By Ryan W. Quinn
For the past forty days, we have posted a program on this blog about changing our reactions to negative events. This seems like a useful topic to me, if for no other reason than because there are so many negative events in our world to react to. Dad felt inspired to post the program on our blog because he spent so much of his life struggling to recover from the losses of the Red Sox, and now, finally, has learned how to react differently to that disappointment. The past forty days have given us, as a society, many more serious negative events to contemplate, however, than just the loss of the Red Sox. Today, I have a couple of ruminations on this topic that I feel inclined to share.
One of these ruminations is a memory of an event that happened a day or two after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. At the time, I was a doctoral student in what was then the University of Michigan Business School’s Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management department (now the “Management and Organizations” department of the “Ross School of Business”). I went to the weekly brown bag seminar held for the faculty and doctoral students, and instead of the usual research presentation, there was an open discussion about the terrorist attacks. Read more »