The Lost Art of Showing Kindness

“Be kind and merciful. Let no one ever come to you without coming away better and happier.” (Mother Teresa)
We know life is not always a bed of roses and many of us get caught from time to time, by the thorny parts of life. Sometimes an angel in the guise of a friend, or loved one or even a complete stranger for that matter, comes along to rescue us or helps ease our burden by listening to our plight. It may not have been a grand gesture or a big thing that this person did or said but they helped us, when we needed it most.

How many times do we wish after a situation like this, that we had taken the time to thank that person properly for the kindness they showed us. Sometimes circumstances prevent us from showing our gratitude at the time and the opportunity of thanking them passes by and then before we know it, so much time has elapsed that the kindness has been all but forgotten and we have not made the effort to thank them. It can be tricky finding a way to thank complete strangers, but it is possible if we take the time and effort.

There is a lovely true story about Charles Plumb, who was a US Navy jet pilot in Vietnam. After 75 combat missions, his plane as destroyed by a surface-to-air missile. Plumb ejected and parachuted into enemy hands. He was captured and spent six years in a communist Vietnamese prison. He survived the ordeal and now lectures on lessons learned from that experience.
One day, when Plumb and his wife were sitting in a restaurant, a man at another table came up and said, “You’re Plumb! You flew jet fighters in Vietnam from the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk. You were shot down!”

“How in the world did you know that?” asked Plumb.
“I packed your parachute,” the man replied. Plumb gasped in surprise and gratitude. The man pumped his hand and said, “I guess it worked!”
Plumb assured him, “It sure did. If your chute hadn’t worked, I wouldn’t be here today.”

Plumb couldn’t sleep that night, thinking about that man. Plumb says, “I kept wondering what he might have looked like in a Navy uniform: a white hat, a bib in the back, and bell-bottom trousers. I wonder how many times I might have seen him and not even said ‘Good morning, how are you?’ or anything because, you see, I was a fighter pilot and he was just a sailor.”
Plumb thought of the man hours the sailor had spent on a long wooden table in the bowels of the ship, carefully weaving the shrouds and folding the silks of each chute, holding in his hands each time the fate of someone he didn’t know.

Now, Plumb asks his audience, “Who’s packing your parachute?” Everyone has someone who provides what they need to make it through the day. Plumb also points out that he needed many kinds of parachutes when his plane was shot down over enemy territory-he needed his physical parachute, his mental parachute, his emotional parachute, and his spiritual parachute. He called on all these supports before reaching safety.

With family and friends, it is much easier to say thank you and to show your gratitude, yet surprisingly, many people forget to do this. Sometimes in the daily challenges that life gives us, we miss what is really important. We may fail to say hello, please, or thank you, congratulate someone on something wonderful that has happened to them, give a compliment, or just do something nice for no reason.

I like to think that developing positive relationships is like a bank account. We all make deposits and withdrawals. The deposits are the things we do to help someone, like a simple gesture of cleaning the kitchen up or taking them out to dinner or lunch. Withdrawals are when we need a favour or help and the other person does this for us out of the goodness of his or her heart (or maybe a little prompting in the case of our spouse or partner). In positive relationships, it’s always best to be on the credit side – to have made more deposits than withdrawals and if this is not the case, then it is very unlikely that both people in the relationship are happy.

Showing kindness and gratitude seems to me to be a lost art, don’t you think? Reading and hearing horrible stories of the verbal or physical cruelty that humans can inflict upon one another at home, or in business, on the road and even in schools is appalling and it would be very easy to become despondent about the lost art of good manners, thoughtfulness and kindness. Whatever happened to the adage that our mothers constantly repeated to us, ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you”? Yes, what has happened to the simple act of showing kindness?

One person can make such a difference to someone else’s life and believe it or not, to thousands of other people too. Ann Herbert may be an unknown name to you, but Ann started something big by one simple action. In 1982, in a restaurant in Sausalito, California, Ann wrote the following words on a place mat, “practice random acts of kindness and senseless acts of beauty.” Sounds simple and inconsequential don’t you think? Before long, it spread to bumper stickers and for some reason the simplicity appealed to many people and the practice of random acts on kindness became a world-wide phenomenon. From this one action grew mass action. True stories and books were written about random acts of kindness which has continued unabated since that fateful day in 1982 when one person made a simple but remarkable statement.

I am in awe of the number of ordinary heroes within our midst. Yes it might seem like an oxymoron to talk about ordinary heroes because a hero after all is someone venerated for heroic acts like putting their life at risk in order to save someone else’s life or many lives. Ordinary heroes, on the other hand, are more common but in my mind, every bit as heroic in the real sense of day to day living.

She or he is the kind of person that gets on and does a job without any fuss. Often they are the first to put up their hand for a new task, nothing is too much trouble and it seems as if they infinite time to go around. Now we know of course, that they have busy lives too, but somehow these people magically make time for other people and put their own needs second. If you talk to such a person they will tell you that they get more out of life by helping someone else and showing kindness to others, than if they had just gone on with their own lives. Debi Mazar puts it this way:

“A hero is somebody who is selfless, who is generous in spirit, who just tries to give back as much as possible and help people. A hero to me is someone who saves people and who really deeply cares. “

There are so many people around us who are ordinary heroes. Let's celebrate these people by showing our appreciation for their actions and kind words. We all benefit by showing gratitude and not only do we make someone's day by this simple thing, but we feel better about ourselves too.

“Appreciation is a wonderful thing: it makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well.” (Voltaire)

Karon Graham

If You're an Optimist, You're Not Alone!

Don’t you love it when a plan comes together? A plan as simple as organising a day out with your family or cooking a great meal or more significantly, organising a special surprise birthday party or escaping to your favourite holiday getaway can make your day and put you on top of the world, so long as, all goes well. Why the proviso? English poet, Robert Burns once wrote:

“The best laid schemes of mice and men oft go awry…”

Yes, sometimes our best laid plans can come unstuck and in spite of our best efforts, all does not go well. Making the best of a bad situation is often all that’s left for us to do, because the situation is, what it is. I recently came across some funny statements made on actual insurance claims that give some indication of how bad a day can go in the blink of an eye (apparently). In the drivers own words:

“Coming home I drove into the wrong house and collided with a tree I don't have.”
“I had been shopping for plants all day and was on my way home. As I reached an intersection, a hedge sprang up, obscuring my vision and I did not see the other car.”
“As I approached the intersection a sign suddenly appeared in a place where no sign had ever appeared before, making me unable to avoid the accident. “
"The guy was all over the road. I had to swerve a number of times before I hit him."
"I was thrown from my car as it left the road, and was later found in a ditch by some stray cows."
And my favourite:
“In my attempt to kill a fly, I drove into a telephone pole.”

I am a self confessed optimist and always try to look on the bright side of life. I have discovered though, that I am not the only one who thinks this way. Hard to believe that in this day and age of instant bad news, 24/7 and despite the barrage of bad news, it appears that most of us believe that things will turn out okay. While the world around us might be disintegrating, our personal view of our own life is still amazingly optimistic. Rather ironic don’t you think or maybe not. Maybe we are just far more complacent about our own personal circumstances than those of people around us.

I was heartened to read in a recent article by Tali Sharot in the June 6, Time magazine, called ‘The Optimism Bias’, that most of us are optimists. It turns out that we are hardwired to be this way, because of the evolution of our brain over time. Recent research shows that we expect things to turn out better than they wind up being and we seriously underestimate the chances of bad things happening to us, while we tend to overestimate good things happening to us and our family.

The fact that we believe the future will be much better than the present is called the ‘optimism bias’ according to Sharot and transcends all races, religion, socioeconomic status and cultures. This optimism bias actually protects us and inspires us and gives us hope. This faith helps motivate us to achieve our goals. No wonder our vision of our future is rosier than the reality of the situation. Take for example our perception of our own driving ability. Did you know that 93 percent of people surveyed believed that they were in the top 50th percentile for driving ability? Perhaps not so surprising given some of the statements made on the insurance claims up above.

Scientific evidence shows that where people are more optimistic, their chances of recovery from serious illness are more positive that those people who are pessimistic. According to Sharot, a study conducted with heart-disease patients showed that optimistic patients were more likely to take vitamins, eat low-fat diets and exercise and were more likely to reduce their overall coronary risks. A study of cancer patients revealed also, that pessimistic patients were more likely to die within eight months than optimistic patients of a similar age, status and health conditions. These studies beg the question,” Can optimism change reality?” Well according to another study conducted with students, it seems we can effect change in our reality.

Cognitive neuroscientist, Sara Bengtsson found that students’ brains responded differently to the mistakes they made depending on whether they were primed with certain words. She found that when she induced certain expectations with college students by using words such as ‘smart’,’ intelligent’ and ‘clever ‘just before asking them to perform a test that these students performed better than those students who heard words like ‘stupid’, and ‘ignorant’ before their test. Not surprisingly then, students performed better after hearing an affirmative message and she found that the brain activity was greater after a word like clever was used because the student was primed to perform well. When the word stupid was used, the brain expected to do poorly and did not show signs of surprise or conflict when it made an error.

Interestingly, the research shows that optimists work longer hours and tend to earn more. What are the implications of all of this information? Well as Sharot argues, the good news is that awareness of our optimism rarely shatters the illusion. I guess we are just better prepared for any eventuality. The glass remains half full, because we still believe that we will remain healthy, yet most of us take out health insurance and while for some of us the sun is always shining, we still take an umbrella with us, just in case.

Life’s not perfect but as Nicholas Butler points out:

“Optimism is essential to achievement and it is also the foundation of courage and true progress.”

Karon Graham

What's the Most Effective Form of Feedback? What does the research say?

Queenslander!
Don‘t you feel proud to be a Queenslander? After great wins by the Brisbane Lions, Queensland Reds, a fantastic State of Origin game where the Maroons continued their winning streak against the NSW Blues and the win by the Queensland Firebirds in the ANZ Netball Final Championship game after an unbeaten record of wins during the season, state pride is at an all time high. Nothing builds state pride more than winning at the games we love against our arch rivals south of the border.

Building a championship team or group – whether a sporting team, a musical band, or choir - takes time, effort, deliberate practice, perseverance, commitment and belief in yourself and your team mates. While we celebrate the great Queensland victories and marvel at their achievements, it’s worth keeping in mind that every single person started somewhere many years ago with limited skills, experience and understanding of how best to improve. To get to the top or to excel in our chosen field requires much more than talent and sometimes we can begin with no talent at all or limited talent and still succeed. How can that be, you may be thinking?

In a sporting environment or a musical group we often need a good coach or a good instructor to help us develop our skills to realise our potential. This is true in many aspects of life – consider some of the favourite reality shows – Masterchef or Biggest Loser. How do the contestants improve? They receive specific feedback on what they are doing well and not only what they are not doing well, but more importantly, what they need to do to improve on those things that they are not doing so well. It’s this constructive feedback and practice that allows contestants, sportspeople and musicians to improve far beyond what they may have been able to achieve if it were not for this constructive feedback and advice.

Why are Queensland coaches like Wayne Bennett or Mal Meninga so sought after in Rugby League ? It’s because they have a demonstrated record of success in bringing players together and training them into a championship team. It is rare for anyone to achieve to high levels without good coaching and mentoring. Whether it’s sport, music, acting, singing, career, business or even school achievement, very few excel without constructive feedback from good coaches or mentors.

In the school environment, feedback is every bit as important as application to class work and study and some researchers would argue that it’s even more important. In his groundbreaking book Visible Learning, researcher and Professor of Education at the University of Auckland, John Hattie, found that after looking at all the possible influences on achievement, it became clear to him that feedback was among the most powerful influences on student achievement.
Hattie has made some important observations about the best kind of feedback to students and some of these observations may surprise you. Hattie explains feedback in this way:

Feedback is information provided by an agent (e.g., teacher, peer, book, parent or one’s own experience) about aspects of one’s performance or understanding. For example a teacher or parent can provide corrective information, a peer can provide an alternative strategy, a book can provide information to clarify ideas, a parent can provide encouragement, and a learner can look up the answer to evaluate the correctness of a response. Feedback is a “consequence” of performance.

Hattie and his researchers found that some types of feedback are more powerful than others in raising student achievement. The most powerful forms of feedback provide cues or reinforcement to the learner in the form of video, audio or computer assisted instruction feedback or relate feedback to learning goals. The key to the success of this kind of feedback is that it is received and acted upon by students.

Despite common perceptions, the least effective forms of feedback for enhancing students’ achievement are praise, punishment and extrinsic rewards. Tangible rewards like stickers, awards and so on have little merit in providing relevant task information and have little impact on improving achievement unless they are accompanied with specific feedback. Tangible rewards actually undermine people taking responsibility for motivating or regulating themselves, according to researchers like Deci, (1999) and Ryan (1985). Hard as this might be to believe and accept, the bottom line is that extrinsic rewards can actually have a negative impact on student engagement according to all of the research conducted with thousands of students, teachers and schools.

So what is the right form of feedback to give? According to Hattie, feedback is more effective when it provides information on correct rather than incorrect responses and when it builds on changes from previous tests. The main purpose of feedback is to reduce discrepancies between current understandings and performance and a learning intention or goal. This kind of feedback can be used in a range of teaching and coaching situations.

The major feedback questions to ask, which focus students most, are:
• “Where am I going?” (learning intentions, goals, success criteria)
• “How am I going?” (self assessment and self-evaluation)
• “Where to next?” (progression and new goals)

These questions work best when both the student and teacher (or parent) seek answers to each of these questions. Closing the gap between where the student is and where they are aiming to be, leads to the power of feedback. The art of course is to give students the right form of feedback at, or just above, the level where the students is working.

There is one exception, and that’s in terms of praise, because praise is rarely directed at the three feedback questions and therefore is rarely effective in improving student performance. What is most important is to have a classroom environment that is engaging and challenging, fosters peer and self-assessment, and allows students to learn from mistakes. The fact is that students need to make mistakes to learn. As Tyron Edwards once said:

Some of the best lessons we ever learn,
We learn from our mistakes and failures.
The error of the past is the success
And wisdom of the future.

Karon Graham

What's the Secret to Success in Life?

If you had a magic wand, what would you change? Now before you go thinking that this is a deep philosophical question, which it is, what would be most important to you? Would it be something about your appearance, your health, your finances, your career, or your neighbours? Would you change your game of golf or tennis, your car, or the general pace of life or something more altruistic like ‘world peace’? Or maybe you’re like me and just want ‘peace at home’. How good would that be?

How many times have you heard someone (or ourselves, for that matter) say, “If only I could do such and such a thing, or be this person, or change some other aspect of our life?” Or maybe you are one of the rare exceptions though, who is very happy with everything in your life? Okay, these people are generally monks, who live in some remote region like the Himalayan mountains. Yes surprisingly, they really are. A research study on happiness done a few years ago ranked monks, who meditated in these remote regions, amongst the happiest people on earth.

It seems that its human nature that we yearn for the best or we simply want more in life. Some people are never happy with their life or life choices. They think that if they had, for example, more money, or more friends or a bigger house or better job, that they would be happy or successful. Interestingly, however, getting more of something does not necessarily bring about happiness, nor does it bring about greater satisfaction either. As many people have found over time, happiness is an intrinsic attitude to life – we either make up our minds to be happy or not.

Some students think that if they had more intelligence or had different circumstances, that they could do better in life or in school. If someone were to say to them exactly how they can achieve more, would they want to pay the price? It’s a common misconception that some people are born smarter, or are more good looking or come from a wealthy family, and that’s why they are successful or happy. The reality is though that many great musicians, sportspeople, academics or business people are successful for very different reasons.

What do technology tycoons Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, basketball superstar, Michael Jordan, All Star Canadian Ice Hockey players have in common? Not much you might be thinking, but surprisingly they do share certain circumstances that account for their success.

In his thought provoking book “Outliers – The Story of Success”, Malcolm Gladwell argues that his research on people who have become successful, demonstrates through a series of totally unrelated people and circumstances, how successful people have become successful. Was there anything magical about how it happened? Maybe, but, by and large many of the most successful people became successful, according to Gladwell because of :

• hard work - one of the keys to success in life, he argues
• persistence - no one succeeds without this key ingredient
• 10,000 hours of deliberate practice are required to become the most successful – whether programming a computer, practising basketball, ice hockey or in science – 10,00 hours of deliberate practice makes perfect
• an element of luck or serendipity - like being in the right place at the right time - but some people seem to make their own luck don’t they?
• timing – the year or even the date born was a factor with some sporting stars who were ‘young for cut-off dates for sporting teams and had advantage of more expert coaching and team competition
• cultural and family circumstances plant the seeds of success – particularly where parents set high expectations and encourage or rehearse their children for success in all aspects of their life.

According to Gladwell (p19):

“People don’t rise from nothing. We do owe something to parentage and patronage. The people who stand before kings may look like they did it all by themselves. But in fact they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot.
It makes a difference where and when we grew up. The culture we belong to and the legacies passed down by our forebears shape the patterns of our achievement in ways we cannot begin to imagine. It’s not enough to ask what successful people are like, in other words. It is only by asking where they are ‘from’ that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn’t.”

Now how does this information benefit us personally or our children? In John Hattie’s groundbreaking research book Visible Learning, he synthesises over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement and found that the top contributor to student achievement gains is prior achievement. In other words, what a child brings to the classroom each year is very much related to their achievement in previous years.

According to Hattie’s findings,(and this will be no surprise to most parents and teachers), students were very knowledgeable about their chances of success and overall if students had higher expectations of success, then they were more likely to succeed than students who did not expect to succeed. Hattie also found that the home environment and parental involvement in learning, parental expectations of students and parental aspirations where the parents are actively involved in the students learning, contributed significantly to student achievement improvement over time. The secret to success is not such a big secret after all.

Commitment to succeeding it seems is as good a predictor of success as many other factors. Parents and students should take heart from these findings as they demonstrate again, that there is no secret to success. Success comes from the interplay of hard work, perspiration and persistence, commitment and family expectations and student expectations and aspirations of how successful they want to be. In conclusion I will leave you with these thoughts from famous Scottish athlete W. H. Murray:

“Until one is committed
There is hesitancy, the chance to draw back,
always ineffectiveness.
Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation)
there is one elementary truth,
the ignorance of which kills countless ideas
and splendid plans:
that the moment one definitely commits oneself,
then Providence moves too.
All sorts of things occur to help one
That would otherwise never have occurred.
A whole stream of events issues from the decision,
raising in one’s favour all manner
of unforseen incidents and meetings
and material assistance,
which no man or woman could have dreamt
would have come his or her way.”

(p.s. Did I mention the 10,000 hours of deliberate practice too?)

Karon Graham
Principal

"Where is Wisdom we have Lost in Knowledge?"

“Nothing seems to be more prominent about human life than its wanting to understand all and put everything together.”
(R. Buckminster-Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, p79)

Many years ago in 1966, American economist, Kenneth Boulding, published, what was to become his most famous essay ‘The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth’ and in 1969 Buckminster-Fuller wrote Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. Drawing on the Apollo 8 mission, both authors were convinced that there had to be a paradigm shift in how we thought about our planet, from ‘cowboy economy’ to ‘spaceship economy’.

Essentially, both authors predicted a shift from the ‘cowboy’ economy of individualism, independence, autocracy, humanity against nature, intercultural and religious intolerance to a ‘spaceship’ culture of community, interdependency, democracy, humanity as part of nature, gender equality, and cultural and religious tolerance. It’s not that we deliberately set out to change our way of thinking, but like in many instances, our perspective on ‘life as we know it’ was transformed in the blink of an eye by one historic event.

The stark image of earth taken from space on Apollo 8 was one such turning point. Like the opening scenes of the brilliant 1968 movie by Stanley Kubrick, 2010: A Space Odyssey, we were changed forever by the images we saw; they were inspirational and transforming. I remember one of the astronauts marvelling at the view from space and making the comment that there are no borders on earth from space.

“The first day or so we all pointed to our countries. The third or fourth day we were pointing to our continents. By the fifth day, we were aware of only one Earth." --Sultan bin Salman Al-Saud and astronaut, Muhammad Ahmad Faris:
"From space I saw Earth -- indescribably beautiful and with the scars of national boundaries gone."

Over the last fifty years there has been a definite shift in the way we think about our place on earth, in particular, the shift to a global perspective, from that of a local almost introspective national perspective. The concept of a global village has become a reality as satellites, the internet, increasing fast and easy world travel and instant messaging, have ‘shrunk’ our world. The speed at which information is now transmitted is breathtaking and it has transformed the way we think about the world – our paradigm has altered forever. Our sons and daughters are growing up in this world; this is their norm.

Innovation comes about by changing the way we think about what we do, how we do it and why we do things a certain way. Peter Ellyard, author of ‘Ideas for the New Millennium’, argues that innovation requires innovative people. Innovation, he believes, will only come about if we have two key elements in play: creativity and enterprise.(p77) Equipping our children with essential skills of life-long learning; giving our young people the skills and the wherewithal to be use initiative, drive, knowledge, wisdom and hunger to create, innovate and succeed is critical for their future success and the future of our world.


Teachers and students work together to discover new ways, new thinking and new paradigms. Albert Szent-Gyorgyi put it this way:

Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.

Our students will amaze you with what they have achieved. Just a few recent examples:

• Transformed stories from Year 4 buddies and create animated digital stories
• Created their own website on environmental matters and learned the power of writing and receiving over $500 and a water tank in Years 3 and 4
• Developed virtual travel itineraries in Year 1
• Skyped a student from their Year 4 class to London to help a young boy who has left the school
• Year 9 students are creating a digital game (using KODU) for Year 2 students
• Year 10 students are creating a Vodcast to assist in subject selection for Year 11
• Created a sophisticated, professional design of an object using Inventor in Year 12 Graphics and a mobile device in Year 9 Graphics
• Year 12 ITS have just completed developing House websites using Dreamweaver

Teachers too have created some exciting ways of inspiring our students, like the now famous CCPS “Captain Energy” on YouTube, which is the brainchild of a certain Year 2 teacher.

In this world of "instant information", it's timely to remember the words of famous poet, T S Eliot:

"Where is wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”

Schools must meet the needs of the future generations leading this planet. The students need skills in problem solving, metacognition, innovative and creative thinking as well as good knowledge and depth of understanding that goes far beyond the surface. Our students need to be thinking globally, as well as acting locally. Good teachers can make the world of difference to our students achievements, and to their future aspirations for themselves and their generation - especially the teachers at Caloundra City Private School.

Karon Graham

Principal

What's the Fascination with Lists?

Have you ever wondered why we are so fascinated by lists of things? We seem to love lists of countdowns to ‘number one’, lists of the top ten or the top one hundred. Why is it that people sit glued to the television to see the countdown to the number one song of all time, or the funniest home video? Why are we so absorbed by The Guinness Book of Records, or Time magazine’s: The World’s Top 100 Most Influential People, or the list of the most glamorous or the richest people in the world, or for that matter, the fastest lap by some celebrity on the Top Gear race track in some remote and obscure area of London?

Why do we keep lists (sometimes in our heads) of the best or favourite movies, songs, or sporting teams? Why do we care what someone else thinks about who’s the best, the fastest, the toughest, the funniest? What does it matter? Well it seems it matters to us a great deal. Lists like these appeal to our natural curiosity and our competitive nature. Maybe too, it’s the debate that goes on around who or what was the number one or who or what was left off the list that we enjoy the most? As any good family debater knows – it can often be a ‘no win’ argument. As one husband quipped to his wife, “If I agreed with you, we'd both be wrong.”

Lists, by definition, give us some sort of order in our lives – from the mundane, like our weekly grocery shopping lists, or the daily ‘to do lists’, to the sublime, like in the movie, The Bucket List, where actors Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson wrote a list of their top ten things to do before they died. As we get older or when become ill, life and how we spend our time takes on a whole new meaning. It’s as if everything comes into sharp focus and we become centred on what’s most important in our life. A bucket list can become a life transforming list.

Noted time management experts and life skills coaches, like Jack Collis and Michael Leboeuf, extol the virtues of lists and setting goals. In their best-selling book, Work Smarter, Not Harder, the authors argue that without lists, without a plan, without goals, we can often live an aimless and purposeless life. The clear message is to make every day count. Merrill Douglass put it this way:
Many people assume that they can probably find many ways to save time. This is an incorrect assumption for it is only when you focus on spending time that you begin to use your time effectively.

There are many benefits to making lists and students in particular can benefit by making lists of their own.
• Lists allow us to take sometimes complex information and simplify it. The alphabet is nothing more than a list of letters and a dictionary a list of words.
• Lists aid our memory retention and are a very useful way to recall disparate information.
• Lists help us organise our lives and keep important goals at the forefront. Doing a ‘to do’ list each day allows us to prioritise our goals – short term and long term - and keeps us focused, not just on the here and now, but also on the future.
• Lists can give us a sense of achievement as we move from one day to the next – sometimes because we wonder what if anything, we accomplished during the day.
• Lists can be powerful motivators, once we have prioritised our goals for the day, or the week or the year for that matter, we can move forward with a sense of purpose and satisfaction.

A word of caution about making lists though. We can sometimes be so caught up with the day to day lists that we lose sight of the big picture in life. It’s important to keep life in perspective; it’s not the end of the world if we don’t complete all of our ‘to do’ lists and our success and happiness is not necessarily measured by how many things we have crossed off our lists. A few wise words to ponder:
Remember where you have been and know where you are going. Life is not a race, but a journey to be savoured each step of the way. (Nikita Koloff)

Students benefit by being organised and parents can help their children to become better organisers by encouraging them to make simple lists. For example, someone should have spent some time with the children listing what needs to happen before and on Mother’s Day. Why? Because mums deserve it!
• Buy present for mums – Mother’s Day Stall at School on Friday - check
• Organise breakfast in bed - check
• Talk to children about being on their best behaviour (at least until breakfast is over and presents given) - check
• Lavish love and affection on mums all day Sunday - check

See how useful lists can be? I would like to take this opportunity to wish all mothers a very Happy Mother’s Day on Sunday and hopefully the above list will materialise as if by magic on the day.

Overcoming Challenges in Life

Everyday life has plenty of challenges don’t you think? Just getting a family organised and ready for school or work is challenge enough most mornings. Lost socks, school hats, bags, car keys, making lunches, early morning training or practices, can push us to the brink, even before the day truly starts. In the scheme of things though, these small challenges are just that – very small challenges – even though they can put us in a cranky mood. Keeping life in perspective is very important for our sense of well being and happiness.

Some of us of course, have far worse challenges to deal with and in many cases, the rest of the world is oblivious to what we are going through. It might be a serious health issue, a difficult relationship, a death of a loved one, financial difficulties or some other problem that is causing us to worry or be concerned. Being happy in the face of these difficulties is not easy and I don’t mean to make light of the challenges that each of us faces. Ironically though, it’s not what happens to us in life that determines our happiness, but how we react to what happens. Ultimately, it’s our attitude to what happens that makes us happy or unhappy. Abraham Lincoln once said:

Most people are about as happy as they make up their mind to be.

Every day we experience the highs and lows of life, the good news and the bad. Life can be like a roller coaster ride – thrilling, exhilarating, frightening, uplifting and depressing – so many emotions, all in the space of a short period of time. No one day is the same. Some days we run on adrenalin and others we rejoice in the contentment of life. The secret to happiness in life is to find joy, or opportunity or a silver lining, if you like, in all the situations that confront us. Granted this is easier said than done, but it'w worth the effort in the long run.

There is an old Chinese proverb that I love: Sāi Wēng Lost his Horse

Sāi Wēng, a Chinese farmer, lived on the border and he raised horses for a living. One day he lost a horse and his neighbour felt sorry for him, but Sāi Wēng, the philosophical farmer, replied to his neighbour, “Good luck? Bad luck? Who knows?”

After a while the horse returned with another beautiful horse, and the neighbour congratulated him on his good luck. But Sāi Wēng thought that maybe it wasn’t necessarily a good thing to have this new horse. The farmer replied to his neighbour,” Good luck? Bad luck? Who knows?”

The farmer’s son liked the new horse a lot and often took it riding. One day his son fell off the horse and broke his leg. Again his neighbour felt sorry for the farmer. But the old farmer replied, “Good luck? Bad luck? Who knows?”

When the military came to collect all the young men in the village, the farmer’s son couldn’t go off to war because of his broken leg. Most of the young men in the village died in the war. Good luck? Bad luck? Who knows?

Each of us has the power to change the way we think about things. We can think good thoughts or we can think bad thoughts. We can think the best or worse of a situation. It’s up to us how we react to the situation. Experts in the field of human psychology and psychiatry, like, Dr Ross Harris who wrote the best seller, The Happiness Trap, tell us that we must acknowledge the negative thoughts that go through our mind and learn to defuse them. This may take some practice, but learning how to do this can be life altering.

Another author, Joshua Marine, has this to offer:

Challenges are what make life interesting; overcoming them is what makes
life meaningful.

As Easter approaches and Anzac Day on Monday, we should pause and reflect on all of those people who have made great sacrifices for us, so that we might enjoy the life that we do. The challenges faced by those who went to war and died, and the challenges faced by those who went to war and survived are indescribably horrid. The physical injuries and the emotional scars can last a lifetime.

It’s time to take stock of the positives and list all the good things in our life and acknowledge all that we love, if for no other reason than to celebrate the very freedom that these people died to preserve. As I shared on Assembly on Tuesday:

Although the war in which you fought took place nearly a century ago, your courage, your sacrifice and your patriotism reaches through the decades and inspires us – even today.

We remember you,
We salute your courage,
We say in our hearts,
Thank God for your sacrifices.
Lest we forget.

Karon Graham

Principal CCPS