Many congratulations to Susy and the new board members elected at the Club Assembly last week! I am so excited for July and seeing the great things our next board will do. So many thanks to Colleen Maynard (Admin), Lee Bonta (Service), Aurora Hilton (Public Image), Steve Boucher (Membership), Martha Abbott (Secretary), Ron Wrobel (Service), Chris White (At Large) and Liz Cutler (At Large) for agreeing to serve.
While I was home sick and not able to get to the meeting I was thinking a lot about how can we make our organizations and ourselves happy?
We talk about this ALL THE TIME in our house. To be fair we also talk about expelling gas out the rectum and cookie recipes. But happiness gets mentioned a lot.
Will Durant wrote, “We are what we repeatedly do.”
Humans are pattern seekers, but sometimes those patterns aren’t helpful ones. We fall into our default patterns; they become like well-used highways, constantly-used routes to our thinking. Our brains are like mechanical devices, wired for efficiency, and for those learned patterns.
How many of us get up, make coffee, go out and exercise, come back drink our coffee, go to work via the same road, every day - or some pattern like that. We're wired for efficiency. We've learned the pattern.
But the cool thing about our brains is that we can rewire them.
The currency of the media, social media, blog posts makes it that news is attention. And negative news gets a lot of attention. Threats get attention more than positive stories and inspiration. I think that is true about clubs, too. We worry and fixate about who will be the next president after Susy instead of celebrating all the good things we have going on.
The more entrenched in our lives and our organizations and our networks that we become, the less we see the need for new patterns. What we need in our club is not worriers, but inspired evangelists for the good we do, for the friendships we make and the community that we are a part of. For the remainder of my presidency, I hope you will work on that with me!
