President’s Message:
Introduction to the President’s Challenge (October 2021)

Hello, Members of the Academy,

It’s an honor and a privilege to start my term representing you as president of the American Academy of Audiology. As I’ve looked forward to the year ahead and what I hope we can accomplish together, I’ve thought a lot about what being a member of this Academy means to me.

To me, the Academy is about community. It’s about how much more powerful we are together than we are as individuals. It’s about joining together to amplify our voices to send a strong, clear message.

We are unified in our perception of the value we offer and how essential good hearing and balance are to quality of life. As an Academy and as a community, we can leverage the power of every one of us as members to make sure that legislation, regulation, public perception, and our professional reputation with referring providers reflect the value we bring to the health-care system and to individual lives.

This sounds like a heavy lift. And it is… there is a lot of work to be done and I promise you that volunteer leadership and staff of the Academy are tackling it head on, with a strategic and focused approach. But I want to do more than tell you about our efforts in a President’s Message. I want to engage you in the effort.

I am asking each of you to lend your voice to the message. I need you to be willing to act in the small ways that each of us as individuals can, to be the change we want to see. For this reason, I’m reimagining the President’s Message you usually see in Audiology Weekly as the President’s Challenges. Over the course of the year, there will be six President’s Challenges, each tied directly to the initiatives that matter most to our profession, those objectives that we have identified as key to achieving our strategic priorities, and that we believe, when accomplished, will meaningfully improve your professional life.

For each President’s Challenge, I will share some information about the objective, why it’s important, and exactly how you can help. When you complete the challenge, submit a photo, video, or summary of how you participated to the Academy and you’ll receive a certificate to display in your office celebrating your accomplishment and your commitment to making Audiology better than it ever has been before.

I understand that sometimes it can be daunting to know how to make a difference. What will help? How can one person move the needle? If you follow along with the President’s Challenges, each of our small contributions will be multiplied by the efforts of all the members who embrace the challenge and, in this way, even seemingly small efforts will have great impact.

Chaos Theory is a branch of mathematics that focuses on the science of unpredictability, for example, in terms of the weather or the stock market. One of the key principles is called the Butterfly Effect. This principle developed in the early 1960s when an MIT scientist realized that changing his input in a weather prediction model by a few hundredths of a point radically changed the output in ways he never expected or could have predicted. This discovery led him to claim that something as small as a butterfly flapping its wings in one corner of the world could lead to a hurricane an ocean away. What does this have to do with audiology?

If each of our small contributions are analogous to a butterfly flapping its wings which has the potential create a distant hurricane, imagine the resounding impact we could make if we had thousands of wings flapping at once, focused together on a single purpose. There is little doubt we’d create a tidal wave of change that would reach every corner of the profession. So, please, join me in taking the President’s Challenges!

Read and watch on to learn about our first challenge…Advocacy!