Saturday, 03/19/16, 9:17am, 2:21pm
Yesterday, at RG's school, they were holding a special The Leader in Me event. I attended most of it since TK had preschool in the morning. The basic concept here is teaching children to be leaders by embodying the 7 Habits, as penned by Stephen Covey. If you're completely unfamiliar with the 7 Habits, I'd recommend skimming them here.
I was listening to individual presentations in the third grade classrooms. They were presenting on Habit 5: Seek first to understand, then to be understood. It's a good habit, really. Now, most of the presentations were pretty much the same. It seemed like the kids had been giving some guidelines of what to include, but then could expand on specific examples of good and bad ways to show the habit, etc. Basically, it was listen first, understand what the other person is saying, don't be the one to talk about yourself all the time, etc. One girl had an additional insight in her presentation that I thought was really great and really important. She said that if someone is sad or upset, listen to them, don't tell them what to do. This is so great! Sometimes, yes, our friends are looking for a solution when they're bothered by something, but most often, people just need someone to listen.
I'm not sure where my blog falls within this habit. I guess I'm providing a way for others to seek to understand, but not really myself. But this is one habit that I really work hard at. I consider myself a good listener, but I know I could always do better. This is something that's really hard to do when you have differing opinions with the other person. When you get into conversations about politics, religion, parenting, values, it can be really hard to listen first when the person has a strong, differing opinion. But we need to work on that more. One of the third graders also pointed out that he thought we would have fewer wars if we all worked on this habit. How awesome would that be? Just by listening more, and trying to understand others more, and being more empathetic, as I've said in the past, we could improve our world.
The other Habit I want to talk about is actually the first one. Habit 1: Be proactive. I do think that this one is worth following the link and reading up on the background of this habit. The key point in this habit is "taking responsibility for your life." It's not always easy to do. It's easy to blame our grumpiness on other factors: the weather, this person was rude to me today, the kids are being exceptionally tough today, my spouse doesn't appreciate me, etc. We have to understand the difference between our circle of concern and our circle of influence. Do you remember me talking about this once before? When I talked about it before I talked about the circle of control and circle of influence. But sometimes we talk about it in terms of the circle of concern. We have a large circle of concern, but only a small portion of that is within our control. We have to always understand and accept the things we can't control (other people for example). We need to focus on what we have control over (ourselves). It's something I'm still really working on. There are people I know with mental illness who I wish would get all the help they need, but I can't control that. There are people I know who suffer from hurts in the past for whom I wish I could take away their pain, but I can't control that. I can only control me, my reactions to people and things in my life. It would be healthiest if I could stop worrying about my circle of concern, but I'm not sure I can do that either. It's hard.
The 7 Habits is something I'm quite interested in, have learned some through RG's school, but I feel I need to immerse myself more in. It is/was hard to be told, with reference to the first habit, that we have control over ourselves completely. We control our mood, we control our actions, we control our emotions. Sometimes, with the depression, I don't feel like I have that control. It's a tough balance. Knowing that I can change my emotions can sometimes be empowering, but when I don't feel like I can do it, I feel guilt and shame that I'm unable to do it. And of course, that guilt and shame make my depression worse.
I went for a run this morning, with my sister, and we made it a full 10k. Felt awesome and a great start to a busy weekend.
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