Gifts of Character

October 16, 2012

Life Skills: Giving to Others & Self Esteem

Teaching Children Life Skills — Teaching character and life skills to students

Take a look at the gifts you have, the talents and abilities that you possess and of what you have accomplished already with them. Before you start comparing yourself to others and their accomplishments, smile at the accomplishments you have achieved in the short time you have been here in this body on the earth.

While the media and sometimes other humans are telling us what more we should be striving for, the secret to feeling good about ourselves and having self esteem is to look at what we already have and accomplished. In fact this secret goes one step further as described in the Tao Te Ching by Lao-tzu:

“Heaven is eternal – the earth endures. Why do heaven and earth last forever? They do not live for themselves only. This is the secret of their durability….. Serve the needs of others, and all your own needs will be fulfilled.”

Have you discovered that too; when we are willing to give to others that we do feel good about ourselves? But when our ego pushes us to have and be more and we are constantly striving to be better than, our inner peace and satisfaction with ourselves is diminished? If we are constantly striving, and never feel complete our self esteem suffers. When we let go and appreciate what we have and all we have been given, the concept we have of ourselves is growing.

October 9, 2012

Life Skills: Self Esteem Building Tips

How a child or adult feels about themselves is what self esteem is all about. What is it that you like about yourself is something that we can ask our children, or what is it that you did today that made you smile about yourself?

Giving our children the opportunity to have gratitude about who they are will over time build their self esteem. At the same time that we are encouraging them to think about what they like about themselves, a little note or kind word to them about something that is special about them, will go a long way to helping them feel good about themselves too.

Then one of my favorites is the simple but highly effective SMILE. A smile from us to our children reminds them that we approve of them being them. It will also bring ourselves as parents under more control when they the children don’t have our greatest approval. 🙂

September 30, 2012

Life Skills: Discipline and Goals Part 4: Setting Goals

Everyone would agree that achieving goals require self discipline. It does not matter if the goals we have are about how we eat, our finances, personal relationships, organizing our work, reducing our television watching or anything else it all requires self discipline.

The fourth part of gaining self discipline is more than just saying we are going to do something – it is in fact the step of setting self – discipline goals. This fourth step is the basis of all the rest that we have talked about. If you do not have clearly defined, short term and long term goals – you have no need for self control, motivation or persistence.

Self discipline goals are about self improvement and the goals must be clearly defined or specific with dates or time frames included. Simply wanting something is not enough, but when you are specific about what you want, when you want to accomplish it by, and set up specific actions and schedule then you can use self control, motivation, and persistence in reaching your self improvement goal.

If I have a goal of eating 5 portions of vegetables every day, then we can ask ourselves every time we eat if we are demonstrating self discipline in our eating habit and working to reach the goal. We may have to use self control and not eat something less healthy, or we may have to rethink our motivation or remind ourselves that individuals with self discipline would persist in getting all of the portions in to the day. How would a self disciplined person thnk or act? When you demonstrate self discipline you will thank yourself later for being strong, exercising self control, and persisting with your specific goal.

This is the fourth in a series of post on self discipline:

Part one: Self Control

Part two: Motivation

Part three: Persistence

September 30, 2012

Life Skills: Self Esteem – The Definition

Each month we define and discuss a word of character development and life skill with all of our students.

This month the word is Self Esteem and will be defined this way.

Young students: Self Esteem means, “I like myself.”

Older students: Self Esteem means: Confidence in and satisfaction with oneself.

Here are the worksheets for our students:

Self Esteem Project Worksheet Tiger Tots

Self Esteem Project Worksheet 5-6 year olds

Self Esteem Project Worksheet 7-12 year olds

Self Esteem Project Worksheet Teens & Adults

If you would like to see how we will talk about Self Esteem with our students please follow our discussions here during the month of OCTOBER or come in and TRY A CLASS.

September 24, 2012

Life Skills: Discipline and Goals Part 3: Persistance

The third component was best summed up by Winston Churchill when he said, “Success is going from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm.” In one word that would be PERSISTENCE. The majority of those that we would consider to be highly successful are also ones that suffered setbacks, one after the other. But due to their persistence they were able to achieve what they set out to do.

Persistence is something that you have to set your mind to from the very beginning. When you begin with a great deal of motivation and self control, it is persistence even in the face of failure that you will experience self discipline and have success in reaching your goals.

Persistence does not come off the shelf, it cannot be bought – but it is inside each of us already. What keeps some from persisting though is fear of failure, what others might think or how they may look foolish in the eyes of their peers.

So now we have self control, motivation, and persistance and in our next post the final component. You will be surprised by this one as there is a difference in personal _____ and self discipline _____.

Part one: Self Control

Part two: Motivation

Part four: Setting Goals

September 23, 2012

Life Skills: Discipline and Goals Part 2 – Motivation

In developing self discipline the second of the four key factors or components is motivation. If there is no motivation to reach the goal we have set, then disciplining or regulating ourselves to accomplish this goal becomes much harder to do and it is far more likely that we will stop and not reach our goal.

If the motivation is external as in, you have to go to work-not because you want to, you have to study for a test-so your parents do not get mad, you go on a diet because your doctor/friend/spouse says you should, it is not likely that you will be motivated to be disciplined in the efforts.

However if you have a strong enough WHY you are doing your job, studying in school, eating healthy, that strong motivation of why will create a self-discipline that would be very difficult to break.

All of us are motivated in different ways but if we are having trouble with motivation to be disciplined on a specific task or goal, one way putting some pressure on ourselves is to tell our friends and others about the goal that we have and allow them to help us stay the course.

Finally in regard to our children, we may not be sure what motivates them, but our goal is for them to find their motivation from within. With that in mind, external rewards and praise for winning / medals / grades and other external things are less important than helping them to see the results they get with great effort and self discipline. Praising that in our child will help them to continue on the path of self discipline.

Part one: Self Control

Part three: Persistence

Part four: Setting Goals