Here's what we have been up to at Discovering My Purpose lately. We have a lot to share.
Read more to hear stories about the youth and moms we are serving – how we are helping them get to know their Elephants, boosting their life satisfaction, coaching them to see their strengths and settling down their inflamed systems.
Teacher Training
On Wednesday we started up our new round of teacher training! It's so fun to share the program with others, knowing that they will be going out to teach it to more kids.
In our cohort of teachers are counselors from
Wildwood Hills Ranch, a nonprofit organization who works with at-risk and foster youth. Wildwood focuses on character development, using a variety of experiential learning opportunities, including some cool stuff that happens on horseback! They are really an amazing organization serving over 1000 kids a year.
When I heard that one of their core aims is to help kids discover their meaning in life, I knew that we had found a great partner. Shout out to my friend, Dave Strege. Thanks for putting me in touch with these amazing people.
Interested in teaching the program? Let me know and I will keep you informed about future trainings!
Spreading the Word
2019 is all about expanding awareness of who Discovering My Purpose is and what we are about. To that end, we are going to be launching some ads of Facebook soon. Thanks so much for following us and sharing the ads when you see them. Free advertising is really appreciated. : )
Volunteer Recruitment – We Need a Researcher!
Thanks to all of the people who volunteered to serve on our board. We are so lucky - some amazing people stepped forward. We have a meeting later this month where we will consider these applications and decide who will take part.
The key position we are still searching for is researcher. It is important to us that our program is evidence-based. We have all students take a survey assessment before and after the program. As we gather data, we need someone to help us connect the dots and continue to understand the impact the program is having.
If you know someone with a background in research, please introduce us!
Support our Programming
We would love to expand our ability to provide the program to more foster kids. These organizations often don’t have funding to support things like this. If you would like to help, thanks for donating. Read more about the need and the impact the program has below.
Jesse’s Girls – Raising Positivity and Highlighting Strengths
We have a brand-new relationship with
Jesse’s House, a group foster home for teen girls. Did you know that the number of kids in foster care is rising? This is fueled mainly by five states – Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Indiana and Minnesota.
Georgia’s growth is the most dramatic. In 2013, there were 7,600 kids in the foster system. Now there are nearly 14,000. The biggest driver? A surge in substance abuse in parents.
Jesse’s House is currently home to eight teenage girls. At the beginning of the first class, they were not exactly happy to be there. Thankfully, that shifted fast. By the end of class, we were having tons of fun.
Raising Positivity
We start every class by asking the kids what the best part of their week was. I tell them this could be anything – a delicious dessert, a new favorite song, laughing at a joke with friends… In the beginning, a lot of the kids just sit there. Coming from traumatic homes, their survival skills have taught them to keep a sharp eye out. They naturally watch for the bad. The good? Not so much.
Later on the class will teach the girls more about appreciative inquiry. It’s a powerful strategy where you look for what is working in your life and explore ways to expand on that success. As the wonderful Dr. Tal Ben-Shahar says, “When you appreciate the good, the good appreciates.”
As I went around the table, the girls shared fun stuff. A lot of the highlights came from spending time with their mentors. (Think Big Sister here, if you are familiar with their program.) Janet said, “This might sound weird, but the best part of my week was being expelled from school.” I asked her if that was because she got to make a fresh start at a new school. She scoffed a tiny bit and said, “No. I just hated going to the old one.” These girls go through a lot and sometimes it winds up reflected in their behavior.
Highlighting Strengths
As I have mentioned in past blogs, your purpose lives at the intersection of what you love to do, what you are good at and what the world
needs. To better understand what you are good at, you need to know what your strengths are, right?
In class, we first ask students to list out what they think their strengths are. They then take the
Values in Action survey. (Check it out yourself! It’s awesome and free!) It’s fun to compare the two – their thoughts and the VIA results.
The girls listed out their strengths in their workbook. We then went around the table, sharing. Jimena said that she was creative, artistic and good at video games. Susannah talked about how she is good with people. Laurel wants to be a music producer. She mentioned that she is artistic and is a strong leader. (I will also say that she is wicked smart. She is new to Jesse’s House so she missed the first lesson. But when I was quizzing the kids on what they remembered from that lesson, she was the one answering!)
When we got to Meredith, she shrugged and gave a small smile. “I don’t know.” I asked the girls and staff to help her out. They came up with words like “patient, kind, conscientious, and intuitive.” I encouraged Meredith to write these down, so that she could really soak them up. One of the girls then said “intelligent” and Meredith got this look on her face, like “yeah, right.”
Sir Kenneth Robinson has a great turn of phrase. He says we often ask the question, “How intelligent are you?” We should instead ask, “How are you intelligent?” I promise you, I will be paying special attention to Meredith when we cover that in a future lesson.
Drake House – Helping Homeless Teens & Their Moms
Impact on Moms – Life Satisfaction The Drake House is a local homeless shelter where single moms are able to get back on their feet while keeping their family together. We wrapped up the class with the Drake moms a few weeks ago.
Throughout class, we worked hard to keep purpose accessible. These are moms dealing with financial crisis. Some of them have fled situations of domestic abuse. It’s challenging to encourage them to dream big when their focus is on paying the bills and putting food on the table.
We talked about how purpose doesn’t need to be tied to how they make a living. And as little as 30 minutes a week spent on purpose makes us happier.
With all the concepts we shared, we explored how embracing them is a powerful way to model happiness and success for their kids. Moms were also encouraged to ask the “best thing from your day” question at the dinner table and some of the moms did it!
The moms also took our pre- and post-program emotional baseline assessment. The biggest bump was life satisfaction.Post-program results increased by 43%. When you appreciate the good, the good appreciates, right?
Being Mindful By Getting to Know Our Elephants
Mindfulness is a big part of our program. This includes helping students get to know themselves, so that they have better self-awareness, teaching them about how their brains work and teaching them meditation tools.
On Monday night, we were getting to know our Elephants. Dr. Jonathan Haidt has created a powerful analogy of
the Elephant and the Rider that we use extensively. Nutshell is that your conscious mind is the Rider and the reactive, automatic response is the Elephant. The Elephant serves as our protector.
To help the kids better understand the influence of the Elephant, we were brainstorming out a list of things that might freak our Elephants out. I listed out a few like forgetting to study for a test or thinking that we had lost our phone. Some of the things that the kids came up with were rats, cats, dogs, and cockroaches. Dante, a fourteen-year old student, also listed out “adults” as his trigger.
The Deepest Well is an amazing book by Dr. Nadine Burke Harris, Harvard grad and founder of a pediatric clinic in a rough part of San Francisco. Through her practice, Dr. Burke witnessed that some of her patients failed to thrive. Through research and a lot of sleuthing, she figured out that the common issue with these patients was their exposure to trauma.
Kids who have experienced trauma often have a dysregulated stress response, which means that their bodies and brains are continually flooded with stress hormones. This creates an inflammation which affects both their physical development and their ability to focus and learn.
In her book, Harris further explains the impact of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) on the development of the body and brain.
Dr. Harris goes on to provide guidance on how to help these kids heal. Her list is short – only six things. And mindfulness is one of them. (The others are sleep, nutrition, exercise, mental health and healthy relationships.) Mindfulness practices have been shown to drop levels of cortisol – the key stress hormone that these kids are flooded with.
In this way, our program is helping kids on both a mental and physical level. Pretty awesome.
Thank You & What's Next
Next week we will talk about post-traumatic growth, which is all about learning from our hard times and going on to thrive.
As always, thanks for your support and thanks for following our journey to helping these kids live more meaningful lives. We appreciate you!
Laura Garrison-Brook
CEO
Discovering My Purpose