I’ve been looking for the secret to happiness, and all along, it was as simple as that: cleaning fish.

Every day we ask people to do something: join, volunteer, donate, attend, recycle, eat, read, exercise. Sometimes they say yes; lots of times they say no, or don’t say anything at all.

I see you. You, the thousands of Extension professionals whose jobs have been terminated with the elimination of SNAP-Ed. The elimination of the SNAP-Ed program doesn’t make sense.

There is no such thing as work-life balance. The best we can hope for is work-life harmony. When we aim for harmony rather than balance, we live knowing that the mix will sometimes lean toward work; other times it will lean toward home.

Feedback done well leads to growth and motivation. Susan Sloop offers strategies for effective feedback using the S-B-I process.

When work gets crazy (crazy hard, crazy sad, crazy busy, crazy mad), and I am digging deep to find a reason to smile, I pull up the Extension Worker’s Creed to remind me why I chose this work.

These are the pillars of our operating procedures and strategic guidelines. They may seem simple but I use them constantly to assess whether we are on the right path, as individuals, and as a team.

I stopped calling errors “mistakes;” I call them hiccups instead.

The sooner we get out of an urban vs rural mindset, the sooner we begin building trust between those who feed and those who eat.