Thanks for visiting my site again! You may want to subscribe to my RSS feed since I'm always putting out good stuff like this.

“Emotional literacy is one of the most important keys to mental health and well-being” says Christine Carter PhD. of The Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley, and a critical window of opportunity exists for character development and instilling emotional literacy.   Dr. David Hamburg, psychiatrist and President of the Carnegie Corporation says from ages 6 to 11 “school is a crucible and a defining experience that will heavily influence children’s adolescence and beyond” Dr. Hamburg also notes that in children entering middle school “there is something different about those who have had emotional literacy classes” He has found they are less troubled than their peers by the new pressures they are facing like increased academic demands, peer politics and temptations to use drugs and alcohol.  They seem to have mastered abilities to read and understand their emotions and those of others.  Emotional literacy represents a body of skills that can be defined with the word character, and character is all about self-discipline and self-control, delayed gratification and self motivation.

Scores of studies have found that emotional literacy and character education programs improve children’s academic achievement and school performance.  Emotional literacy also improves a schools ability to teach.

An Exercise in Happiness© is an emotional literacy program that gives children hands on tools to develop an understanding of how and why their emotions work the way they do, and when this knowledge is applied to their daily life, they learn:

Emotional Self-Awareness
How to manage their own emotions
How to read emotions in others

Understanding human emotion makes it much easier to gain control over our lives rather than the circumstances of our lives being in control.  This knowledge leads to the understanding that it is not what happens to us in our life, but rather how we respond to what happens in our life.

An Exercise in Happiness gives children the opportunity to choose the life they want to live, and start creating a life of pleasure, meaning and engagement now.

In addition to emotional and character building activities, An Exercise in Happiness also teaches children the incredible power of:

Gratitude
Creative visualization
Written goal setting
Taking Action on inspired thoughts.

Lessons in “how to live a happy and fulfilling life” have been taught for centuries since Socrates and Aristotle and have made self-help and personal growth a $15 Billion per year industry.  Now scientific evidence is emerging to reveal that the power we hold in our mind goes far beyond our imagination in terms of how we can use this power to create for ourselves positive, productive and overall happier lives.

Limiting beliefs and self-doubt will often sabotage our efforts as adults in creating the life we want and deserve, and for many  who seek this knowledge to change their lives, these beliefs have such an intense grip that self-improvement tools, when purchased, seem ineffective or very difficult to implement into their daily lives.   Many of these limiting beliefs we hold where developed in childhood and after years of living those beliefs they seem almost impossible to replace.

A window of opportunity is open for our children due to the development of their brain, and this window will surely begin to close as they enter into young adulthood, and any negative beliefs they may have developed about themselves or the world around them will influence the rest of their lives.  Children, before early adolescence, are in the process of forming the beliefs that will govern the rest of their lives, and as adults we are in a position to help them develop empowering beliefs that will benefit generations to come.

Sources: Emotional Intelligence-Why it can matter more than IQ,  Daniel Goleman Bantam Books copyright©  1995.