Foundation For Change

Time Management The concept of time management is quite strange to me. Why is it so meaningfully different how two people may have the same amount of time at their disposal, and yet achieve a great variability of output? Does anyone else on this planet really pack in as much as Elon Musk, or David Goggin’s, or Ginny Rometty? Probably no. Can we? Yes! Do you want to? I think that is the real question that gets much less value than it should in this space. How level is the playing field on a practical perspective? Well, in relation to time, I think that we can all agree that it's pretty much a human constant... Not a significant amount of variability there. I add the three dots because as I write, the voice of Neil DeGrasse Tyson creeps in to explain how technically people closer to the poles are experiencing time faster, or something like that. Need we bother with parsing social issues on the impact of how we utilize our time? I think it sufficient to say that the impact on time he...

Self-Efficacy A subject close to my heart, Self-Efficacy. Significant because I adore the concept of striving for perfection. It lends itself to my quest for knowledge, my favourite concept in which is the Dunning-Kruger effect whereby the more you learn, the more your awareness of your lack of knowledge increases exponentially also. Eternal humility is the consequence here, showing all of us that even though we've maybe come so far, even more lay ahead. More in fact may lay before us as we approach awareness of our own mortality than we would like. I adore the simplicity of the Dunning-Kruger effect on the other end of the spectrum too; that those gentle naive soles around us also maybe to blissfully aware of their lack of knowledge. Crossing the precipice may be the goal, but the consequence of which is not innately positive. As I've learned many times, the framing of this very scenario is everything. See I choose to frame my outlook on finding enjoyment in the quest rather t...

Reunification As touched on in my blog titled, " Hesitation ", from a few weeks ago, I've wanted to revisit the concept of reunification more broadly. In that Blog, I examined the latest literature from indigenous populations in the USA. Here Landers et. al (2023) found that reunification is more or less inevitable across the early adulthood of the people within the study. The extrapolate this based on this issues cited, to postulate that reunification is perhaps a truism of the foster care population, such that only the odd outlier exists, but for the most part, all fostered children want to normalize their relationships with their biological parents.  What is there to parse in this revelation? I've thought of a few things in the past few weeks since my initial writing, being;  Reunification feels logical based on my professional experience. Reunification aligns with my academic experience from a sense of parsing one's cognitive dissonance and fictiti...

Openness Like agreement, openness is one of five factors in the Big-5 personality inventory, developed and popularized by Goldberg in 1981. Openness for me however has quite the behavioural component to it, that despite someone's predisposition, is quite essential in the human services world, particularly in the area in which I work, foster care. I think that it's by no mistake that there is a plethora of information on open adoption principles internationally. To date, there are literally thousands of articles since the 1980's which utilize "open adoption" somewhere in their title. A deep dive into many of these articles tells me that there's a central theme at play here, that openness is key to success. If we measure success in better loved experiences for children, more stability for adoptive parents, less shame for adopted kids, greater integrity for biological parents, and better outcomes for children across health, mental health, educational, and vocatio...