No #184 | August 31, 2025

by Matthew Boyd

Good morning, welcome to the weekly Lead It Cool newsletter.

Me in June: Yes! Summer! Let's go sunshine, bring it on☀️😃

Me at the end of August: Please let there be rain... ☔😏

In this week's Lead It Cool newsletter:

• 🧭Back to School
• 😴Seven Types of Rest
• 📃Paper Blanket
• 💍Taylor's Engagement
• 😎Cool Links

🧭Back to School

This week marks the return of back-to-school season (parents rejoice!).

To help get into the "school" mindset, my family decided to watch Mr. Holland's Opus (now streaming on Disney+!).

For those unfamiliar, the movie follows a struggling musician who reluctantly takes a job as a high school music teacher. At first, he resists the role, but over time he comes to realize that helping students discover a love of music is the greatest symphony of all.

Early in the film, there’s a particularly powerful line that the school principal gives to Mr. Holland:

That quote feels especially fitting as the school year begins.

To all the teachers, support staff, and volunteers who pour their time, energy, and heart into helping students grow, you have one of the most important jobs in the world, and I tip my hat to you.

Happy back-to-school, everyone!

😴Seven Types of Rest

When we hear people say that they need a rest, our initial reaction is that they need to get some sleep.

However, the truth is there are many different forms of rest we can invest in to avoid becoming burned out.

​Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith summarizes the seven different types of rest that we should focus on to ensure proper restoration. For me personally I really need to purposeful with sensory rest.

1. Physical. Rest your body
2. Mental. Rest your mind
3. Sensory. Take a break from bright lights, computer screens and background noise
4. Creative. Nurture the awe and wonder in your life
5. Emotional. The time and space to freely express yourself
6. Social. Differentiating between the relationships that revive us versus exhaust us
7. Spiritual. Connect to a deeper sense of belonging, love, acceptance and purpose

📃Paper Blanket

Perfect sidekick for the fall season (source).

💍Taylor's Engagement

Lots and lots of memes about the Taylor-Travis engagement announcement this week. But this one wins them all.😂

Could you imagine!

😎Cool Links

💡Shift in leadership approach needed to boost Canada's productivity. According to Baoween, low productivity results in bottlenecks, slows innovation, and makes it harder for Canadian businesses to compete. He says the problem often lies not with employees’ effort, but with systems that are not designed to help them succeed.

⌛A Study Says Your Brain Can Travel Through Time. Now, a new study from a team of German scientists at Regensburg University has shown that using “mental time travel” techniques can actually enhance the brain’s ability to recall memories, especially in the short term. The rate of “forgetting” isn’t linear—details of a memory will quickly be forgotten over days or weeks, but less and less of the memory is lost over longer periods.

🤔The Man Who Saved the World. He was not supposed to be on duty that night and would never have been “the right man in the right place” as he later claimed if the officer scheduled for that shift had not called in sick. On such small things have turned so many of history’s greatest events. And so Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov, a 44-year-old lieutenant colonel in the Soviet Air Defense Forces found himself the Duty Officer at the command center for the nation’s nuclear early-warning system the night on the night of September 26th, 1983 when that system told him his worst nightmare was coming true.

🐈‍⬛Finally, for the feline fans out there, here is your heartwarming story for the week. 🥹

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