Weekend Kindness
Reaching Others Through Kindness

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February 24 through March 1 is National Eating Disorder Awareness Month. Typically this is frame around a “Love Your Body” week (or month) on most college campuses and communities! Here, we’ve been loving our bodies all month long. It’s been truly a great month of educational opportunities and empowerment to really celebrate the body you have and not critique it for it’s faults.

Yesterday, I had the honor of listening to four women from outside the United States. A woman from Sudan, a woman from India, one from Mexico, and one from Bocstand heritage. Each woman had such a beautiful perspective of beauty in their culture. Many woman brought pictures of their children, mothers and friends. When asked the question, “what do you love about your body”, not one mentioned a physical characteristic, but gave thanks to having a healthy body, all their limbs and to have not be taken over by illness. How cool!
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As January comes to a close, February 1st approaches, which some refer to as Groundhog Day. It’s when Punxsutawney Phil emerges from his burrow to let the world know if winter is over, or if we’ll have six more weeks of it! What I’m reminded of each year with Groundhog Day is the ever popular 1993 movie with Bill Murray.

The movie is about a weather man who is asked to cover the groundhog day story for the fourth year in a row. However, awaking the following day he finds it to be groundhog day over and over and over again. At first, he uses this to his advantage, then comes to the realization that he is doomed to spend the rest of eternity in the same place, seeing the same people do the same thing EVERY day. After the realization, he changes his attitude, behaviors and daily activities and awakes to February 3. Most people never experience the same day twice. As the saying goes, “you never get a second chance to make a first impression”, unless you’re Bill Murray.

Ways to make a great first impression:

5) Avoid gum chewing.
4) Use eye contact.

3) Use good body language and stand up straight!

2) Be on time.

1) Proper handshake - no limp hands!

Now that Christmas has passed, we have a vision of a new year upon us. I imagine in the next few days we’ll be seeing many “the best of 2007″ recaps! It’s always fun to see the highlight of the past year and I wanted to pass along my top 5 ways of showing kindness over the past few years. It stemmed from a few “new years resolutions” gone right!

5. Call your parents twice a week and siblings at least once. I had received a daily desk calendar with lots of great daily tips, this one stuck out to me, so I’ve carried it from office to office and had it sitting out so it’s a visual reminder that family is important!

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Christmas is one of my favorite holidays!

Here is an idea for a frugal Christmas gift - Hot Cocoa in a jar! I’ve received several over the years and each one is uniquely created and warms the heart. The directions are simple:

Ingredients:

6 1/2 cups powdered milk
1 (5 ounce) package non-instant chocolate pudding mix
1 cup powdered chocolate drink mix
1/2 cup powdered non-dairy creamer
1/2 cup confectioners’ sugar
1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder

Directions:

In a large bowl, combine powdered milk, chocolate pudding mix, chocolate drink mix powder, creamer, confectioners’ sugar, and cocoa. Divide the mixture between two 1 quart jars. Seal, and decorate as desired. These can be stored in a dry area for up to 3 months.

Attach a tag with the following instructions: Hot Cocoa: Dissolve 1/3 cup cocoa mix in 1 cup boiling water (taken from allrecipes.com)

The great thing about this gift is it can be adapted to various holidays, birthday and other gift-giving opportunities without breaking the bank!

We all do it. We all react when our needs aren’t being met, but what are we reacting to? Being a woman who found love later in life, I’ve gone through many cycles of friends getting married or having significant relationships. I’ve listened to many friends who’ve gone through the “crazy cycle” time and time again. For the past several months, I’ve been musing through Dr. Emerson Eggerichs, Love and Respect. It’s an amazing book and I would recommend it to any new couple, engaged couple or husband and wife teams.

This book hit the nail on the head when it comes to continual conflict in your most precious, sacred relationships. I don’t want to give away the whole book but in case you don’t have time to pick it up to read it I’d like to review a few of the many points, giving credit to the doctor himself.

What is The Crazy Cycle?
“Craziness is when we keep doing the same thing — again and again — with the same ill effect. Marital craziness is when we do the same thing — over and over — with the same negative results. I call it the Crazy Cycle. When hurt and frustrated, we continue reacting in negative ways to motivate our spouse to be positive.” (taken from http://www.family.org/marriage/A000001383.cfm)

How do we stop the crazy cycle?
Dr. Eggerichs states, “based on Ephesians 5:33, I discovered why a husband and wife react the way they do. We read, “each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband” (NIV).

He continues saying that “because a wife needs love, a husband would be wise to assume his wife’s negative reaction is rooted in her feeling unloved. On the other hand, because a husband needs respect, a wife would be prudent to assume her husband’s negative reaction is rooted in his feeling disrespected”
(taken from http://www.family.org/marriage/A000001384.cfm).

It was almost like a bell went off as I’ve been reading through Dr. Eggerichs’s book. SR and I have an amazing relationship and rarely get into “the crazy cycle”. However, I know we’re young in our life-long, God-given relationship and I am so glad to have read this book so early on.

Some take-aways, your pride needs to take a back seat to your relationship and to the person you’ve committed your life to AND you need to be the change you desire. If you’re more concerned with being right or getting the last word you’ll continually stay in the crazy cycle; this may mean a softer tongue. I know it takes “two to tango” but in order to thwart the crazy cycle you might need to first remove the log from your own eye.

It’s a great book; pick it up, check-it out but make sure to read it!

Lets see, I was asked to introduce myself but I’m never sure where to start. However, this past week, I was asked to do a personality test for work, so I thought I’d start there. It was mainly to see who makes up our team so that we work more effectively together. I found out that I’m a Gold. There are four colors, blue, green, orange and gold. Most people have a primary and secondary color. If your primary and secondary colors are within 4 points of each other there is likely to be overlap between the various characteristics making up your colors. Being that my primary color was 19/20 and secondary color was 11/20 it’s a pretty good indication that I-am-a-gold. I know we shouldn’t put ourselves into a box, but it was fun to see who made up my team of co-workers. I’ve done this type of personality test before and my primary color was blue but I guess over the years I’ve changed.

As I sat with the other Golds and read the description it was not surprising that gold was my primary color.
“Gold represents a need to be responsible, to fulfill duties and obligations, to organize and structure our life and that of others. Those with Gold as a Primary Color value being practical and sensible. They believe that people should earn their way in life through work and service to others” (taken from truecolors.org).
As we read through the description my supervisor and I chuckled because this described us to a tee!

But to get to the basics of who I identify as, I am a God-following, woman, fiancée, (soon-to-be) step-mom, daughter, aunt, sister, niece, athlete who eats only fish (and recently chicken) but loves anything sweet!

Min asks me to write for Weekend Kindness so I’ll be contributing once a month. That’s me in a nutshell!