Belief Makers

Mark told me he wanted to use some extra article space this week, and so you will not see an article from me today.

Labels: books, inspiration, iris tuomenoksa

Thank you readers
The A New Option Blog has flourished this year in a way unexpected by me when I started our little initiative in February. Your consistent support, readership, comments, enthusiasm and excitement about our joint effort have crafted this blog into what it is today. So thank you for helping to create a friendly place to openly explore thoughtful, inspirational and diverse thoughts and ideas!

Thank you Authors!
This A New Option Blog would not be what it is today if it were not for the wonderful input of the 2009 authors Mark Tuomenoksa, Jeannene Christie, Kathy DeCastro, Julie Sando, Mark Kaufman, Rita Gendelman, Joy Vigh Strand, Faith Clarke, Barbara Balla, Chris Kisling, Brian Ellis and Paul Bos. I am so grateful to have been able to read and share your inspirational thoughts through this blog. Everyone of you has expanded yourself by exploring new horizons thought your writing and I wish for you the drive and initiative to do new things and expand yourself in unique ways for a long time to come. I love that we together are creating a future of creativity and color and unexpected developments, all without knowing where we are going exactly.

Thank You Growth Opportunities
I hope you will join me in this gratitude towards all the growth opportunities we created this year. Every experience was special and one to celebrate. Thank you my friends, family, readers and any one else I met this year for your love and support. Thank you for your criticism and authenticity. Thank you for the moments of in-authenticity, lies, mis-communication and discomfort we created together. You have been an inspiration. You have helped me grow and I hope you have given yourself a same kind of experience. I also want to express my gratitude for all other internal and external factors that gave inspiration to craft myself in unique new ways in 2009.

A New Option Blog During 2009
When I started the blog, my idea was to write one or two blog articles a week and then post some small thoughtful things at other times, to help you be inspired. But it became clear that the readers of this blog wanted something more than just little quotes. You readers love provocative thoughtful articles that you can digest over time. You want to read things that start discussions and create new options for your thought processes. That's what got us to where we are today. Daily inspirational material that piled up with such speed that we even decided to create a book out of it called Adventures in Happiness.

We have had a consistent growth in our readership over 2009, and 65% of our readers this year has been coming back for more and more and more... Wow, this is amazing!

Our growth has been noticed by Google, whose analytic statistics say that your readership has grown this A New Option blog to what Google calls "an established blog site".

According to Google, we now have readers in more than 90 countries. Our biggest readership is in Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, India, Poland, Sweden, Netherlands, Russia, Ukraine, United Kingdom and the United States. It's so wonderful to see that people are so inspired to come back over and over, even when the English language might be a challenge. Google tells us that a lot of you use the wonderful services of Google Translate to make sure you get the nuances of the written articles. Who would have expected that we would have a regular reader in Kingston, Jamaica or in the Ukraine? I never imagined that we would be writing to you regular readers in Lahore and Karachi, Pakistan. How wonderful!

All our readers, I want to thank you once more for making 2009 a truly fun and inspirational year.

A New Option in 2010
A New Option will be going strong in 2010. We have a great team, and we are planning to do lots of new things in the New Year. We will go on providing you with daily articles, and we will start new initiatives.

What do you want?
This blog was created with you in our minds, and while creating our 2010 plans, we would love to hear what your wants are for A New Option. Why do you come to this site? What do you like? What would you like to see different? How are you going to participate?

Here some of the ways in which I can help shape the blog for 2010.

1. Give us feedback below this post, or by sending an email to iris@lifetransitioncounselor.com, so we can use your input in our 2010 plans.
2. Come to the site regularly, read the articles and participate in our discussions by commenting on the articles.
3. Write articles yourself. Even if you can only commit to one or two articles in 2010, pick one or more dates and send me a New Year’s email (iris@lifetransitioncounselor.com) with your intention and the dates. I would love to help you get your thoughts and ideas into an article.
4. Tell us what you like to read. Do you have a favorite writer that you would like to see more articles from? Do you like specific topics?
5. Invite your friends to read this blog too! This way you can expand the materials found in these articles and help you create a inspirational group of supportive people around you with whom you can discuss new ideas.
6. Do you have ideas for initiatives for this blog and want to help put these ideas in place. I would love to hear from you.

Labels: all blogs, inspiration, intentions, iris tuomenoksa

Joining a Son-Rise Program® has been a great inspiration for me. Not only is it fun to be in the playroom. I also get inspired to do more fun stuff outside the playroom. I get inspired to find ways to inspire Christo's mom. And I get inspired to change my life.

Inspiration in the playroom
When I am in the playroom we mostly play games inspired by Disney. We started with Tigger, which happens to be Christo's and my favorite Pooh character. We will bounce around and quote Tigger. Just try to perfect your "youuuhuuuhuuuhuuuhu". Can you do that without smiling? Do you recognize the amazing feeling when you get Tigger under your skin? You can feel the energy and happiness bounching around while being Tigger. It is so different from playing Eeyore (which is fun too, just different).

Sometimes we pick characters from "Jungle Book". I love Balou. Being Balou gives me a chance to move my but! I would like to be a monkey, but I still can't sing all the words from "I wanna be a Mankind" (I haven't made it my highest priority yet!). Than there are the dogs. They are everywhere: it can be 101 Dalmantines, Blutz, you name it. There are so many great Disney dogs, and I'm a dog person..

I would recommend to anyone to personify a disney character. It's fun and you can make it a good workout too. Pick one of your favorite disney characters and start playing! And by the way: when was the last time you were standing close to someone making funny faces? or scary faces?

Preparing for the playroom
We've been playing monsters, dogs and George of the jungle. I didn't even know George of the jungle. So recently I 've spent time on youtube. Laughing a lot watching clips from this crazy movie.

I've bought some new dvd's and borrowed some from friends with kids. Because how could I know that "Get out of here" was just a quote from Beauty and the Beast"? And I for sure didn't know that there were lines from StarWars in KungFu Panda!

Lately I have been smiling, singing new songs and making more jokes and people around me have been laughing with me!

Inspiring someone else
When I did Group Facilitator training I found it challenging to find the energy and enthusiasm within me. But when I am sitting at the kitchen table exchanging ideas for the playroom with the mom, I am excited. I love telling her how good she is, how fantastic it is that she can see what to do next and that she keeps moving.

I want her to get more help and training, so I keep feeding her with suggestions, and step by step is she moving on it. It's fantastic. I see that I can inspire, and can be patient, all at the same time. It feels so good.

I used this inspiration to challenge people at my work, people who seemed to be waiting for inspiration. When they resisted taking responsibility for their lack of inspiration, I would ask them: how is it working for you to wait for a small ant to bite you, to get under their skin and fill you up with inspiration. As we laughed I knew that they knew that inspiration was there for them to choose.

Let the world be my playroom
I want to take as much as I can from the playroom and build my world from this.

I know that Brian and Mary have a webpage on how to create relationships. My suggestion will be: build a playroom for you and your partner. Build this place with love and acceptance, and a lot of space for exploration.

If anyone want to join my playroom, let me know. It might include pillow fighting and greek dancing, but it will be fun.

My playroom, my rules.

Joy

Labels: inspiration, intention, joy vigh strand, love, relationships, son-rise

I think one reason why I love working with my little friends with special needs is that in some ways I was a special needs child too! In a way, a lot of us were probably special needs children when we were young. The diagnostic systems were not what they are today, and at that time there were lots of developmental challenges that were ignored or overlooked in the regular school system.

I love the way I grew up. I love that I have been able to overcome my challenges. I love that my parents and all the other wonderful people around me were not worried, but just accepted that I might need some more time in different areas... It helped me to design a worldview in which I see opportunities and possibilities for everyone. And, I learned that challenges are nothing more than challenges!

So, as a kid I had some speech challenges. My mom could understand me very well, but no one else could! When I was around five years old, people started to talk about getting me into speech therapy. I think my mom decided it was not necessary and I would grow out of it! In lots of ways, I did. The only challenges that have stayed with me for most of my life are that I cannot pronounce the rolling-R like we do in Dutch, and I seem to make the same sounds for the Dutch S and the Dutch Z.  These are other little nuances that most people don't notice.

At that age I LOVED singing. I would sing any time of the day (yep, for sure an ism!) The songs taught to me in kindergarten were sung over and over and over... I specially loved the songs that integrated the lyrics with movements of the body. You could see me singing and dancing everywhere.

When my parents and their friends would hang out, I would be invited to sing for them. In the beginning I did this with great enthusiasm. I would sing and they would laugh.  They would ask me to sing again and, when I did, they would laugh harder and harder. It turns out that they were laughing at my pronunciation;  I sounded "funny".

I would start to get uncomfortable with the laughing because I didn't understand why they were laughing.  Meanwhile, the adults would have great fun asking me to sing more and more. Over time, I would try to avoid these parties and I started to only sing when I was by myself.

I also had dyslexia. For years I was not able to copy a sentence from a book without missing letters or mixing them up or writing in mirror writing. I remember one of the last times my mom tried to help me with it. I was around nine years old.

My mom, my brother and I were sitting at the kitchen table with a schoolbook. She asked me to copy a sentence. I did and she pointed out what I missed or had to correct and asked me to do it again.

I wrote the same sentence again. She pointed out that I made mistakes again.  We continued this process until my mom lost her patience and irritatedly told me, "the only thing you have to do is look and copy that sentence!"

My sweet mom. I just needed more time. Around the time I went to middle school, something seemed to spontaneously change and I started to be able to retain how to write words and language with much greater accuracy. (Read more about dyslexia here Types of Dyslexia)

At different times my parents were told it might be better to hold me back a year and repeat the same class instead of moving forward with my group. For me, my friends were very important and I am still grateful that my parents always chose to keep me with  them, even if that meant I would be behind in certain areas. I built friends that made every challenge worth to overcoming.

In my late twenties, I started to play guitar with a wonderful teacher in the Netherlands. He had a small group of singers that would play and sing together and I joined them. Twelve singers in four main categories (tenor, bass, alto and soprano). We would sing harmonies accompanied by guitar. This was the place where I learned to be more comfortable singing with others and how much fun it is to share something like this together.

Then last year, while visiting the Netherlands, I decided that I wanted to make a music CD. I was not playing or singing with anyone and I didn’t know how to do it, but I decided that by the end of 2009 there would be a CD. If you have read earlier blogs, you know I have been working on my singing and drumming and that I am now part of the band “No Room For Jello”.  You can find some snippets of me singing last night by clicking here. One of the amazing things about this is that my singing exercises have helped me to be able to roll my R's properly. A miracle!

Why am I writing this all? When Sree commented the other day on Mark's article saying that it helped him and that he has new inspiration to look differently at his kids, I realized that a lot of us have amazing stories about growing up that do not fit in the general view of how we kids should develop and by what time. I decided that those stories might help others see things in a different light. The diversity of our experiences creates a wonderful mix of perspectives and strengths that we can use to help each other.

Do you have a story about your life that you want to share with others because it might inspire them? If so, write it down and email it to me and I will make sure it gets posted on this site.

Have a great inspiring Saturday!

Labels: all blogs, inspiration, iris tuomenoksa, philosophy