We have accomplished quite a lot over the past decade I've been at Wellesley College. We've reinvigorated the curriculum, developed new distribution requirements and a quantitative reasoning program, and implemented creative initiatives in experiential learning and global education. We've greatly extended our uses of technology in teaching and learning and initiated new academic programs in a number of areas, including environmental studies, neurosciences, cinema and media studies, and several others. We've provided national leadership through our program of religious and spiritual life and our learning and teaching center and through two annual conferences that bring our whole community together to celebrate our shared intellectual life and our students' stunning achievements, on and off the campus. We've renovated many buildings and revitalized the landscape, grown the endowment, strengthened our administrative practices across the college, and graduated roughly 5,000 impressive women, ready to do all they can to bring peace and Justice to their world, and some rationality, too, we hope We've raised hundreds of millions of dollars to support all of that energy and forward movement. I'm enormously proud of, and ever grateful to, the talented and committed leadership team that has done all of this with me. The most challenging and in some ways most invisible area in which we have made strides, and yet possibly the most consequential, is in the progressively Increasing sophistication we have been developing in the wrenchingly difficult work of engaging and learning from the many and profound differences that define and often divide our small, highly-diverse, and reactive learning community I think I've had an impact there, although it's hard to codify, except perhaps in the many stones of our struggles to stay in relationship through thick and thin. We've done that. 

Sustain' is really the wrong word for me; it connotes more constancy than, in truth, I'm able to muster day-in-and-day-out. It's hard to lead a process of change, unremittingly hard, and the barriers are overwhelming at times. The commitment flows in cycles and so does the momentum. Sometimes I'm inspired and on fire; sometimes disillusioned and isolated; often somewhere in between. The question, then, is what brings me back? For me, the grounding often comes from something I read or write, but a conversation with a colleague or friend can as easily turn the tide. What's important for a leader to discover, through trial and error, is where you can reliably go to reconnect to your inspiration when you're running out of steam, which inevitably you will do.

I'm pretty systematic and disciplined about setting and reviewing goals -- weekly, monthly, annually...familiar disciplines. But your question is more interesting and more subtle, hinting as it does at whether one is self-conscious about the evaluative stories one tells oneself, whether one has techniques for rising above the constant chatter of the badgering monkey mind. One of my selves is often consciously telling another to lighten up, often in vain. But that's because my other selves are busy driving me on, keeping me on track, on time, on task, in harness, and in role. A trick I've learned that may be of use to other leaders is that when things get murky (and they do), it's often the case that the task has been lost and the simple expedient of stopping to round it up again can be surprisingly clarifying. 

I love words and I love to write and to read (and to write) writing that moves me. Always have. It might be a persuasive piece of policy analysis or a heartbreaking poem, even, God forbid, a pungent memorandum. When I was a scholar and teacher, I was free to carve out large expanses of time to spend immersed in that engrossing craft of wrestling ideas into the curious and unforgiving linear form through which we humans communicate in writing. I miss that and will welcome it back when this leadership adventure comes to a dose To write well is to think well, I've always believed, although one thing I learned from my Kellogg colleagues is that others think well in other ways in conversations, through music, meditation, dancing, art so many other expressive forms. 

I've always been physically active and I maintain a highly regular morning exercise routine that unclogs my arteries (I hope) and clears my head (I know). It also provides quality time with my husband when he joins me. And I guard my spirit (inspired by Parker Palmer) by staying connected to the people and ideas that I can rely on to slow me down, cheer me up, work me over, pull me out, push me beyond ... whatever I happen to need the most when I reach out to them -- the ones who seem instinctively to know precisely what that is.

Paradoxically, by trying hard to step out of the world of measurement (where I earned my academic spurs) and into the universe of possibility -- where you set the context and let life unfold. The quotes are from a lovely book, The Art of Possibility, by Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander. I commend it to other leaders. 

At the end of the fellowship, I wrote a playful poem (an ode?) called Owed to Kellogg. The Kellogg Fellowship profoundly affected me, my sensibilities, my priorities, my insights, my ambitions. The experiences, insights, and friendships from those three years have stayed with me with a salience far beyond their allotment of time in my life's journey. They've grown in me and grown me into a deeper, more centered, more compassionate and wiser leader. I'm grateful to have had that extraordinary gift.