Photo by Ahmed Zid on Unsplash Bill* had an “Aha” moment at work. He was one of those people who if he was on a project with someone whose work he felt was substandard, he’d delete it, replace it with is own and move on. Then, as he was taking an improv class, he learned about the concept of always making your scene partner look good. As he was sitting around that evening, he reflected back on class and thought “Huh! That probably applies to work as well.” So he tried it.

Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash I’ve struggled mightily with this first blog post. I’m never sure how good my writing is, so I tend to obsess. And recently I’ve not been happy with my writing at all. It seems trite. Somehow translating the broad, abstract ideas I have about teaching, speaking and learning into words seems to gut some of the concepts. Ironic, because all of them shape how I teach and speak and my students seem to have no trouble picking them up. But writing

Photo by Ben Mullins on Unsplash Researchers in a 2010 study (Jamieson et al., 2010) broke some university students who were going to take the Graduate Records Exam (GRE) to get into grad school into two groups. Both groups took a mock GRE exam The first group was told nothing Members of the second group were told that their elevated heart rate and other physical signs associated with anxiety actually predicted that they would do better on the test, not worse. The second grou