer work.
Ask yourself:
- What ‘inner work’ would be helpful for me to do more often as I move into 2025?
- How can I contribute to the world in ways that are more other-focused and less self-centered?
- What emotional intelligence skills do I need to cultivate this year? Listening? Being less defensive?
- Given that we need humane human beings on this planet more than ever, how will I model that sense of humanity for those with whom I work and live?
At this time in our world we need to grow (up). If not now, when? Join me. Please contact me to be a valued thought partner and/or interested school partner in the work ahead.
Questions, comments, or suggestions? Feel free to email me at jennifer@jenniferabrams.com.
Cool Resources
Aflame: Learning From Silence by Pico Iyer. “Pico Iyer has made more than one hundred retreats over the past three decades to a small Benedictine hermitage high above the sea in Big Sur, California. He’s not a Christian—or a member of any religious group—but his life has been transformed by these periods of time spent in silence. That silence reminds him of what is essential and awakens a joy that nothing can efface. It’s not just freedom from distraction and noise and rush: it’s a reminder of some deeper truths he misplaced along the way.”
The Human Side of Changing Education: How to Lead Change with Clarity, Conviction, and Courage by Julie M. Jungalwala. “When we ask schools to change, we are asking human beings to change. This requires special tools and a human-centered approach. In The Human Side of Changing Education, leaders will learn to make sense of their challenging change journeys and accelerate effective implementation. With this practical framework that includes human-centered tools, resources and mini case studies, readers will learn to navigate and succeed on their unique path of change.”
This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud. “[Messud’s] beguiling, deftly crafted This Strange Eventful History vaults across seven decades, from World War II to the aughts, prismed through one family’s migrations through five continents as they forge a kind of nucleus, a centeredness, that they all may share…This Strange Eventful History moves like a broad river, a Nile or a Mississippi: slow and majestic, rich with the layers of its watershed. It’s not a propulsive read, but one to savor, line by line, distilling its mysteries… Messud elevates the personal into the political, her themes spooling out from beneath her sensuous prose. This Strange Eventful History is assuredly her masterpiece.” ― Hamilton Cain, Minneapolis Star Tribune
