McKay Musings

Photo by Pixabay from Pexels Last year my staff watched the viral video, “Know Your Why”, from comedian Michael Jr.  If you haven’t watched it, I recommend you get on that! It is only a few minutes long and has a great message! If you don’t know how to work YouTube, live under a rock, or just don’t want to spend 3 minutes and 49 seconds of your life on it, the basic premise is that if you know your “Why”, your “What” becomes more impactful. How we applied this to education, was that our “What” is educating children, but we all have a different “Why”. We had each staff member take some time to reflect on their “Why”. We then took a strip of colored paper and wrote our “Why” in 1 or 2 words. These were placed on the wall right above where everyone signs in every morning with the phrase, “Remember your Why”. Every day, each staff member could find their word or even look at others’ words for motivation and to refocus before the day begins.  This knowledge of your “Why” is imp...

Photo by Mohammad Metri on Unsplash Listen, Linda. This is from a wildly popular video that was uploaded to YouTube around 6 years ago. To date, it has over 21 million views, so it is kind of a big deal. I will go ahead and admit that about a million of them are from my family alone. My mother-in-law just happens to be named Linda, so we found this video especially funny.  We even got our kiddos saying it to her, just to be funny. I will go ahead and say we definitely don’t condone the behavior in the video, and we don’t allow our kids to actually argue like that with us or Linda. As funny as the video is, there really is a lesson in there.  Two lessons that I think can be learned from this video are: We need to make sure we listen to each other to form consensus and move forward. Just like we check our hearing, sometimes we need to check our listening. We have a tendency to only listen to those who tell us what we want to hear. Lesson number one, in the video, the adult talks...

I would have put this as my first post or at the very least posted it Monday… but I kept putting it off. I guess this is apparently something I still need to work on! I have actually had this one on my “to-do list” for weeks!  It took me a while to get here because I am a habitual procrastinator, but in all seriousness, procrastination can and does affect our productivity and the quality of what we produce. Oh sorry. I got distracted for a bit. Let’s get back on track! Wait. Where were we? Oh yes, procrastination, essentially putting something off for as long as possible. I know some of you are already getting your argument ready that you do your “best” work last-minute or that you work better under pressure. I too have used these excuses for my procrastination. That is what they really are, excuses. Most studies do not back up the theory that waiting until the last minute is beneficial. In fact, there are super-duper, horribly, awful side-effects to procrastinating! Probably the b...