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THE POWER OF MINDSETS

Our mindsets direct the experience of our lives toward happiness or misery.  Henry Ford wisely noted:  “Whether you think you can or  think you can’t  – you’re right.” Our state of mind has a huge impact on how we experience life.  We can choose one way of thinking – “I can” –  and the result is that we work at a problem until we solve it because we believe we can. Or we can choose “I don’t think I can” and the result is that we stop trying because . . . “What’s the use?” We don’t believe we can. In his infinite wisdom, Buddha said, “What we think, we are.”   What we think, we feel – stress or joy.  What we think, we

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The Power Of Belief

Andy is a trainer and board member of Ho’ala Foundation for Education dba Awakening Wisdom. His life is a reflection of Awakening Wisdom’s “why” as you will see from this article he wrote.  The Power Of Belief “I know I mean something in this world now.” Twenty years ago, a group of inner-city students I worked with introduced me to “The Rose That Grew From Concrete” by Tupac Shakur. It is a collection of poetry that fits well alongside my humble library of books focused on the human condition – the sorrows and the joys of our journeys.  Reading the quote above brought me back to those students as I witnessed another rose struggling to break through, reaching for the sun.  We had just wrapped up

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LISTENING GROUPS

Students are starved for listening, to have experiences where they are invited and encouraged to share and to be understood.

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Raising Resilient Students

Julie Lycott-Haimes, while Dean of Students at Stanford, noticed that incoming freshmen were less resilient to handle the challenges of college life.  In her book, How to Raise Successful Children:   Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kid for Success, she describes how the over-helping done by parents and by educators, too, has crippled our youth so that they are less able to “#adult.”    Helicopter parenting has morphed into “snowplow” parenting in the winter, “lawnmower” parenting in the summer, describing how parents remove any obstacle in their child’s journey to adulthood.  The college admission scandal is an example of this level of parent interference. Of course, they are doing it out of love, not realizing that they are robbing their child of

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YOU’RE NOT RAISING CHILDREN; YOU’RE RAISING ADULTS

This  title is a somewhat unusual way of thinking of our roles as educators and as parents in raising our children, our students. Every organization has a purpose and vision – their North Star – toward which they labor.   A family, a classroom, a school are all organizations and, like a business or a nonprofit,  it helps to be clear about its North Star.   What kind of human being do we want our children to be when they are adults?   What kind of human being do we want our students to be when they leave our school? What kind of employee will serve our global family? My daughter asked me when she was 9 years old, “Mom, what do you want me to be?” 

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