Wishing you Happiness in the New Year

 

To all friends who have visited, read and enjoyed this blog:

Thank you for your interest and support! It has been an amazingly fascinating and challenging year for me and it has been an immense personal satisfaction to develop this blog further.
I can't wait to enter the new year and have the opportunity to share more insights and personal thoughts on developing ourselves into more conscientious and free beings, tending for our body, minds, hearts and souls.

I Wish You a Healthy and Happy New Year!

Below are some tips for creating and allowing happiness into our lives. The Greater Good Science   Center is based in the University of California, Berkley and sponsors research into social and emotional well being.

Here are 6 habits they say are worth cultivating if you want to lead a happier life:

To view Press Here:
6 Habits of Happiness Worth Cultivating

VIA Greater Good Science Center

On Education

Having had the immense pleasure and honor of working with children for several years, I am very concerned about the impact our current educational system has on them. I personally believe we ought to be working towards a revolution in the way we educate our youngsters. That is why I am impressed by Portuguese teen entrepreneur, Ricardo Sousa, who has founded the "Movement for Change in Education". MCE hopes to be an enabler and a catalyzer for local action demanding an education model where creativity, entrepreneurship and individual talent are taken into consideration. ricardosousa.me

VIA ricardojrsousa.wordpress.com

My curiosity on ways to view and involve children holistically in education led me to Sir Ken Robins' work and I reveled in watching his TED speech in Monteray, California. This extraordinary man shares with us his thoughts on how our current educational system stifles children's creativity. 


Sir Ken Robinson is an author, speaker, and international advisor on education in the arts to government, non profits, education and arts bodies. He was Director of the Arts Schools Project (1985-89), Professor of Arts Education at the University of Warwick (1989-2001), and was knighted in 2003 for services to education. Wikipedia

Below are a few of his inspirational words for those who don't have 20 minutes to spare to listen and reflect on where our current educational system takes the keepers of this world's future.  


"Creativity now is as important in education as literacy and we should treat it with the same status" 


"Every education system on earth has the same hierarchy of subjects...At the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities and at the bottom are the arts."



"Our task is to educate [children's] whole being so they can face [the] future."

"Many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they're not, because the thing they were good at at schooled wasn't valued or was actually stigmatized." 


"We know...about intelligence:
Intelligence is diverse: We think about the world in all the way we experience it. We think visually, we think in sound, we think kinesthetically, [we think] in abstract terms, we think in movement.
Intelligence is dynamic: Creativity...more often than not, comes about through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things."


"We have to rethink the fundamental principles by which we are educating our children."


Finally, my personal favorite: 
"If you are not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original"


Watch it, you will be inspired!

Let it Be For Everything To Be Alright!

At times of trouble, just remember...

Let it Be Because Everything is Gonna Be Alright!!

Just Perfect!

Dare to fail?

Coaching with my incredibly sensitive and insightful coach, Rich Litvin has had an impact on me as few self development courses or lectures I have attended. And I have attended MANY! My beliefs and world views are gently challenged by Rich, and this has the power to change the way I see the world, in only one hour! Because the way I view it changes, I automatically start occurring in the world differently!

Some time ago, Rich challenged me to fail! My work (coaching is all about taking steps forward, so there is always a call to action!) was to collect a pre set number of "NOs". When I first heard it, I thought "peace of cake, bring me the real challenge!!", boy was I in for a surprise! 

When I started out trying to collect NOs, it was much harder than I thought.  It made me realize that to me, receiving a NO is synonymous to failure. OK, I did ask a waiter if I could move my table outside the restaurant and he very politely replied "No, I'm sorry, that is impossible" with a very puzzled look on his face, given that there was obviously nowhere to put the table outside the restaurant. Yet that was easy. He was a stranger, he would never see me again and let's face it, these waiters see so many "weird" people everyday, I couldn't care less if he thought I was just another one of them. 

Then the challenge started to feel uncomfortable. I started thinking of things to ask of people I know, that might get me a NO. I really longed to do it, and even though I knew it was only a "game" I still felt that getting the NO would mean I failed. The thought of asking real challenging things from my friends, my clients and even my landlord, filled me up with fear and paralyzed me. I was obviously not prepared to hear the two lettered word from them!  I am still playing the game and at times it still feels like butterflies are having a party in my stomach. 

The Bible says: Ask and it shall be given you. It never said: "Ask once and it shall be given you straight away"! As Master Coach, Steve Chandler puts it: Yes lives in the land of No! The more No's you receive, the bigger the chances to collect the so sought after Yes!

When we think failure (as in NO), we immediately put up a fight. Failure is a hard blow to our ego: "Someone said no to ME? Let me run and hide in my whole for a month!" 

The No game, or any other form of failure, are ways to take your consciousness to another level. The more you fail, the more you become resilient to it, feeling the need to hide in the whole for less and less time, until one day, failure (or No) is just another word, detached from any fighting or feelings of unworthiness. 

Have you seen Nike's commercial featuring Michael Jordan talking about his life's failures?

How many times have you failed this past month? Just for fun, are you willing to double the failure rate next month? Give yourself a REALLY challenging new years resolution and take your consciousness to the next level while you're at it!