Elisabeth > Recent Status Updates

A saying I’ve adopted—and that has never failed me—is “if it starts bad, it ends worse.” Overlooking your nonnegotiables is a surefire way to hire the wrong person for your team.

Now that we’ve discussed maintaining quality instruction and professional practices among your team, it’s crucial to address the importance of hiring right from the beginning. As mentioned earlier, desperate times do not call for desperate measures. Establishing a clear set of nonnegotiable for your team members is vital.

The inconvenience is far less severe than the long-term consequences of keeping a bad hire. Trust me—allowing a poor performer to remain can have far-reaching and lasting negative impacts on your entire team and the quality of care provided to your students

When you’ve completed your observations, implemented action plans, and verified with follow-up measures, yet an employee still fails to rise to the occasion, you must dismiss them without delay

After completing your observations, a well-crafted action plan will help you quickly determine whether you’re dealing with potential that needs to be nurtured or performance that requires immediate attention

When you can confidently say that the person who is not meeting your expectations with their work performance knows what those expectations are yet is not meeting those expectations, you can confidently hold them accountable. With accountability, they will either improve quickly, or you must make the decision to remove them from the organization, even when you may see perceived potential.

There were plenty of people in the world who insisted that others should use their own brains to figure out what to do—then got angry when people didn’t do what they expected

If you’re going to be a bear, be a grizzly.

A few drinks in, I admitted out loud that maybe I’d like to be known for something other than shaped salads. She had said we all had parts to play and then reminded me that it could be worse

Mondays: Grocery and kitchen Tuesdays: Laundry Wednesdays: Bedrooms and bathrooms Thursdays: Linens and living room Fridays: Defrost the fridge, groceries, dining room and halls Saturday: Family day Sunday: Rest

Four years and I was still overwhelmed by the dense fog that covers you when your children are very young, the one that makes you feel like every day is the longest day you’ve ever lived

I’d spend the next segment of my life trying to figure out how to align these pieces of myself through work, a recurring pattern, ending up in jobs that I felt like I should be good at or wanted to be good at but never really fit who I was. It wasn’t until the Stirring that I’d start to recognize I had it all wrong

I read a book by Os Guinness The Call. he tells his readers to “do what you are.” Meaning don’t find a job or invest ur time in areas that check off a list of boxes that ur merely good at (or not so good at) or even educated for; invest ur time in areas where God truly calls you into his kingdom, where the interior of who you are aligns w/ the exterior of a cosmos in which you have to spend eons of your time

I hadn’t yet learned that people are wired in different ways, that not only was it okay to be strong in some areas and limited (or downright awful) in others, it was perfectly normal.

And so instead of succumbing to despair, letting the pendulum knock me to the edge of the earth, I plead with God about what to do with the weight that presses hard in the middle of my chest, the alluring charm of the dreams that beckon me to make a dent in the world at the same time I fail to articulate exactly what they are.

Sometimes I don’t know exactly what it is I want, but it fairly makes my heart ache, I want it so. Mark Twain

When relief does not transition to development in a timely way, compassion becomes toxic.

Giving ti those in need what they could be gaining from their own initiative may well be the kindest way to destroy people.

Religiously motivated charity is often the most irresponsible

The compassion industry is almost universally accepted as a virtuous and constructive enterprise. But what is so surprising is that its outcomes are almost entirely unexamined.

Who is still going to college?

Although most animals seek solitude for birth, almost all women in labor ask for help or surround themselves with company. It’s as if somewhere, deep inside our brains, we cannot fathom how that baby’s big head can make a graceful exit. It’s a notion that causes fear, which triggers a cry for help in labor and delivery.