Today was a day full of learning and inspiration and now I am so full of it all I want to sleep! It started with a LEMI Conference call, which is a conference call for parents who are trained by Leadership Mentoring Institute to mentor youth in scholar projects. The two speakers on the call, Tiffany Earl and Aneladee Milne, shared the work of Brene Brown, featured above. I had never heard of this woman. She is an expert on shame. They talked about how shame is an indication of listening to negative scripts in our heads from “gremlins.” We can learn to acknowledge when we are feeling it and use positive scripts to ask ourselves what we really want and what we are going to do.

Then it was off to our Commonwealth School’s Parent Mentor training. On the way, my husband and I listened on the radio to this episode of Classics for Kids. I learned about Clara Wieck, who became Clara Schumann. I learned that she was incredible musician. She started performing when she was 8.  She started writing a piano concerto when she was 13. She married her father’s piano student, Robert Schumann. They formed a great marriage and music mentoring partnership, helping each other compose. She had eight children and continued performing for decades until her death at old age. So this reminded me of a movie I have been wanting to watch about Clara and Robert’s romantic love story. I looked it up on my smartphone after I got to the workshop and found out that it is on Youtube, see below. I think dh and I will watch this on our next date night.

So at the Parent Mentor Workshop, with Aneladee Milne, we talked about applying Leadership Education. We went over the 4 Phases, 7 Keys, 5 Environments, and 5 Pillars of TJEd. Aneladee showed this video below and we analyzed the boy’s story to find the 4 Phases in it.

We also talked about the 9 types of social orientation from Keith Olson’s book Why Teenagers Act the Way They Do. Not another system of typing and categorizing! There are so many types and categories out there. Now I am categorizing all my kids into which type.   I am wondering how it corresponds with the energy types of Carol Tuttle, or the Meyer-Briggs testing, or the color code….

We also discusses this amazing article by Ralph Waldo Emerson, called The American Scholar. You can read it here. It is so good! It has been called, America’s Intellectual Declaration of Independence. Each of these resources are enough to give me inspiration for weeks, and I got them all in one day!