Author: admin

Readers of this blog will know that I value liberal arts education (including my own), especially in this hyper-digital age, for providing skills like critical thinking, communication and collaboration or adaptability. These skills, over time, often yield valuable careers and meaningful lives. I have not aimed to be original when arguing (in previous postings and newsletters) that the arts can become more valuable than popular technical skills which quickly grow obsolete. Liberal arts focus on developing the whole person, which is a much  deeper and broader process than job-specific training.

This is not, of course, to knock the unquestionable value of STEM majors (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) to our collective communities. Recent start-up presentations I witnessed at last week’s “Co.mmunity” Tech competition, at the Co.Lab start-up incubator (U of S) demonstrated just how many creative innovations the local computer science industry is spawning and how much support they receive! But “old school” wisdom has often said that STEM graduates have better job prospects and higher earning potential for life than peers who choose the liberal arts.

In a recent article in The New York Times, called “In the Salary Race, Engineers Sprint but English Majors Endure,” David Deming, director of Social Policy at Harvard Kennedy School, reminds us that “the long-term story is more complicated” than just one field, and its earning potential, pitted against another. The advantage that STEM majors hold, “fades steadily after their first jobs,” so that “by age 40 the earnings of people who majored in fields like social science or history have caught up.”

The difference is not black and white: most universities require STEM students to take some liberal arts courses, although as an editor, I often encounter students in applied fields who late in their degrees still do not appreciate how to write a basic essay. In a better world, the U of S Writing Help Centre would receive sufficient funding to employ more tutors to teach students across all fields (and degrees) how to write.

Deming observes that there are two reasons that liberal arts graduates catch up and may even surpass their STEM peers: First, technical skills develop rapidly and become obsolete quickly, so that “skill obsolescence and increased competition from younger graduates work together to lower the earnings advantage for STEM degree-holders, as they age.” Secondly, liberal arts graduates develop careers in which they apply their abstract thinking.

Such “soft skills,” such as problem solving and critical thinking, can have long-term value in many careers. While it’s true, especially on the Prairies, that poetry doesn’t “pay the bills,” liberal arts majors turn to entrepreneurship, management and business occupations, as well as taking advanced degrees, like law. Abstract thinking that students develop by reading literature, philosophy, history and anthropology, are essential to such fields.

In my passion to read and write more about the psychology of marketing and entrepreneurial wellness, as exemplified by some of the best TEDtalks online and by innovative publications by geniuses like Seth Godin, I agree with Deming that we must resist contemporary pressure to make university and college curricula too technical or job focused. We should seek knowledge, not “information.” And as some experts like (Sir) Ken Robinson (whose TEDTalks are profound) have been saying for years, we need to step back further and not insist upon university- and college-based education for all students.

Last Monday, mentor Monica Kreuger (CEO of Praxis School of Entrepreneurship) spoke of work she is doing with a “Re-Imagine Education Reference Committee” in Saskatchewan to bring change to the public primary and secondary education system. There are so many ways over the past 30+ years that the system has failed, and continues to fail, students. Sometimes it has been an approach to book learning that has inflicted suffering–or an atmosphere that was hostile to student growth.

Certainly, for those who do attend university, today’s degrees should include both the arts and some classes in the STEM disciplines. But what those courses include, how they’re structured and taught should continue to change and adapt.  It’s heartening to read the statistics that arts-based graduates come into their own, salary-wise, over time; but this does not address the lost potential of students who fall through the cracks. (For example, think of the singer Joni Mitchell, who failed in Algebra during high school in Saskatoon. And what about those who also failed but never found her stardom?)

As we face the future, we need to think more broadly of what education at all levels looks like and how, as Deming writes, “a four-year college degree should prepare students for the next 40 years of working life, and for a future that none of us can imagine.”

And now it’s your turn: Do you have an education in the liberal arts (including social sciences) or in a STEM field? What value have you found, in it? And how do you think we need to re-think education, at every level?

Please weigh in; I’d be delighted to hear from you.

Proteges of the Raj Manek Mentorship Program were offered a tremendous opportunity for growth at the organization’s October seminar.

At the “mic” was Heather Rodriguez, hypnotherapist and teacher of the Regina business,“Hypno Heather.”

Trained in Marlborough, Massachusetts, Heather started her business in 2014, realizing that she could better teach and treat patients if she was an entrepreneur herself.

She recognized that busy people like entrepreneurs could only scale their businesses if they scaled personally. So much about business building requires confidence and motivation; and clients most often ask her to help them improve on those two attributes. Heather shared that this often means that our priorities and relationships need to change: “Things are not just treated by action, but also from within.” We tend to bracket off our emotional lives and then wonder why we cannot perform well.

She described our subconscious minds as the 90% of the iceberg that is immersed in water, out of sight and below awareness; while the conscious mind and activities that we get stuck in amount to only 10% of our minds. When we can “let our guards down,” and plumb the subconscious for unaddressed pain, loss and other repressed emotion, we can liberate our conscious minds from feeling “stuck,” unmotivated, lazy, weak and pain-filled.

All that we have, as humans, she says, are our thoughts, our minds and our consciousness: “All that we really have control of in the world is our thinking.”

Old ways of doing things (including “comfortable old habits”) can be ineffective and these and the fear that often underpins them contribute to self-sabotaging behaviours that undermine our growth. These include binge-eating or binge-Netflix watching, craving and eating too much chocolate, alcoholism, narcotic use, over-sleeping and more. We engage in these behaviours because we’re unhappy and because we don’t acknowledge our submerged fears.

Our minds don’t recognize the difference between a successful and an unsuccessful blueprint of thinking—our minds simply follow our thoughts, however hazardous, distorted or wrong they may be.

The goal of hypnotherapy is to create a more successful blueprint, so that we can live in alignment with our own minds.

Heather identified that when we feel fear, we should ask ourselves, “What excites me? What do I want to do next?” in our businesses, rather than giving way to fear. Fear arises when we push our own limits and start to grow within our minds.

At the same time, unhappy emotions disrupt our growth: Heather says we should not judge ourselves for having unhappy feelings, as the negativity of judgment will only erode our confidence. Instead, she advised us to ask ourselves: “What thought is making me feel this way and is the thought even true?” Often it is not. And yet we tend to believe everything we think.

And action we take when we react to distorted thinking can sabotage our lives. We should avoid “reactive” responses to our thoughts.

Although we often repress opportunities to change out of fear, desire fuels our motivation. We need to have relationships that support us, as we deal with our fear.
When we do create that more successful blueprint for our thinking, we can reach peak states of mind, through which we can institute change and take a “vertical” leap “up and out” of our thought-obsessed, horizontal patterns. Here is “where the money is, both literally and figuratively,” Heather advised. That leap is all about growth and change.

Internally oriented action won’t fail, unlike that which comes externally from others. In this hyper-digital age with the internet at our fingertips, those of us who are more creatively fulfilled increase our chances of success.

What most of us need is time to relax, mentally, that allows us to better align with our subconscious minds. Sometimes journalling, taking long walks, getting exercise, cooking from scratch and similar activities can hold us “in-the-moment,” and so help to calm our minds and “get in flow.” Hypnosis functions like meditation to bypass critical factors into our subconscious, circumventing the judgments and beliefs that limit us so much.

When we are in alignment with our emotions, not surprisingly, our work also goes better. Pushing ourselves when we are in a low mood is not productive or caring. We can decide “not to spend more time in our [conscious] minds, right now.” The “break” provided by hypnotherapy and other, enlightened activities, reduces stress hormones like Cortisol and enables us to transform our minds, as recent theories of neuroplasticity suggest.

Heather identified among all these insights an unfulfilled need amongst clients in Saskatchewan. She therefore now offers three month treatment packages, in-person, as well as online. She works as well with hypnotherapists in other cities and countries.

And now it’s your turn: If you’re based in Regina or can work long distance via Skype or Zoom, would you consider engaging in hypnotherapy with a licensed specialist like Heather? Hypnotherapy by a qualified, licensed practitioner can provide a tool to increase your capacity for growth, happiness and success.

Historians have long referred to the advent of widespread reading in the Western world as the crucible of so much of contemporary culture.

In a September 19th article in “The Atlantic” magazine (shared by psychologist, Adam Grant, in a recent newsletter), journalist Joe Pinsker suggests that people only “become lifelong readers” if four criteria are met.

It isn’t enough to fill our homes with books, he says. Instead, we must integrate them into our daily lives:

(1) Kids need to see their parents or guardians reading regularly. (It remains true that “Children learn what they live.”)

(2) Parents or guardians and children should discuss books during meals or car rides.

(3) Families should visit libraries and bookstores together.

(4) Books should be given as gifts.

As Pinsker observes, reading has been linked to “good academic and professional outcomes,” when we have the motivation to do it regularly.
Statistics south of the border are sobering. The National Endowment of the Arts (NEA) found in a 2012 survey that 23 percent of American adults were “light” readers (reading 1-5 titles/year). Ten percent were “moderate” readers (reading 6-11 titles/year), 13 percent were “frequent” readers (reading 12 to 49 titles/year) and only five percent were “avid” readers (reading 50+ books/year).

In Canada, reading print books was the seventh most popular daily activity for respondents (at 16%), following shopping (35%), dining out (26%), and exercise (20%). Respondents were more likely to read weekly than daily. And in that weekly activity, 43% preferred print books, while 25% read ebooks and 15% listened to audiobooks (Booknetcanada.ca).

Seventy eight percent of Canadians said that they had read or listened to at least one book during the past 12 months. At least one local writer in my writers’ circle reports reading as many as 50+ books per year.

Although reading has historically been a mainstay of cultural transmission (e.g. in the 1830s onward, Victorian novelist Charles Dickens published his novels in serial format in newspapers that were devoured by readers). But in the late 20th century, reading was undermined by the advent of television and, subsequently, the internet.

Statistics also show that urban dwellers read more than country dwellers; that affluence corresponds to increased reading, as does race. For instance, in the US, white adults read more than African Americans, who read more than Asian, who read more than Hispanic people. But that pattern Pinsker rightly says may only reflect educational differences between races and classes.

More interesting still, Pinsker cites Daniel Willingham (psychology professor at the U of Virginia) in his book, Raising Kids Who Read, as observing that there are three variables that influence children’s capacities to become lifelong readers:

(1) A child needs to be a “fluent decoder,” smoothly passing from words on a page to images in his or her mind. Reading must involve wordplay, and early on, children must learn the sounds of speech (an awareness of which has caused some expectant parents to read to babies, in-utero).

(2) Children benefit from having received a “wide-ranging background knowledge about the world,” so that they already know fundamentals of culture and society as contexts for what they read. 

(3) Finally, children need to be motivated by developing a positive attitude toward reading and a positive self-image as a reader.

Correlated to reading for both Americans and Canadians alike is not only academic success but also emotional well-being.

So, what’s not to like about reading?

Whether it’s Harry Potter or Jacques Derrida, we all know intuitively that reading builds the foundation of our communities: consider the importance of the government-funded, program-rich, public library system in Canada. And yet it pales in comparison to the sophistication of European libraries.

The recent American college admissions’ scandal involving Hollywood actors (Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin, amongst others) demonstrates the anxiety some parents face when they realize that they have not instilled in their children a love of reading and therefore the capacity to perform well academically.

Reading widely throughout life is a fundamental practice of lifelong learning that holds us all in good stead, whatever our age and wherever we live.

And now it’s your turn: how often do you read? And would you consider yourself a “lifelong reader” and learner?  

Please weigh in; I’d be delighted to hear from you.

A special report on women and boards in Saskatchewan: community leaders weigh in . . .

The importance of increasing the participation of women in entrepreneurship and business continues to be much discussed in the media and at public events. Ten days ago, Saskatoon’s networking event, “Shaken with a Twist,” featured the testimonies of award-winning entrepreneur, Rachel Mielke (Hillberg & Berk); and CEO of Women Entrepreneurs of SK (WESK), Prabha Mitchell.

The next day, WESK announced a 12-member Saskatchewan Advisory Committee to close the gender entrepreneurship gap in SK. The gap is that gender parity in the business community is only growing at three-tenths of a percent (3/10%) annually. At that rate, it will take 180 years for women to achieve equality in business with men in Saskatchewan.

Why should entrepreneurs care? Mitchell observes that women contribute “$148 billion to the Canadian economy [2011] and that advancing gender equality has the potential to add another $150 B to $420 B to the economy by 2026.” Therefore, this is not only an issue of supporting women entrepreneurs to achieve gender equity, but “is part of a strong economic policy” (September 13, 2019).

Both purposes should matter a great deal to Saskatchewan’s entrepreneurial community. How can we possibly think of entrepreneurial success without redressing the fundamental inequalities that persist in our community?

The Directors Education Program (DEP), offered in Saskatchewan by the Edwards School of Business (U of S, and affiliated with the Institute of Corporate directors and the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management), is working to diversify the economic and business landscape, including by accrediting and welcoming more women not only to the boardroom, but to the director’s chairs of those boardrooms.

Graduates in recent years have included Christine Hrudka, Julie Ann Wriston and Monica Kreuger.

The Saskatoon Regional Economic Development Authority (SREDA) reported on September 17th that “half of the country’s sectors currently fall short of meeting the goal of women achieving 30% representation around board tables—a goal set by the Federal Government for 2019. Much work remains to be done to reach that goal.”

Saskatoon currently performs better than the national level, since many organizations meet that 30% threshold: more than one-third of board positions and approximately one-quarter of board chairs in local organizations are held by women. But statistically, women comprise 50.6% of Saskatoon’s population is women (2016 CMA Census). So, a gap in representation persists. And we shouldn’t be measuring ourselves against lower, national statistics, or (as Seth Godin says) we will race to the bottom.

The Federal Government installed (in 2015) a “comply-or-explain” rule, whereby publicly traded companies must list how many women sit on boards and in executive positions. Prior to this, statistics showed that 60% of Canada’s publicly traded boards had at least one woman member but a full 40% did not. The compliance rule has helped to grow those statistics, since, by 2018, only 7.5% of boards had no female representation.

SREDA rightly summarizes, however, that “although governments, businesses and postsecondary institutions are already taking steps toward building a more inclusive society, discussions around gender equality serve as a reminder of the much-needed work that lies ahead.”

Fed-Ex Canada President, Lisa Lisson, wrote last year for the CBC that that most of the men who occupy boardrooms in the country don’t recognize the problem. They are ignorant to the realities that women on boards “outperform their rivals, deliver higher returns and are more aggressive about taking initiative and refusing to accept poor company performance” (March 8, 2018; https://www.cbc.ca/news/opinion/womenon-boards-1.4566959 ).

Women contribute to a “greater collective intelligence” on boards, but statistics show that “women remain underrepresented at every level and progress is stalling, even though there’s no shortage of initiatives to retain and promote more of them” (March 8, 2018).

Lisson wrote in frustration that what’s needed is some actual strategies to get more women on boards: “We need a concerted, multi-pronged effort to promote change.”

She suggested the following strategies:

• Companies hiring women and boards choosing members should “exercise more imagination when considering the candidates”: let women lead business areas where they have no previous experience, because they have other assets and will grow into the position (e.g. Lisson was earlier made VP of Sales at FedEx with no sales experience and sat on the HR committee of SickKids Foundation without any training in that area. She rose to later become, respectively, president of the company; and chair of the HR committee.)

Women represent a huge talent pool of qualified women from which to choose—”an embarrassment of riches.” So, introduce limited terms for members, Lisson argues, to make room for more women.

•  While mentorship is important for women’s advancement, at higher levels, sponsorship is “more important” and largely overlooked. It consists of “someone at a senior level who expands the perception of what their protégé can do, and recommends them for key assignments . . . Sponsorship is more important for women than mentorship, because it means that [women] have any ally to help [get] up the corporate ladder.”
•  Women need to be more proactive, not just about bettering their careers, but about “identifying companies that interest them, reaching out to board chairs, heads of nomination committees and taking board training courses.” Women must keep knocking at these old boys’ clubs, if the doors are ever to open, she writes.
•  Lisson stresses that hands-on strategies matter because we don’t need more studies on why having more women on boards is important, but we need “an attitude shift that is ultimately about good business practice.”

And now it’s your turn. How do you notice women’s underrepresentation in your industry? What steps are you taking to close that gap?

Please write in; I’d be delighted to hear from you.

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a Saskatchewan-based entrepreneur who writes for a living, must be in want of good clients.” (My apologies to Jane Austen, who would, I might add, understand the theme of today’s blog posting.)

By “good clients,” I mean clients who understand that entrepreneur’s value and so do not “nickel and dime” them over fees. Clients who are willing to pay freelancers’ project fees and not to insist on a (low) hourly rate.

Often in Saskatchewan and other Prairie locales, prospects simply don’t “get” this. They think that because Uncle Bob will “do this for free,” that freelancers should work for cheap—hourly rates of cheap, in fact.

North American enewsletter expert Michael Katz addressed this perennial disconnect in a recent blog posting. A veteran in his field with 25 years of experience as a solopreneur, an innovative thinker with two degrees, who is based in economically vibrant Massachusetts, Katz still finds prospects who want to know his hourly rate as a copywriter.

Katz responded to one such prospect recently, saying, “I don’t have an hourly rate for anything; I price by the project.”

The prospect commented that “hourly pricing seems fair.”

Katz thought: “What’s fair got to do with it?”

The prospect said “he wanted to understand the effort involved.”

Katz thought: “Does it matter to you how many hours Bruce Springsteen practices before you pay for a concert ticket? . . . . Does it matter to you how many miles the apple you’re eating travelled before you took a bite?”

Katz observes that “People who get paid for how hard and how long they work are called employees.”

By contrast, he asserts: “People who get paid for the value they provide are called entrepreneurs, owners and artists.”

Entrepreneurs, who invest years of (ongoing) training, education, acquire and maintain professional association memberships, receive mentoring, network strategically, keep our own books, and so on, are not employees.

But the disconnect persists. And in economically challenged regions and times, those who refuse to recognize the difference between employees and entrepreneurs don’t hesitate to get louder and more insistent.

In my work as an entrepreneur and with stars like Michael Katz, we are not merely employees, because we are more committed to what we do than a 9-5 worker has scope to be. We bring more expertise, emotional energy, thoughtfulness, risk-taking and many longer hours, committing deeply and leaving nothing in reserve. These qualities, by the way, are what marketing guru Seth Godin uses to define the “linchpin”—the worker who resembles an entrepreneur in his/her commitment to their work.

Godin, whose 2011 book, Linchpin: Are You Indispensable, was an groundbreaking bestseller (and the subject of several postings in this very blog), recently suggested that linchpins and entrepreneurs would be better understood if prospects, clients or customers could see us at work: “When we see passionate people at work (at a chess tournament, a brainstorming session, writing a play or counselling), we have trouble imagining doing it for six hours in a row, never mind eight.” . . . Or 10 or 12, as in the entrepreneur’s case.

Maybe what local entrepreneurs need to do is to upload online, time-lapse videos of us doing just that work . . . Except that resistant, low-paying prospects couldn’t bear or bother to watch them.

Entrepreneurs like me use our project fees to pay our staff (who are the employees); the excellent sub-contractor whose specialist knowledge of SEO, for instance, raised consumer response to the latest project; the professional membership whose connections allowed for our deeper understanding of the industry that shaped our work. We entrepreneurs work late into the night (and early in the morning) to maintain such things as proper books, even to advocate for fairer government policy . . .

But yes, as the nay-saying prospect counters, entrepreneurship is still a choice.

A choice that Godin describes as that “to go all in, to make a ruckus,” to change the game for the clients for whom we work. And to do so, daily.

While it’s a blessing to have that choice, often the alternative (for a writer like me, the race to the bottom of low-paying, repetitive tasks, as a “cog in the wheel,” 9-5 employee) is no alternative at all.

So the next time you hear a prospect complaining about an entrepreneur’s “high” fees, or feel tempted to raise an eyebrow when you’re quoted such a fee yourself, consider that what’s at stake is not how you measure “how hard or long” entrepreneurs work; or your assumptions of what constitutes “fair” pay.

Entrepreneurship is not like a 9-5 job. It’s a way of life.

And now it’s your turn: Do you recognize that entrepreneurship is not like a 9-5 job? Would you consider paying a sustainable fee to an entrepreneur in your community, who is passionate about what s/he does?

Please write in on my “contact” page; I’d be delighted to extend this conversation.