Success – sonya terborg

The Success Series

08/27/201408/28/2014 Sonya terBorg

SoulPancake is awesome. If you don’t know it, check it out. As their tag line says, their objective is to open your mind, challenge your friends, and feel damn good.

Currently on their YouTube channel, is a Success Series of four videos. All of them are worth watching. Two of them are remarkable.

The first, One More Thing, One More Time is from Josh Sundquist. Josh talks about just that: being successful by doing one more thing than you were planning on doing , and doing it one more time than you thought you could do. Josh is a son, brother, cancer survivor, author, Paralympic ski racer, motivational speaker, YouTuber, mediocre rapper, and a member of the US Amputee World Cup Soccer team. His motto is “1MT1MT” and he is a believer in hope, possibility, having a sense of humor, and overcoming adversity.

The second is titled, The Steps to Success. It starts by asking people to think about someone who has helped them on their journey to being successful. Once they have a person in mind, they are asked to write that person a letter to tell them how thankful they are for their influence and their support in their life. They are then put on the spot and asked to phone the person and read them the letter.

Who has helped you become successful?

What would you say to them?

I spent a long time thinking about this. The more I thought about it, the more grateful I became for all of the people who could be a recipient of my letter. It also made me question the idea of success: a successful friend? wife? mother? teacher? person? There are multiple people to thank for the many facets that make up the success of the whole person.

Again, who is on your list? What will you say to them?

Creativity

Success – What it really looks like.

09/06/2013 Sonya terBorg

I want to start by saying that I really like this quote. I think success can often be thought of as an individual pursuit and it is a good idea to think about it in terms of how others can be inspired by the things we do.

In thinking about success, I came across this video:

Loved it. A brilliantly simple reminder of how we all learn things differently. I showed it to my kids and then asked to them draw their own version of success and explain their drawing. Awesome. Do it with your class – it is great. Here are their responses:

Brain Research, Innovation, Inspiration, Internet

We All Could Do With a Little More “Happy”

03/04/201303/04/2013 Sonya terBorg

A parent of one of my students recently sent me this video:

Shawn Achor encourages us to think differently about the correlation between success and happiness. Many people would say that if you become successful, you will be happy. Achor argues that if your focus is first on being happy, success will follow and your happiness will be longer lasting as it is built into the fabric of who you are, rather than pinned to reaching your latest goal, target or sales figures.

Students in the fourth grade class next to me, have recently watched this video and started a 21 day happiness journal via Hapyr. Each day the students choose to write three things they are grateful for and/or a happy memory they had in the last 24 hours.

I have recently become a big fan of TEDEd: Lessons Worth Sharing. This is a great resource for teachers who want to find a video (from TED talks or on YouTube) and then create a lesson for students by ‘flipping’ the video = providing guided content after watching the video that students can do at their own pace (at home or school). One of the great things about it, is that if you find something you like but the creator hasn’t asked quite the questions you were hoping to have your students dig into, you can ‘flip’ the lesson yourself and rework it to suit your own class.

Here is the TEDEd Lesson I created using Shawn Achor’s “The Happy Secret To Better Work”.

Here is a SKITCH screengrab explaining the features of TEDEd: