What A Breakthrough!

For those of you with kids, I'm sure you'll both A) appreciate this much more than I and B) be thinking "Dude, that's not even the half of what I deal with on a daily basis."  But today, we had a breakthrough and I wanted to share.

For those who don't know, I work for the Girl Scouts.  I essentially get to play with kids from kindergarten up through 8th grade.  Who wouldn't love that job, right?

Yay kids!

Anyways, we kicked off an awesome new anti-bullying and self-esteem program recently for middle school girls.  At our most difficult school, we generally get these girls through our programs, but it's like trying to pulling teeth while policing a riot.  A few flat out don't want to participate, some get bossy with team activities, others stop participating because of the bossiness, and so on.

Well, we decided enough was enough and earlier this week we pulled out our biggest anti-bullying activity; a very serious and quiet look at negative comments and their consequences.  We also laid some new ground rules about negativity.  It was S-L-O-W moving, but we made it through with only one major bump. 

As of early afternoon today, the other facilitators and I were slightly unsure whether many of the girls would show back up. 

Did we scare them all away?

We showed up and were happy to see a few happy faces come our way.  We didn't have quite the same numbers as before, but as you looked out at the girls chatting you noticed one thing - they were all involved.  No girl was left out.  That felt promising. 

In light of the previous activity, we planned what we consider our funnest activities (really, just an attempt to ring them back in); team building challenges 

Source

I know you don't know these girls, the program, or what the previous weeks have been like (Ok, two of you do.  You know who you are), but my God!  You wouldn't believe the turn around we had.  Yeah, there was some slight negativity at times and a bit of an issue with chatting, but we expect that.  Otherwise, once we explained the rules amongst their chatting, they dived head first.  No bully planning and no shyness at all.  And when we jokingly tempted them with another challenge, they snatched it out of our hands like starving animals. 

It was glorious!  I will guarantee that every girl in our program today had a more positive outlook when they left to go home than when they showed up in our classroom. 

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Question

1.  What was one great breakthrough you've had? 
It can be by yourself, with someone else, through a group, work-related, academic, personal, anything.


Stay fit.  Stay healthy.