Introducing Summer Seminar x What Works
Introducing Summer Seminar x What Works
Join me for an 8-week adventure into the wilds, and rethink rest, comfort, and when we've done enough.
Core to my intellectual curiosity is the tension between what we claim to believe and how we behave.
And, oh yes, there’s tension there.
What we say we value is often at odds with how we express our values. What we say are our priorities is often in opposition to how our priorities show up (or don’t) on our schedules and bank statements.
Many of us feel this tension acutely when it comes to rest.
We’re the first to remind others to take a break, always quick to lend a hand and encourage friends and colleagues to go ahead and take that mental health day. But when it comes to whether we take a mental health day, accept help, or even opt to eat lunch away from the office, well, it’s dicey.
As a recovering overachiever, an autist prone to burnout, and a middle-aged woman with insomnia, I am quite familiar with this tension. While I will not pretend to have it all figured out (far from it), it’s been a core part of my research and inquiry over the last few years.
I’ve found two texts to be incredibly useful on this subject.
And they’re fiction.
“I think you are mistaking something learned for something instinctual.”
— Mosscap, in A Psalm for the Wild-Built
Ever since I first read them, I’ve wanted to teach Becky Chambers’s Monk & Robot novellas. The pair is a brilliant allegory on burnout, rest, and purpose, written while Chambers herself was dealing with a nasty case of burnout.
But I had no idea how to incorporate these books into an online course...
…mostly because everything I know about teaching online is about learning objectives, and value propositions, and giving people useful things to do with what they’ve learned.
Enough with that.
It’s time for an experiment.
Introducing Summer Seminar.
Summer Seminar x What Works is an 8-week guided learning and reflection experience that provides a structure for examining your relationship with rest.
From June 24 to August 23, we’ll read the two Monk & Robot novellas1 (about 45 minutes per week) and four short essays to help us reflect on the story. I’ll guide you with prompts for reflection and discussion—and I’ll offer my own reflections along the way. And yes, if you want more reading, I’ve got that too!
We’ll meet for four live group discussions on Zoom, and we’ll discuss the readings and your reflections asynchronously through written comments on each week’s assignments.
As I mentioned, Summer Seminar is an experiment in offering a different kind of online learning experience. My hope is that it becomes the first step to developing a series of seminars that invite critical thinking and make space for challenging ideas—imagine seminars on identity, marketing, emotional labor, etc.
To be able to run this experiment, I’m looking for at least 15 participants, and I’ve made enrollment available on a sliding scale in the hopes of making this as accessible as possible.
Summer Seminar is for you if you want to explore that “do as I say, not as I do” tension when it comes to rest. It’s for you if you want to exercise your critical thinking skills—and have some fun while doing it. It’s for you if you’re looking to explore challenging ideas with others.
What do you say? Want to go on an adventure with me this summer?
P.S. Yes, I’m still working on Remarkable, my weird little workbook about marketing.
P.P.S. And yes, I’ve also got a workshop coming up next week called Endurance Training for Work!
If you’d like a sneak peek, my essay “All Parasites Have Value” is also based on these novellas.