Management of Measurement Constructs

How’re you doing, in Astrology?”A Suggestion for the New Year

I received a telephone call this morning from a participant on the Forum. I don’t know the person; she was diligently inquiring about the quality of her work on successive submissions in vocational profiling exercises. It was a pleasure to tell her how much her work had improved, how well she was doing.

She said she had picked up the special fine points on the Forum for her technique, on this website, through the essays. –I was so very pleased to hear that.

But there are others who have been working within this website for a long time who show no improvement; who simply appear content to float at the same level as last year, the year before. And that bothers me.

Of course, we can say that not everyone wants to do any more with astrology than enjoy fascinating reading and hobbyist involvement. Fine. –But I want to remind everyone how much there is to gain through serious learning. I gain much studying Biblical Archaeology although I will never dig a hole in the Holy Land!

And so it is with our enormous resources here on this website: some 190,000 words in tutelage through the essay departments; a daily stream of questions and answers and discussions on the Forum (about 1,200 postings per month!). Somehow, someway, we should be growing through our learning within all this.

Discovery is energy. How much are you letting yourself experience?

Ask yourself: what have I learned this month? Have I taken what I’ve learned into practice and further investigation? Or have I just passively asked a few more questions and let answers fly by?

Have you thought of doing what this lady who called me this morning does: maintain a learning program every day, every week, every month … just as one would study a book, section by section?

**How about this startling fact: many people buy a book just to have it, not to read it, discover it, dig deeply into it so that its rewards are part of them forever! –And how many people scan over the discussions on this site and others without seeing what can be put to work tomorrow, the next day, the next?

When someone asks a music student, “How’re you doing with your music?” The student will say well, I’ve learned this Sonata or that one, this Aria or that one, and I’m going on to this or that right now! Progress is the keynote; development is the sustaining energy.

–How’re you doing in your astrology studies?

The students in my Master’s Certification Program know exactly what they are learning, I assure you! At the fourth Lesson, they can’t believe what has already taken place. At the ninth, they realize dramatically that their work at that level would have been impossible some ten months to a year earlier. And the graduates? Get out of THEIR way! Swoosh.

It’s amazing and gratifying how determination to learn translates into real growth and enrichment, how the energy of discovery moves mountains of development.

I can’t be without that feeling, and that’s why I try so hard to pass on the excitement and substance of learning to anyone I can.

Please start making plans for an orderly development program into the New Year … an orderly program, within the Forum and the Essays, or in the Master’s Certification Program, or through a book program, devouring, say, two texts per month!

You owe it to yourself to be the best astrologer you can be … even if it is just an enriching hobby. –Then, when someone asks you, “How’re you doing?” You will be able to tell them … with a trumpet in hand!

Happy New Year!