“You’ve Got This” with Margie Warrell
By Elaine Chan
May 26, 2020
A best-selling author and global leadership expert how has spent the last 25 years working with organizations such as NASA, Google, Shell, Salesforce and the UN Foundation, Margie Warrell found herself challenged to the core when her husband was diagnosed with the coronavirus in mid-March.
In her latest book, entitled, You’ve Got This!: The Life-Changing Power of Trusting Yourself, she shares insights from her personal and professional experience helping people to navigate uncertainty better and to emerge from it better off.
“Our brains are wired for certainty – we like to be able to make plans on a future that we can predict… to see patterns… to know what’s coming. However right now, it’s impossible to predict the short term future with any level of confidence,” Margie says.
In the midst of so much uncertainty, we must double-down on what lays within our control – building our innate resiliency to respond to our challenges and find ways to thrive amid the pressure. She likened resilience to a rubber band, explaining that even when it’s stretched or pulled out of shape, it quickly returns to its original best shape. “So we need to prioritize those activities that will enable us to bounce back to our ‘best selves’ -faster and with less stress.”
During our webinar, Margie shared some concepts from her book in four key points.
Firstly, prioritize what empowers you. That is, schedule into your daily routine the “rocks” that empower you – those activities that help you feel stronger physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. “Unless we prioritize the rocks that help us feel more positive and purposeful, the smaller stressors (‘sand) can crowd out our days and overtake our minds with negativity.”
Secondly, ground yourself in self-certainty. When so much around us is uncertain we must look within for the certainty we can’t find elsewhere. Using the metaphor of “when the storms blow in oak trees, many trees will put down deeper roots”, Margie invited us to ground ourselves to internal sources of security that lay within our power. “The more we focus on that, the more constructively we can respond to all our challenges, and the better we’ll come out of this period,” she explained.
Thirdly, be kind to yourself. Compassion is often directed at others, but we are often very hard on ourselves when we fall short of achieving the high standards we set for ourselves. According to Margie, research has shown that when we can extend compassion to ourselves, it allows us to get over our mistakes faster and evolve to be braver in how we live our lives.
Fourthly, choose faith over fear. Margie explained that often we suffer more from our fears than we do from the source of that fear. So while it’s important to face the harder realities around us, we must also retain optimism for the future and ‘have faith’ in our ability to emerge from this time stronger and wiser. “Faith that the dots will all connect doesn’t change our problems but it transforms our relationship to them,” said Margie.
We do that by not getting pulled into ‘fear-casting’ but rather taking ownership of what we focus on and “challenging our doubts and fear-filled stories we are spinning ourselves,” she said. “If your inner narrative is just stressing out, change it to one that makes you feel braver.”
At the end of the session, Margie summarized the four key takeaways into four questions:
1. What’s one thing that, if you did more of, would make you feel better?
2. What ‘power virtues’ (character traits) would you like to embody during this time?
3. If you're going to be loving to yourself today, what would you do?
4. What are you focusing on right now to be more courageous?
A Q&A session followed after her talk, with Margie providing insightful advice to Club Members on how to help their family members, in particular, their children. Overall, it was a fruitful time, and thanks to Margie, we left feeling inspired and charged up to be more positive and courageous. We’ve got this, Margie!
Singapore Media and Policy Through the Eyes of PN Balji
By Richard Hartung
May 25, 2020
PN Balji, the former editor of Today and the New Paper, didn’t pull any punches when he talked with Club members about media and policy in Singapore on May 25.
The media follows the government line and has to be mindful of the politics, he said. Editors carefully make sure that stories are within boundary markers, and any reporter who potentially crosses an ‘out of bounds’ marker once will be watched carefully to make sure it doesn’t happen again. In an example of how carefully editors are controlled, Balji said that an editor who dared to include stories about opposition politicians and even put an opposition politician’s photo on Page 1 of The Straits Times during the 2011 election was quickly replaced. The result, he said, is that The Straits Times is seen as propaganda in neighboring countries and the wider world.
Moreover, many in Singapore are fearful about giving information to the media and people don’t want to talk to the media. Many journalists have thus become what he calls “press release journalists” who simply reformat press releases from the government or companies and turn them into articles in the newspaper. Control by the government is so tight that it is stifling, he observed.
The result is that it can be difficult to get an independent view of news in Singapore. Sources he reads for news include Rice Media, Academia SG and the South China Morning Post, which has a team covering Singapore and provides insights into activities here that the local press may not cover.
While he has not sought to inject himself into the local media since his retirement in 2006, he has continued to advise media companies, write stories, and gather information from a variety of sources. Today, he said, there are two extremes in media. One is mainstream media such as The Straits Times, which says the government is right. The other is online media, which says the government is wrong. “My intention is to walk the middle line,” he said, by analysing the stories, leveraging his institutional knowledge of the landscape in Singapore, gathering the facts, and writing stories that provide balanced views about what is really happening in Singapore. His recent book, Reluctant Editor, is designed to preserve his institutional knowledge of the media.
Hearing these insights and a multitude of others, ranging from the impact of Lee Kuan Yew on the media and how editors were influenced decades ago to the state of online journalism today, and whether the Singapore media has covered COVID-19 appropriately, gave participants in the session a behind-the-scenes peek into journalism here and a deeper understanding of how media and policy actually works in Singapore.