Thoughts to Ponder

As a follow up to my last entry, I thought that I'd share some of the things that I learned at the Toronto conference. I took some notes and I think that the things we learned can really help everyone in their lives. So here goes.

David Ulrich (look up a bio of him, he's totally awesome!)

He based his talk on a scripture John 10:10 "I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly"

He said that in a world in crisis (economic recession, psychological recession, mental illness, cynicism, hostility, erosion of commitment, isolation, challenges of change, uncertainty about the future etc.) we need to find abundance or meaning in the decisions we make. Places we can find abundance include work, home/family, church, personal life, and friends.

Brother Ulrich gave 8 questions and ideas of how we can accomplish these questions.

1. Identity: What am I known for?

• Be self aware

• Build on your strengths...then strengthen others

-create and identity that you want to be seen as
-what are my strengths?
-What am I good at?
-If you don't like your identity, CHANGE IT!

2. Purpose: Where am I going?

• Figure out your definition of success (what do I want?): insight, achievement, affiliation, empowerment
• Be willing to satisfice

-Satisfice--some things are worth doing even if they're done poorly...meaning that some things you need to do for experience, or because they're so important even just to go through the motions, because they will help you to grow.
- don't let things happen to you make things happen

3. Relationships: who do I travel with?

• Close vs. loose ties
• Give and receive bids
• conflict resolution: avoid deadly horsemen: defensive, stonewall, contempt, criticize
• Repair: apologize (did, feel, fix, else?)

-We need "loose" friends because they come and go in our lives, they are the ones we are going to learn from the most, not the people we see every day
-learn to disagree without being disagreeable

4. Engagement: what challenges interest me?

• easy, energizing, enjoyable
• Guaranteed success
• Evolve challenges (time and season)

-do what engages us

5. Context: How do I build a positive work and life setting?

• surround with positive people
• practice service, grace, humility, charity, forgiveness
• Find resources that meet my demands

6. Resilience/learning: how do I respond to setbacks?

• Do hard things...experiment outside comfort zone
• see failure as an opportunity to learn
• build learning agility (reflect, improve, adapt)

-trials are hard, and you don't always have to be happy while experiencing them, but you can think, MAN am I gonna learn a lot while I'm going through this
-resilience means trying, overcoming, and learning from
-push yourself and learn

7. Delight: How do I find delight in my life?

• Have fun/be upbeat
• rejuvinate...15 minutes, 3 months, 6 months

-think about things that give you quiet moments of delight
-something as simple as watching a sunset, reading a good book, or singing a great song

8. Transition: How do I manage the transitions required of change?

• let go...(identity, engage, enchanted, oriented)
• start anew...start small

-change doesn't come overnight, neither do these transitions, but sometimes they're necessary. We have to learn how to let go of things we can't change and move forward with the change and accept it.

He gave a lot of interesting things to think about in his talk. A lot of the time I think we focus on the things that are going wrong in our lives and whine and complain about them rather than changing them! I know that sometimes we can't change what is happening to us, but we can change how we react to it and our attitude about the situation. I have to constantly remind myself of all the good things I have in my life, which makes me realize that they far outweight the bad things, which makes me feel better. The main questions I want you to think about from this message would be these:

What do you want to be known for?
What am I driven by?
What do you want?
What gives me delight?
Why do I feel so good (or so bad) at this point in my life?

A lot of the time, we don't sit down, take an hour or two and really ask ourselves these questions. I know that I've felt afraid of being left to myself sometimes because doing a thorough introspection can be intimidating, and you might find things you don't want to see, but it is those things that will really help you develop the aspects of your character that you want to change the most. You want to find yourself? Sit alone in a room and think about these things. Think about what makes you tick, what makes you happy, and why you react the way you do in certain situations. It's really worth it.

I will post my notes from Sheri Dew some other time.

Until then,
-J

It's been a while...

Well, since JANUARY!! Lots has happened. I could go into the painstaking details of the past 9 months, but instead I'll just tell you the highlights. First off, I passed all of my spring semester courses with flying colours, bringing my GPA back up to 3.5. As I was trying to decide whether to go home to Ottawa for the summer, everything fell into place in Lethbridge to allow me to go home. I.e. I couldn't find a job in Lethbridge, I had one offered me back in Ottawa, and someone even offered to sublet my room for the summer so I didn't even need to pay rent! So, I went back to Ottawa and, yes, Subway.

Over the summer I attended a number of YSA (young single adult) conferences. I went to Palmyra twice, (once for a conference, once for the pageant) and Toronto. In Toronto I got to meet Sheri Dew and listen to a number of amazing speakers, including David Ulrich and Elder David Murray of the seventy. The topic of that conference was "Great Expectations", the title of a famous book by Charles Dickens. I'm not lying when I say that this conference changed my life.

Every talk I heard, every feeling I had, and almost every workshop I attended spoke the same things to my mind. The same questions kept emerging and I was forced to really think about them. Brother Ulrich spoke about finding meaning in you life, finding quiet moments of delight, and thinking about and working towards who you want to become and what you want to accomplish. Sister Dew spoke about our own personal mission. She mirrored what Brother Ulrich had said and expanded on it (even though they didn't collaborate and she didn't hear his talk at all). She said that we need to be clear about who we are, we need to learn about the Atonement, and we need to learn how to receive personal revelation.

These talks caused me to question what it is that gives me joy, and expanding on that, what I need to do to accomplish my life mission. For me, I think I discovered part of my life's mission through thinking about these things. What gives me the most joy is also, coincidentally, what I feel my life mission is. It is just trying to fit them all into my life that has been my struggle since that conference.

However, since that conference, my perspective on life has changed greatly. I have been happier in the last month and a half than I have been in years. A lot of that has to do with letting go of the past, and focusing on the future and what I can do to become a contributing member of society. I feel that everything I am doing in my life now is helping to prepare me for greater things later on.

I've even noticed a difference in the way people react towards me since I've found this "happy place". I've had more people introduced themselves to me in class, more people want to talk to me at church and school, and people being genuinely happy to see me and want to talk to me. I feel like the joy that I feel on the inside is somehow radiating on the outside as well, and people notice.

I hope that you can take from this, that doing an intense inward survey of what makes you feel the most joy, and what gives you "quiet moments of delight", will cause you to realize that those things are many, and cause you to seek them out. Perhaps once you do, you will be in a similar situation as me.

Until next time,
-J