I have had a busy week. I wanted a quick healthy snack. Luckily I always have healthy food available. My solution:
Whole Grain Bread, Tomato, Avocado, Red Onion, Cucumber, Pepper Sandwich. Just cut them up and put it on a sandwich, great meal. I guess the BLT is the unhealthy alternative to this great sandwich!
Enjoy! When you try it, let me know what you think. Also share any alterations, let me know what you did! Make it a Great Week with Great Food!
Like his great books, these podcasts help the listener take a second look at things that have happened. The second look he takes provides a different, valuable and a more detailed perspective about the story. Each have been very interesting and I encourage you to listen. In future posts I will outline what they meant to me and how they have helped me and hopefully you better understand how we can take action to generate comprehensive improvements by creating interactions so everyone and everything benefits.
If interested, I highlighted some episodes I thought were interesting and I thought you would like. In “The Satire Paradox” he looks at the effect of political comedians such as Colbert and Saturday Night Live. He provides an interesting perspective on the impact of these shows. In “The Big Man Can’t Shoot” about Wilt Chamberlain and Rick Berry, he looks at what could have dramatically impacted Chamberlain’s career.
I also liked the informative perspective he provides about what happened with desegregation after Brown vs. Topeka Kansas in Miss Buchanan’s Period Of Adjustment. If you are interested in higher education and how well it capitalizes talent in America, as he puts it, he has a 3 episode series – Carlos Doesn’t Remember, Food Fight, and My Little Hundred Million. It provided food for thought.
Overall, these podcasts shed light on what we are doing and what we could Practice Paneugenesis so we generate comprehensive improvements by creating interactions so everyone and everything benefits. Next week I hope to post about how one of these stories may help explain how we can more often experience wellness, or progress.
If you listen, please share what you got from them, I am interested in your thoughts.
Beyond their great contributions, the summit had other powerful speakers. The summit’s opening Keynote was by Gina McCarthy, former head of the EPA under President Obama and now at Harvard’s Kennedy School. She provided common sense strategies and information about how to create a better world for all. She also reminded us of the importance of using science because, “…it provides facts and discovers the truth, regardless of personal beliefs.”
Later Leith Sharp, Director of Executive Education for Sustainability at Harvard helped us understand the difference between reality and what we are told. She demonstrated how the process is messy, takes many turns, squiggles she called it, and then in hindsight seems logical and straightforward. This relates to Kahneman and Tversky’s classic work. They called hindsight a type of mental illusion because what was confusing in real-time, seems to appear logical and straightforward in hindsight. I also understood her to say that despite the confusing and sometimes overwhelming process, it was important to keep moving forward because setbacks are part of the process.
The last Keynote by Majora Carter was powerful. She not only demonstrated how to create a sustainable environment, she explained how to turn a neighborhood, the South Bronx, into a place people want to live, work and play. For me, and I think for most, that is what sustainability should be about, creating a better world. It also needs to be a world that has the potential for an even brighter future, not just one that can exist. She explained how, with her team, they worked to create something of pride so community members want to contribute to making it even better.
It seems Marjora Carter is helping to create what we all should be contributing to creating in our shared community – the earth. Much can be learned from her explanations in clips below about how she has led and continues to lead a team in the transformation of the South Bronx.
After her presentation and in our working groups, a contradiction seemed to emerge. During the conference, we break into working groups to develop action plans. These working groups included Campus Based Energy Efficiency, Academic Integration, High Performance Campus Design, Transportation – Oriented Opportunities, Finance, Regulatory and Energy Generation, and Zero Waste/Waste Reduction.
The contradiction or what seemed inconsistent was the discussion about sustainability and how sustainability has been defined. Sustainable development has been defined in many ways, but the most frequently quoted definition is from the UN Bruntland’s Commission report, “Our Common Future”, that suggested “Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
The contradiction was that we were not working to just meet needs but in how to make things better. Better is needed, not just maintenance of the status quo.
The riskiest thing we can do is maintain the status quo. – Bob Iger
We must create better because according to science, we have passed several tipping points related to climate change. According to Will Steffan, as published in Science February 3, 2015, we have passed these tipping points:
More than 350PPM CO2 so we will likely breach a 2°C rise
Biodiversity should be at 90% preindustrial levels but instead is at 84%
Deforestation should be at 75% of original forests but is now at 62%
Overuse of pesticides, insecticides, herbicides should be at 25% of current use.
To me this means we must restore, not just sustain to have a better life and the potential for a better future. Ironically, despite being about creating a future that would enable future generations to survive, The Brundtland Commission officially dissolved in December 1987 after releasing “Our Common Future”, a document which coined, and defined the meaning of the term “Sustainable Development”
Evidence indicates sustainability is not enough, we must seek to create not just less bad ways, but better ways. With this view our efforts should be to generate comprehensive improvements by creating pervasive, reciprocal, selfish, selfless, synergistic interactions so everyone and everything benefits.
Please share how you are helping everyone and everything benefit!
Some considered his first movie, An Inconvenient Truth, controversial, however it seemed to have moved the environmental movement forward. Something I believe important and vital. This week, as I attend the UNC Energy Summit at Appalachian State University, nothing seems more important. I look forward to the release of the “an inconvenient sequel: Truth to Power“.
Initial release for this movie is Friday, July 28th and nationwide release is August 4th. I encourage all to see this movie. We ALL are dependent on an environment that nurtures, supports and enables us to have a good life. We all must work to make it so by generating not just sustainable solutions but improvement solutions. We need to restore what we have done by generating comprehensive improvements from pervasive, reciprocal, selfish, selfless, synergistic, interactions so everyone and everyTHING benefits. Everything thing because we are all connected.
Focusing on creating more good is necessary because time and again we learn that creating more good is more effective than working to lessen bad. Precautionary theory or harm mitigation may lesson a current problem, however to have a better tomorrow we must redesign reality for that Idealized Outcome.
Not only is the environmental appropriate choice the most important choice, it is the best choice. I look forward to learning more about the upcoming movie.
As always, I had a great time and learned a lot at the 2017 National Wellness Conference. It was in St. Paul Minnesota at the River Center. It is a good conference, different than when it was in Stevens Point Wisconsin, but still amazing. Amazing because of the people.
This year we saw great presentations and I met amazing people. Sunny Grosso of Delivering Happiness opened the conference powerfully with her keynote, “Cultures that Flourish: Applying the Science of Happiness and Human Sense”. In her presentation she confirmed the benefits of doing more good. Paul Scalia, of International Well Building Institute, provided a keynote that outlined the value of creating built spaces to enhance our well-being.
Both demonstrated the benefits these efforts have on personal, economic and planetary well-being. Beyond the presentations and catching up with friends and colleagues, I especially had great interactions with the international group. The international group has become great because of the amazing work Bob Boyd and Thomas Cuddihy do to bring these people together. Their efforts have enabled all who attend the conference an opportunity to learn about wellness efforts in the Phillipines, France, India, Israel, England, and many more places and provides people from these countries opportunities to learn from us.
It is exciting for me to learn about wellness around the world and to talk with them about how we can all move forward together so everyone and everything benefits. I look forward to learning more from them and possibly doing some work together. With technology, we are all staying in touch through a WhatsApp group.
I did a presentation, A Wellness Cultivating Culture Does More than Reduce Risk, which seemed to be a summary of my career and ends by using the Paneugenesis Process as a method to create a culture that creates more good, not just less bad. (it is linked) Some of this work and the model will be shared in an upcoming issue in The Art of Health Promotion section focused on “New Measures for New Directions” of the Sept/October issue in American Journal of Health Promotion. I will post about it when it is released and will also provide a video.
Lets all learn from each other as we do at the National Wellness Conference. Share your efforts about how you are generating comprehensive benefits by creating selfish, selfless, synergistic, pervasive, reciprocal, interactions so everyone and everything benefits.
Positive Health Leadership 