professional development

How to Bring Whimsy Back [video]

Haig Chahinian

Oy, work can be so serious sometimes. We’re guilty of looking at the sober side of things — well, because we take work seriously, too.

Just as Joseph Herscher does, and yet the product of his efforts brings about serious smiles.

Herscher is a kinetic artist who creates Rube Goldberg machines, contraptions that delight viewers with their silly premises and whimsical movements.

His work was recently featured in the Daily Mail, where you can see still shots of “Page Turner,” an installation that–you guessed it–turns a newspaper page. By tapping into his sense of whimsy, he’s created a complicated machine that prompts viewers to experience wonder, joy, and exhilaration.

And he’s wildly popular. The Internet has played “Page Turner” about 5 million times and counting. Herscher has attracted significant media attention, which will likely lead to more commissioned work. To be sure, this artist’s star is rising.

What would result if you were to reveal and engage the extent of your whimsical nature in the workplace? At least, you might bring some levity to your surroundings. And levity, wonderment, joy, and exhilaration are all things that can lead to increased engagement and productivity.

What are you waiting for? You, too, can help bring whimsy back to the workplace.

Watch his very watchable work below:

Image by Fletcher Lawrence via

Come Out at Work: As a Student [video]

Haig Chahinian

Unless you’re still pursuing your formal education, you’re probably thinking “my student days are over!”

Oh, but they aren’t.

Our student days die only when we do, so you may as well come out at work as a lifelong learner.

President Obama agrees.

In a recent interview with ABC News‘s Diane Sawyer, he spoke about his experience at work:

There’re always things that you’re learning in the job. And I have no doubt that I’m a better president now than the day I took office just because you get more experience.

He came out at work as a student! We’re all learning as we go along at work–about our selves, our colleagues, our task, the world. That the highest executive in the United States’ government openly owns his learning process on the job might inspire the rest of us to do the same.

Yet we know that hurdles abound. Read more →

What Sheryl Sandberg Didn’t Say at Davos [video]

Haig Chahinian

Facebook Inc.’s Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg recently spoke at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland and related important ideas about women in the workplace. She said we need to be mindful of how we’re socializing boys and girls at home, and called on chief executives to implement equal maternity and paternity leave policies.

Great stuff, right? And yet we’re totally disappointed in her.

Facebook recently filed for an initial public offering (IPO) that’s expected to raise up to $10bn this spring, and which could compensate Sandberg $1.6bn, solidifying her place among the most powerful executives in America.

Because of her newfound perch at the top, when she speaks about her professional trajectory and gender equality, it’s time she acknowledges the full range of dynamics that have helped her get there.

What dynamics?

That her Whiteness has played a role in her success.

Ay, that was hard to write. And we don’t mean to target the newest billionaire simply because she’s a woman. We’re critical of representations of White male leadership, too.

Sandberg’s story goes like this:  Read more →

Grief, Gender, and Ecology at Work

Haig Chahinian

We were totally excited recently to come across Antony Hegarty of Antony and the Johnsons, a performance group firmly grounded in the 2010s. Part social commentators and part Nina Simone-inspired musicians, AATJ was spotlit in the Village Voice on the eve of Swanlights, their MOMA-commissioned performance at Radio City Music Hall.

In the Voice interview, English-born and transgender Hegarty reflects on the world he inhabits, and touches us at our core. In one moment — among many — of poignance, he relates his experience as a transgender person with the ecological devastation he sees:

“I see them as parallel issues, as a tiny reflection of a greater problem,” he notes. “Even as a transgender person, I’m excruciatingly aware of my privilege as a white male, and the subjugation of women is critical to understanding the subjugation and destruction of the ecology.”

Brilliance! See him working the dual oppressor and oppressed within him?  He continues:

“America is less willing to consider a gay or transgender having a platform outside of gender identity,” he says. “But we are barely acknowledging that the weather is changing, either.”

Say it, Antony. Americans’ purported less-willingness to see the world broadly can lead to pigeonholing one another, and to misperceiving the continuing transformation of Earth’s geography. He’s grounded in his emotions when he says, “We need to start grieving, at the very least.”

And then he drops a profound mind-bender:

“People can more easily imagine the collapse of the world than they can imagine stepping away from capitalism or patriarchy.”

We’ve been thinking about this idea ever since we first read it. Do you think it’s true, that capitalism and preserving the world can’t coexist? While it pains our brain to ponder, it’s certainly worthwhile to consider.

Still, he seems hopeful when he thinks about his ethnicity and place in the world. “I am as American as it gets,” he shares.

And we remain hopeful, too. Not only about our ability to solve some of these worldly problems, but hopeful that revealing our whole selves at work, as Antony does, will help lead us there.

Image via

Teachers Benefit from Revealing Themselves

Haig Chahinian

We often blog from the library of a graduate school of education, and recently we overheard an earful. A frustrated student teacher was talking with his peers about their high school students, and we gathered three (3) main points:

  1. He’s finding it increasingly hard to keep order in the classroom.
  2. Too many students have been prescribed psychotropic medication to manage behavioral issues.
  3. He’s devastated that his grandmother is seriously ill, and he’s trying to “be professional” and “hold it together” when he’s with his students.

If we were bold enough to approach him, we would have said this:

In light of your despair regarding your grandmother’s condition, why must you “hold it together” in class? Why not share your pain with your students? By revealing your current emotional experience, you accomplish so much:

  • You humanize your authority, which can help your students better relate to you. Being able to relate to you correlates with empathizing more with you, and your feelings. And nurturing your students’ ability to empathize may be the most important gift you give them, ever.
  • You unburden yourself from the unproductive work of “holding it together.” When you can share of your self without fear, you’re more relaxed. When you’re relaxed, you have more energy to listen actively to your students, who hunger for your focused attention.
  • The more nurturing you are with your students, and the more you listen to them, the closer you may feel as a class. From here, the difficulties of “keeping order in the classroom” may become more manageable.

If at this point he hasn’t scowled at us for butting in, we’d ask him where he learned that teachers are more professional when they hide who they are.

Get this: we know a school which is incorporating into the junior high school curriculum one teacher’s plan to donate part of his liver to his father. At this same school, another teacher shares with each new class his story of being adopted, so students can understand the complexities of different family structures over a lifespan.

Pretty revolutionary, yes? To publicize these seemingly private aspects of our lives in service of educating today’s youth is a radical–and totally effective–way to teach.

It may be challenging to implement at first, yet teachers who strive to share some intimate details of their lives will reap tangible benefits.

You follow, oh student teacher in the graduate school library?

Image via

Oscar Pistorius Forges New Workplace Culture [video]

Haig Chahinian

Describe the culture of your workplace.

Can you even?

It’s not  easy to pinpoint, since workplace culture typically comprises unconscious assumptions shared by the people involved.

Not easy, unless you’re sportswriter Michael Sokolove, who recently wrote about Oscar Pistorius, the top-ranked 400-meter runner and 2012 London Olympics hopeful.

Pistorius runs with extraordinary athletic ability, and uses prostheses called Flex-Foot Cheetas because he was born without the fibula bone in either of his legs.  Sokolove wrote in The New York Times Magazine about the ways Pistorius is forging a new culture on the track field, and more generally in competitive athletics.  Sokolove talked to a colleague about his experience following Pistorius. In the interview, he says:

In my mind, there is an image of an Olympic-level runner. He is a human thoroughbred, powerful and graceful, like Michael Johnson, the world-record holder in the 400 meters. Oscar is certainly powerful, and graceful in his own way, but I could not look at him and say: this is the highest order of the human form. You can’t. There’s something missing. So I had to adjust my mind and say: this is also a runner, possibly an Olympian, and regard him on his own terms.

Sokolove speaks for so many when he describes this mental image of an Olympic runner, which is laden with assumptions about gender, physical looks, age, as well as ability. These are some of the intangible components of the culture of competitive sports, which Pistorius continues to challenge.

How? Read more →

David Hockney Revealed

Haig Chahinian

Many artists can school the world on how to love, and how to work. Just recently at the Brooklyn Museum we came upon an eye-opening example of how to bring your whole self to work by English painter David Hockney.

In the exhibit HIDE/SEEK: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, we saw Hockney’s painting Adhesiveness, 1960, and learned that he actively integrated his sexual identity into his work.

David C. Ward, co-curator of “Hide/Seek” and historian at the National Portrait Gallery, spoke in a video about how Hockney has engaged his whole self in his work, and the corresponding description says it best:

Even though homosexuality was illegal in England until 1967, David Hockney presented his homosexuality directly, as integral to his art. While his paintings from the early 1960s did use coded references-to lovers and other gay references-the overriding avowal of male desire made these paintings a commentary on England’s proscriptions. And Hockney openly stated his intent to propagandize “for something that hadn’t been propagandized: homosexuality. I felt it should be done.”

Bravo Mr. Hockney! We’ve always loved your paintings, especially those depicting fantasy and reality in Southern California.

Learning that Hockney brings his whole self to work means there’s now even more about him to love.

What parts of you are integral to your work?

Image of BMW 850 CSi, 1995 detail via