How Kindness Healed the Effects of Stroke

You can watch the video here.
The 'No More Harm' National Conference last Monday and Tuesday was a great success.
Some 200 delegates were stimulated by presentations regarding bullying in schools and the workplace. Speakers included government representatives and small business. I particularly enjoyed two workshops, one from the ex-teacher creator of Stymie, that offers an anonymous resource for students to share concerns about bullying, and another from the creators of Rebooting Education, that offers hands-on creative program for staff and students about emotional literacy. Other impactful presentations were about the impact of the Bystander Effect - there are some pretty sobering statistics in that regard.
I was honoured to be one of only three presenters to be chosen by ABC Radio Queensland for an interview.
My interviewer was Kelly Higgins-Devine, and she was clearly intrigued by my talk topic, 'Let's Bully On Purpose In Schools'. Kelly gave me plenty of opportunity to describe the universal laws that uphold my proposal, and to outline in some detail the strategy I have in mind. I'd like to salute my inspirations and mentors, Behavioural Specialist Dr John Demartini and Psychologist Ken Pierce, who is also co-author of The Dance of Bullying, a book that has played a significant role in developing my thinking in this area.
You can listen to the interview here.
And tomorrow I speak with someone who heard the interview and is interested in bringing my program into the school where she works! If you'd like more information, just go to the free offers on the right hand side of this page. ->>>>
A message to you from me and Dr Rosemary McCallum:
Happy New Year to fabulous YOU! And what a year it is going to be!
If 2016 seemed a little hectic that was because it was a Universal 9 Year, which is all about endings so it was a crazy ride from beginning to end as things that needed to be ended, finished or tidied up kept rolling forth, swamping many people if they weren’t ready for it. Phew – it was an exhausting year!
But can I let you in on a secret about 2017?
This is a Universal 1 year– a year of brand new beginnings, a wipe-the-slate-clean year and a start-to-create-a-life-of-choice year. How absolutely cool is that!
As we approach the end of January even more amazing energy emerges as The Year of the Rooster takes pride of place in the Chinese New Year calendar! Well, what the heck is that all about?
Jump on this link https://www.eventbrite.com/e/strut-your-stuff-in-2017-year-of-the-rooster-tickets-30402821658 and get the low down on what a super amazing powerful year it is going to be.
I'll be there learning from Rosemary, and I hope we will have the pleasure of sharing the day with you too, so you get to see how Rooster will affect you personally and, more importantly, how you can use the energy of the Rooster to get clarity, industriousness and willingness to “Strut Your Stuff in 2017” – in this amazing Universal 1 Year of “Creativity & Confidence”!
On the day, we will look at how you integrate your personal number cycle so that you get a solid vision of who you want to BE in 2017 and how this will set YOU up for the next 9 years.
PS. Be smart like the Rooster and get in on the early bird special.
Included in your registration is access to presenter podcasts and Book of Proceedings after the conference.
‘Maturity means acknowledging that Romantic love might constitute only a narrow, and perhaps rather mean-minded, aspect of emotional life, one principally focused on a quest to find love rather than to give it; to be loved rather than to love.
'Children may end up being the unexpected teachers of people many times their age, to whom they offer - through their exhaustive dependence, egoism and vulnerability - an advanced education in a wholly new sort of love, on in which reciprocation is never jealously demanded or fractiously regretted and in which the true goal is nothing less than the transcendence of oneself for the sake of another.
‘Children teach us that love is, in its purest form, a kind of service. The word has grown freighted with negative connotations. An individualistic self-gratifying culture cannot easily equate contentment with being at someone else’s call. We are used to loving others in return for what they can do for us, for their capacity to entertain, charm or soothe us. Yet babies can do precisely nothing. There is, as slightly older children sometimes conclude with a sense of serious discomfort, no ‘point’ to them; that is their point. They teach us to give without expecting anything in return, simply because they need help badly - and we are in a position to provide it. We are inducted into a love based not on an admiration for strength, but on a compassion for weakness, a vulnerability common to every member of the species and one which has been and will eventually again be our own. Because it is always tempting to overemphasise autonomy and independence, these helpless creatures are here to remind us that no one is, in the end, ‘self-made’; we are all heavily in someone’s debt. We realise that life depends - quite literally - on the capacity for love.
‘We learn, too, that being another’s servant is not humiliating, quite the opposite, for it sets us free from the wearying responsibility of continuously catering to our own twisted, insatiable natures. We learn the relief and privilege of being granted something more important to live for than ourselves.'
- from The Course of Love by Alain de Botton