Being real and totally present

I've been away for a couple of weeks of vacation - had a fabulous time with family, seeing friends, and doing lots of fun activities.

I very much appreciated Shailen's comments about the importance of acknowledging and embracing our ego needs rather than trying to stuff them down. I'm not sure I'm properly characterizing his insights but what I took away is that student affairs folks work so hard at humility that we sometimes hold ourselves back. I definitely see this in colleagues and myself. What Virtuoso Teams and Shailen propose is that we should perhaps relish the ego-investment that good people will have in their work and then work to make sure that the egos contribute to the task and to the innovative strivings of the team while not allowing them to become destructive. I like this image very much. Of course, it's a little harder to live than to describe but I would love to master this in my own relationships. I think I achieve it in many situations but in others I definitely think I could do better.

Besides showing appreciation to Shailen, I'm wondering where we want to go with the reading group. It seems that we may all be struggling a bit with finding the motivation or time to post. I know we had such a great time together and I'd like to see us continue our work. It's a little hard replicating Allerton. Maybe electronic communication isn't going to make it for us. Thoughts?