Dr Laura Lowery's Blog

In my last blog post, I wrote about my current daily positive affirmations and how they are really helping. Just saying them every morning and throughout the day makes me smile. Yesterday, I happened to email with a former student from my lab (who had not read my blog), and she wrote, “I have been…

Hi there. I’m still here. I know that it’s been a while. I think about this blog a lot, this sharing of myself and my private and intimate thoughts with the world. What is safe to share, in this sort of public forum, where anyone can come across it? I mean, a link to this…

I’ve been thinking a lot about criticism lately. How we hear it, how we respond to it, how we absorb it or repel it. My current life partner is a rather critical person, in general. He has a lot of strong opinions on how people should improve and grow, and he is not afraid to…

So, a former student of mine, who trained as a scientist but is now thinking that she wants to be an artist, contacted me yesterday to share her dreams. She was quite concerned that her dreams of becoming an artist were too crazy. And so this is how I replied. — Thank you so much…

One of my current regular writing exercises is to get onto paper every childhood memory that I can think of. Eventually, I hope to put together an actual book that flows well so that I can share it with my children. My first goal is to have a version of this to share with my…

In the Mid-Career Faculty Leadership Program that I am participating in this year, one of the activities we are doing is reading the book, “Designing your life – how to build a well-lived joyful life” by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. For years, they have been teaching a course of the same name at Stanford…

It’s been a couple of months since I last posted. There is a lot going on in my family life that is taking much of my attention. My son’s Bar Mitzvah is in less than 2 months, and I must admit that I will be MUCH relieved when that event is in the past. He…

I have a lot going on in my head these days, but I have been having difficulty figuring out what to capture in these blog posts, what to share with the world. But it’s been over a month since my last post, and so I decided to mainly just say hello and let my readers…

“It helps to resign as the controller of your fate. All that energy we expend to keep things running right is not what’s keeping things running right. We’re bugs struggling in the river, brightly visible to the trout below. With that fact in mind, people like me make up all these rules to give us…

A good friend of mine recently recommended a podcast episode that I listened to over the weekend, Arthur Brooks discussing his book, Strength to Strength, on Oprah’s Super Soul podcast. As I expected, I found it timely and so I went and actually bought the book as well. Arthur Brooks is a social scientist who…