Guiding Word for 2023 - Remember

 “Remember who you are.” 

Hearing the voice of James Earl Jones say this to Simba in The Lion King, always stirs me to action. 

My guiding word for 2023 is remember. 

I often experience times where my anxiety gets the best of me. An immediate example that comes to mind is jumping into the Barefoot Writer Club and copywriting. It seemed like something for a while that I wanted to do, but every time I got close to doing it, all the “what ifs” begin to haunt me. Reflecting on my life and my previous experiences with anxiety helped me to remember the challenges I have overcome. 

In my younger years, one of my greatest desires was finding the right girl, getting married, and starting a family. My own family growing up was and still is very family oriented. Some of my greatest memories were made with my family. I wanted to duplicate that for myself. 

My biggest roadblock was my anxiety. 

In my late 20s the anxiety had reached a peak. It was at that point I got so frustrated I dropped to my knees in sincere prayer. As I prayed, the thought came to me, “remember the things you have overcome.” 

Remembering is what brought me out of my gloom and doom enough to say, I am done with it. 

It was just a couple months later that I met an amazing woman, online. We have now been married for almost 18 years and have 3 very different and incredible boys. 

In a The Business Journals article To manage your anxiety, remember your pastsuccesses, author Stevie Ray stated, “If you remember past negative events, they will affect future outcomes. If you remember past successes, the brain is tricked into thinking that the past will rise up and ensure a good outcome.” 

This is the key to me reaching my goals in 2023! 

Anytime my anxiety peaks up this year. Each time I hit a roadblock or some other frustration. I am going to …

 ·      Remember my why

·      Remember my successes

·      Remember my goals

·      Remember that I’ve got this! 

Simba heeded his father’s advice. He remembered who he was. Then he went home to face the challenges awaiting him there, and become the king. 

This year I will remember my past successes, remember to celebrate the little things along the way, and become the king of my writer’s life!

Do you have a guiding word for 2023?

No Sleep. No Think.

 In an instant, your brain refuses to work. Despite your best effort, you cannot finish out the mental and creative task you set out to complete this evening. 

You feel frustrated but slowly pack things up. 

It is in this moment your brain catches up. You are the one that put yourself into this situation. 

The night before, you only got 3 hours of sleep. 

Lack of sleep has impaired your cognitive function. 

You recently started making a real effort in improving your creativity. The creative outlet you have decided to tackle is writing. You’ve had experience in writing and thought it would be an easy ability to fire back up. 

The first few days everything went as well as you thought it would. Things that you write might not be as dynamic as you want it to be at some day, but it’s pretty decent. 

The day before your cognitive collapse, you thought it would be amazing to sleep… 

…until 2 p.m. 

You’ve done this in the past and had no trouble getting to sleep later that night. Not this time! You don’t get to sleep until 3 a.m. 

Lack of sleep negatively impacts your cognitive functions. 

Your find yourself thinking back to something your teachers always told you before a big test. Get plenty of sleep the night before a big test and eat a good breakfast. 

According to the Sleep Foundation, “Without sleep, the brain struggles to function properly.”   

They go on to state, “The existing research strongly supports the notion that poor sleep detracts from effective thinking. Without quality sleep, people are more likely to make errors, fail to take in new information, suffer deficits in memory, or have impaired decision making.”

In the quest to complete creative goals, it’s important to perform at your best. There are several suggestions to improve your performance and to bring your “A” game. 

• Design a creative space

• Schedule your activities when you are at your best

• Learn from the work of other creative people

Perhaps the best suggestion to guarantee better performance is to get a good night’s sleep. 

Last Night of Christmas Break

 Today has been the last day of Christmas Break. As a teacher, it is kind of a sad day, but also a bit exciting too. I’m looking forward to seeing my students and working with them again. I think the sad part is the giant time and stress demand coming back. 

It has been nice not thinking about school or anything related to it for a couple weeks. My wife and I are both teachers. We have a rule that during break we do not do any school related work or talk about it. It gives us time to relax, spend time with our boys, and intentionally work on the life we want to build. I have to admit, I did not get as much done on that last area, as I would have liked. 

So, what do teachers do on the last day of Christmas break? First, I slept until 2 pm. Last day of break and I had to take advantage. We cleaned house. We went shopping and had leftovers for dinner. We also tried to get the boys back into their regular nighttime routine. That is still ongoing at this moment.   

Now we are going over the lesson plans we drafted out before the break, making sure everything is posted to Canvas for our students, and trying to get a handle on what we have to prep tomorrow morning. Elementary teachers use a lot of paper along with our digital. The way I explain that to others is, we do have to teach these little ones how to actually write. I also need to go over seating charts that I need to change and about 2 weeks of unopened email. 

I am sure we are not the only overachievers amongst our colleagues for today. I know many of them won’t hit that until tomorrow morning if they can. Those waiting until tomorrow are also the ones that will probably be there into the evening tomorrow. 

For any other teachers out there, what is your last day of break like?

Thoughts on Service

Friday night we went over with a couple families to clean the church building. As I was vacuuming classrooms in the Primary wing, I started thinking about providing service. In particular, I started thinking about service provided to my family by others while growing up. 

Many times when we think about serving others, we spend our efforts on how we can server those around us. We focus on the service we provide. I think we tend to shy away from receiving service from others. In my opinion, it is because we do not want to admit we may need help. However, there are blessings we receive from service other than the actual service. 

In looking back at this service given, there are a couple examples that stand out to me. Two of those examples involve a couple brothers that served as our Bishop at some time or another. One thing these brethren had in common at some point is they were both mechanics. I remember my dad trying to keep our car going. These men at some time or another spent some personal time or provided some discounted services at their shops to help.

I also thought about home teachers we had assigned to our family across the years. The individuals that stand out are those that made the effort to be consistent in visiting our home. Other than the benefit of knowing there were others that cared about our family, it provided a great example of providing service and time to others. That has had a long lasting effect on me. 

The final examples I thought about were church youth leaders I had growing up. Ones that stand out the most are those I had in my high school years. They spent a great deal of time building relationships with us, providing spiritual knowledge, and providing opportunities for us to develop lasting relationships with our peers. Their examples still stand, as ways I can raise my boys, being aware of other’s needs, and how I should treat my wife. 

What are some examples of lasting service others have provided you?

Multi-Generational Gaming

 One of the things I enjoy as a teacher is the ability to have some long stretches of time off. It helps to make up for all the extra time I have to put in at home when school is in. An activity I love doing is playing video games with my boys. They all have different things they like to play, so it gives some variety. 

Today as I was playing Fortnite with my 16 year old, I was thinking about how video games have evolved. As a kid, I was there when Pong came out. My dad was an early adopter of home video games. Well, at least when it came to Pong. He did love some good arcade time though. 

This afternoon we played duo no-build and duo arena modes. One of the things my son pointed out, we have gotten our game communication down pretty good. I saw that as a victory in itself. Being able to communicate with teenagers is already difficult at times. Speaking of victories, the best we did was a second place finish. Most of them were in the top 15 though. 

It has been an interesting video game journey thus far. Although I really miss the traditional arcade, gaming is still an activity that has carried forward with me. Seriously, I miss Street Fighter, Mortal Combat, Pac-Man, Galaga, Dragon’s Layer, Spy Hunter, and some good pinball. 

As I am writing this, I started thinking about how long this gaming connection goes between our generations. My dad started with Pong in the late 1970s and it has been with me in some form or other since then. As kids, we never had consoles at home, but our friends did. My dad thought it was better money to spend it on a home pc. We did find ourselves playing games on the computer. That of course led to the great deal of PC gaming I did and my love of Real-Time Strategy games. 

Calculating the math on how long this has been going on, figures out to be 43 years. I find it amazing that an activity many passed off as something that would eventually die, has connected us across our generations. 

Do you have an activity that has crossed multiple generations? Feel free to share.

New Year and a New Reason to Blog

 Welcome to 2023 Everyone!

It has been a total rollercoaster of life since I last published something here. As a writer and a teacher, I realize that I can improve my craft in both fields by writing something every day. I thought about doing this just on my laptop or even handwriting it, but why should I hide it when I can share it with the world. That gave me a good reason to fire this blog back up!

I really can't say what you will find here or if anyone will even visit. It really doesn't matter. If my random writings only improve the skills I already have, develop some new ones, and provide me a creative outlet, so be it. The one goal that I have is to write 300 words per day. 

I recently read in a blog post at AWAI about looking back on all your accomplishments, skills learned, and challenges successfully completed. This was as an application across your entire life. I feel that is a very good starting point for this year for me. The post used it as a technique to get over the feeling and voices that say you are not very good at something. This activity ties in really well with the effort I am making with my students to develop a growth mindset. 

A resource I have used for teaching this in class is the Big Ideas section of the ClassDojo website. The little animated videos are great for engaging the students and having a structured discussion about the concept. I think a good challenge would be tying the two together on a level my students can accomplish as a New Year’s exercise.

Feel free to share any ideas you may have that would help me structure this for a bunch of 9 year olds. My students are great creative writers. I just need to flip that strength into writing something autobiographical.

Irony

So I will make one comment about the delay in posts and that is it. It is ironic that as I am working on these character traits and get to follow through that once I start working on that it is almost half a year until I post again. I am going to be working on a new yet similar project next year and hope to capture a good portion of it here. This one will involve George Washington.

In keeping with character and irony, it is character that matters most above anything else. Republican Presidential Candidate Herman Cain seems to be fitting into both of those recently. Keeping it short and sweet, a few weeks ago a couple of different women came out and said he sexually harassed them back in the early 1990s. That becomes a he said she said and we do believe in innocence until proven guilty. Then a couple weeks ago an Atlanta woman came out and stated they had a 13 year affair and she had some documentation to back it up. He had also been providing financial support to her. He did say he had been providing support to a friend that was in financial need. I can sort of understand that but there is the whole avoiding the appearance of evil thing. Now that it has come out that his wife did not know about this woman or the financial support that he had been giving he is dropping out of the race. That is a good decision as character does count for everything and even still going on the premise of innocent until proven guilty, the fact that his wife did not know about all this is a huge indictment of Mr. Cain's character.

So on to the irony of this whole situation which really chaps me after Herman had campaigned as a outside the establishment candidate. Which quite honestly made him very appealing. They are saying that he is going to come out today and endorse Newt Gingrich. Hello! Newt cheated on his wife. He is also the ultimate establishment candidate. So you have one alleged cheater endorsing a known cheater for President.

Does character not count for anything anymore?

In regards to presidential candidates, I firmly believe the only two with great character are Michelle Bachman and Rick Santorum. I think that Romney and Perry are probably decent guys but they lack consistency.