January- Enthusiasm

 Hope for a Better World-- 2021 year of awesome has started.

We had our kick off learning about what enthusiasm means.   When I was in Jr High  I had a great speech teacher - Mrs. Daniels, who made us stand by our desk and say every day with her, "I am Happy. I am healthy.  I am enthusiastic."  Then in high school another amazing speech teacher, Bryan Bowles, had us all learn a speech about Ralph Waldo Emerson and repeat, "Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm."    This has stuck with me for decades.   The Greek meaning for enthusiasm means "with God."    We all stood on our chairs and repeated over and over, "I am happy, I am healthy, I am enthusiastic" over and over til I believed it.  The grandkids couldn't believe we were standing on our chairs, but then when I asked everyone to sign a commitment to an awesome year and we were doing it under the dining room table, on the table itself, their brains exploded.  Meema wants us to write on her furniture.  It was so fun scrambling under the table and passing out the markers.  We signed and dated our names with enthusiasm.  

Part of our enthusiasm this month is for service in our families.  I made service stars for each family to use for the next couple of weeks.  Do a small service for someone leave a star and "tag your it," now it's your turn to do something and leave the star.  The littles really got into it.   

The final piece for this month is learning about, working on, and setting an Impossible Goal.  Impossible goals are awesome for three reasons. 1: By telling yourself from the start that it's impossible, your brain gets out of the way and isn't too worried and isn't throwing up roadblocks about how this isn't going to work.  2: It's great to brainstorm an idea and all of the different ways you could accomplish it, or try to accomplish it.  Go for 25 worthy fails.  Worthy fails mean you actually do something from your brainstorm list.  Not just don't do it.      3:  It's in the trying to do it, not the result that you learn so much about yourself and how you can fail and learn and just keep going.  Anyone who wants to pick this up, we will discuss and help each other through it.

Andrew and Sophia finally made it to our home to do the enthusiasm cheer and climb under the table and sign their names to affirm they are on board for our Year of Awesome!