“Keep Calm and Labor On” with St. Croix Valley SHRM

In September the St Croix Valley Employers Association offered a full day seminar titled, “Keep Calm and Labor On”.  In addition to four fantastic speakers we held a session titled, Keep Calm and Carry On:  Ask the Right Questions.  We decided to do a sort of Book Club for our seminar participants.

The book that we chose was titled, “Wait, What?  And Life’s Other Essential Questions” by James E Ryan.  Ryan is the Dean of Harvard’s Graduate School of Education.  We started out the session showing a clip of Ryan’s commencement address at the 2016 Harvard Graduate School of Education ceremony.

The clip can be found at https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bW0NguMGIbe

In the address Ryan asks the students to remember to these five questions throughout their lives:

Wait, what? | I wonder if… | Couldn’t we at least? | How can I help? | What truly matters?

He ends his address by telling the audience that by going through life asking these questions, in the end they will be able to answer the most important question of all, “And did you get what you wanted out of life, even so?”

Two of our board members, who had read the book and recommended it, focused on their favorite chapters and gave a brief synopsis of the material found in that chapter.  At the end of the session we gave away several copies of the book.  Our seminar participants loved the format and we plan to use the Book Club idea again in the future!

“Wait, What?” By James E Ryan is available for purchase on Amazon or at other book retailers.