Dec 27 – Dec 30, 2021
Theme: Fresh Starts
Skill Building: Goals, Habits & Time
Person-Centered Thinking & Safety
Monday December 27, 2021
Check In
What did you do over the holiday weekend? How did it go?
Today Happens to Be...
- Make Cut Out Snowflake Day: Have you ever made a paper snowflake? Do you know how?
- National Fruitcake Day: Do you like fruitcake?
Introduce Theme of the Week & Skill Builder
- Let's start thinking about and planning for the upcoming new year.
- Our theme is Fresh Starts.
- Our skill builder is Reflection, Planning, & Habits.
Presenters: If it is not usual for you to share your responses to prompts or exercises with the group, feel free to do that this week. No requirement, but it is good for participants to realize that everyone has pretty much the same experiences aiming for goals.
Live Transcriptions in Zoom
Presenters: If some of your participants missed last week, please briefly go over this with them. If everyone attended online program last week, feel free to skip this section.
Did you know that we now can have closed captions in Zoom? Zoom has a live transcription feature that can create automatic, computer-generated captions for our Zoom meetings. Here are a few things you should know:
- We started using this feature for all our Zoom meetings last week.
- For each meeting, the host needs to enable live transcription.
- If the host forgets to start captions at the start of the meeting, you can send them a request to enable live transcriptions.
- These are closed captions. That means you can turn them off if you wish.
- These are automatic, computer-generated captions. That means there will be some mistakes!
- Unfortunately, live transcription only works in the main Zoom session — it doesn't work in breakout rooms.
If you want to learn more about Zoom's live transcription feature, watch this 5-minute video created by Cam: Live Transcription in Zoom.
<Body Break>
Thematic Activity: Emotions and Motivation
Presenters: Ask and discuss the questions below in an organic format. If the conversation moves away from the list but is instructive and helping people express their thoughts about goals, roll with it.
- What are life dreams? (not the ones you have when you're sleeping)
- How are dreams and goals similar?
- How are dreams and goals different?
- Do you think dreams and goals are connected?
- What emotions do you feel when people talk to you about goals? Do you notice any sensations in your body related to these feelings?
- Who should make goals for whom? For example, is it sensible for you to make a goal for your letter carrier? How about for your pet? Your co-workers? Your supervisor?
- Is choosing goals something you prefer to do alone, or with support?
- If you like support, what kind of support?
- Do you have any secret goals? You don't have to share the actual goal, just say if you have some private ambitions that only you know about.
<Body Break>
Motivation is like our battery power for goals. If we have a lot of good motivation, we work hard at our goals and often achieve them or exceed them. Just like a battery on a phone or other device, our motivation can get low and needs to be recharged. Different things motivate different people in different ways. Do any of these things get you motivated? What else would you add to this list?
- Competing with someone else
- Competing with yourself
- Rewards for small steps, like giving yourself a small gift every week that you work out
- Rewards for big steps, like planning a trip for after your big goal is met
- Public sharing of your progress on social media or in a support group
- Encouragement from people who love you
- Measuring your progress
- Fear of embarrassment if you don't do it
- Losing something important if you don't do it
- Making someone you admire proud of you
- Fear of disappointing someone you admire
- Imagining your life with the goal achieved
What did we learn, practice, and/or review today?
What are we doing this afternoon?
Civics Education and Community Awareness
Tuesday December 28, 2021
Today Happens to Be...
- Card Playing Day: What are your favorite card games?
- Let's Play Concentration: Concentration is a popular memory-focused card game where you have a grid of cards all facing down. You can only flip over two cards at a time, and you need find the two cards that match each other. Use the link to play Concentration online. Start with a 4x4 grid and play a solo (1 player game) as a team.
Check In
- Theme of the Week: Fresh Starts
- Skill Builder: Reflection, Planning, & Habits
- Recap yesterday’s topics
- Today we’ll focus on life domains for planning
Show & Share
What are your dreams, ambitions, and desires for how your life will be in 10 years?
Covid Mitigation Moment
- When should you wash your hands?
- How should you wash your hands?
- When might you want to use hand sanitizer?
<Body Break>
Thematic Activity #1: Years, Months, Weeks, Days, Hours
The habits you build into your time frames will become your goals achieved. Let's look at money and health as examples.
Financial: Savings Calculator
Presenters: put in different monthly amounts and interest rates between .027% and 1.5%. (Since deregulation of the banking industry in the 80's personal savings account interest rates have gone down to less than 0.5% at banks and less than 1.8% at credit unions—In 1978 a personal savings account paid between 3% and 5%.)
Health: Workout Planner
By planning your workouts based on your goals and available resources, you have a much higher likelihood of gaining strength and fitness.
Presenters: Enter different starting places for different participants and take a look at the recommendations for a workout schedule that the software offers.
Thematic Activity #2: Time Management at Work
Choose one or both games below depending on group interest and time.
Do You Know 30?
Presenters: This helps people understand their intuition about time passing.
- Everyone turn around, facing away from the camera/meeting, OR close your eyes, except the presenter.
- When the presenter says "Start," participants will guess when they think 30 seconds have passed and turn around to face the camera again.
- Presenters will use this 45-second countdown timer to call everyone back. The presenter will tell the group who was the closest to 30 seconds.
- Do the exercise twice to see if the same people get it right again.
How Long Does THAT Take?
This exercise will give us practice estimating the length of time of a given task.
Presenters: here's a stop watch
- Divide into teams of 3-5 people.
- Choose an "estimator" for your team.
- That person will tell the presenter how long they think it will take for everyone in the whole group to complete a task below.
- The presenter will say "go" and EVERYONE will do the task and show they are done by putting hands on their head on camera.
- When everyone is done, the presenter will compare the estimates to the actual time and the team that guessed the closest will get the point. Play for all 3 tasks.
- Notice that it takes longer for a group to do a task than for and individual.
Tasks:
- Do 25 standing, sitting, or jumping jacks, depending on your position and space.
- Go to your front door, knock on the inside, and come back to the camera.
- Sing a verse of "Mary Had a Little Lamb."
<Body Break>
Skill Builder
How to break a goal into tiny tiny tiny bites. Each day, we will explore another step in breaking the goal of getting a job down into small steps that can be used to find the habits we'll need.
Presenters: the PRESENT button in orange on the upper right will make the slide fill the screen.
Here is some wisdom on habit building for goals: James Clear: Goals and systems (blog post).
Just for Fun: Holiday Math
Play as a team competition or just do as a math exercise. Whatever the group likes better.
- Divide into Team A and Team B.
- Choose which level of math you want to try
- Presenter shares the screen for 10 seconds and stops sharing.
- Team A gives their answer, if it's correct, they get a point. If it's incorrect Team B can try to answer.
- Next question, presenter lets the other team try answering first.
Subtraction (intermediate practice)
What did we learn, practice, and/or review today?
What are we doing this afternoon?
Well Being and Social Connection
Wednesday December 29, 2021
Today happens to be...Pepper Pot Day
Check In (5 min)
Theme of the week and Skill Builder
Today we’ll focus on habit tracking
Recap yesterday’s topics
No Program on Friday
My ISP
Your current knowledge or memory of what is in your current ISP. Do you have a copy of it in your home? Can you remember what’s on it?
Covid Mitigation Moment (5 min)
PRESENTERS: Read the situation aloud and ask folks what is the right thing to do. Touch on the idea of not hurting Roger's feelings but still doing the right thing.
Wellness and Manners
Lane lives in a board and care home. Their roommate, Roger, was away for the weekend with family and just got back. The board and care home has an RV in the driveway and when someone comes back from being in another home, they live in the RV for two weeks until they are sure they aren't sick. Lane just got a text from Roger saying he brought presents back for Lane and if he will sneak out to the RV, Lane can have them.
- What should Lane do?
- How should they tell Roger what they have decided?
Thematic Activity 01 (10-15 min)
What is a habit?
Get everyone's input on what a habit is. If it didn't come up, offer this idea.
It's a path in your BRAIN that has been used many times and it becomes like a groove in your brain.
How Do We Create Habits?
We are always trying to meet our needs:
- Get food
- Be safe
- Have friends
Habits either meet our needs, or they make us feel better when we can't meet our need. For example, sometimes we eat when we're nervous, or sleep when we're lonely.
When our needs are met we feel good. When something we do feels good IMEEDIATELY, we do it again. It's the habit loop. Learn more about habits by watching the video below.
So when it comes to habits, it's much easier to REPLACE them than to REMOVE them, and much healthier for us if we can use them to meet our real needs.
Thematic Activity 02 (15-20 min)
Positive Self-Acceptance
Here are some examples of habits. Discuss the results you get from these habits IMMEDIATELY and the results you get from these habits in the far future.
- Eating lots of sugary food while watching TV late at night
- Doing 100 situps every morning
- Drinking a lot of coffee right before bed
- Vacuuming your house once a week
- Smoking cigarettes every day
- Taking walks for at least 30 minutes 5 days a week.
- Saying hello to your neighbor when you see them outside
- What is different about the immediate results versus the long-term results?
When a habit creates long-term results people don't want, they call it a "bad" habit. But, they ignore the fact that they LIKE the IMMEDIATE results. Just the long-term results are the problem.
To replace habits effectively make everything about changing them feel GOOD. When we get critical or angry with ourselves about a habit, we are making ourselves feel bad. That may motivate us to change for a little while, but it doesn't last.
So the FIRST habit loop to get into is to replace your self-critical messages with self-accepting messages. Practice some self-acceptance messages.
General Self-Acceptance
I accept myself, and my habits. Whatever habits I have are just ways I try to meet my needs. I know that some of my habits can be better and I trust myself to be able to learn NEW habits.
Self-Acceptance for Slow Going
I am learning to change my habit. It's not completely gone yet, but I have a new thing I'm starting to do and that's good. I respect my own efforts. I'll get there.
Self-Accptance for Mistakes
Oops. Oh well. That sure wasn't perfect. Thank goodness I'm not perfect or I'd have nothing to do. Looking forward to the next chance to practice.
Skill Builder (10 min)
A man named Richard D. Carson wrote a book called "Taming Your Gremlin: a Guide to Enjoying Yourself"
(audio link not necessarily useful, depends on your group and their level of ability to track audio narration—you can just show the page to get the idea of a gremlin across with the picture.)
PRESENTERS: We will use the idea of the gremlin to represent the inner critic and work with managing self-critical thoughts from the gremlin. Sharing is always optional but nice if you are willing to add your experience as a human.
We all want to be good at things, be admired and respected for our contributions. Most of the time this is great and it makes life really fun. But sometimes, especially when we start something new, the part of us that wants to be good at stuff starts sounding like it only sees bad. When that happens we can't enjoy life. Let's pretend that part of us can turn into a Gremlin.
- What does your Gremlin say when it's being critical?
- What would your Gremlin look like? Is it big? Small? What color is it? What does it's voice sound like? Does it wear clothes?
- Does your gremlin have a name?
- If you want to draw a picture of your gremlin, feel free.
- If you want to imitate your gremlin for the group that could be interesting
- If the gremlin were near you somewhere, where would it perch?
As we work on planning, dreaming, goals and habits, we will be taming our Gremlins too, so that we can enjoy all the new things we want to accomplish and experience.
Just for Fun
Which item would continue the pattern of the line before the empty square?
What did we learn, practice, and/or review today?
What are we doing this afternoon?
Rights & Self Advocacy
Thursday December 30, 2021
Today happens to be Bacon Day
SLIDE presenting reminder: After using FULL screen mode for a slide show, use the ESC (escape) key at the top left of your keyboard to exit.
Check In (5 min)
No program tomorrow!
Theme of the week and Skill Builder
Today’s focus will be on how any change we want starts with us, not with others.
Recap yesterday’s topics
Achievements
Your most cherished achievements. What have you accomplished that you are so proud to have others know about. Share your memory of the moment you reached that achievement or knew you had.
Covid Mitigation Moment (5 min)
PRESENTERS: Read and discuss the story. Guide the discussion toward the idea that inconvenience is worth it to keep the disease from spreading.
Joseph's friend Emily tested postivie for Covid-19 just 3 days after he had run into her on his morning walk. They were wearing masks and stayed apart but she was probably contagious by then. Joseph's mother asks him to pick up some pills for her at the pharmacy. She still has some left but she doesn't want to wait two days for the pharmacy to mail them to her. Should Joseph pick up the pills for his mom or convince her to use the mailing option? Why?
Thematic Activity 01 (10 min)
Feelings and Habits
When the world is not going the way we would like, we often become self-critical. Why is that? Here's how it works.
PRESENTERS: the slide show will fill the screen if you click the "START SLIDESHOW" button in the upper right corner.
Thematic Activity 02 (10-15 min)
Picking out achievable goals for 2022 that actually make you feel good about yourself today.
Here is the Big Goals into Tiny Habits activity we started earlier.
PRESENTERS: The slides can open up a lot of discussion or a little. You can choose 1 or 2 of them to go over, or go through the whole deck. It depends on your group and what you want to talk about.
Skill Builder (10-15 min)
How to accept ALL of ourselves by using a method called RAIN by Tara Brach
When our critical thoughts, our Gremlin, make us feel bad we want to feel better right away. That often means we just do something to feel good in the moment. Remember those bad habits that feel good in the short term but give us results we don't want in the long term? RAIN is a way to feel better right away naturally.
This is a good 10-minute meditation that teaches how to use RAIN
R stands for Recognize
Recognize and give a name to any bad feeling your are having
A stands for Acknowledge
Give the feeling respect. Remind yourself that you have feelings for a reason, that your body and mind are trying to keep you safe and they use emotions to try and talk to you.
I stands for Investigate
Be brave and calm and come closer to that feeling, think about where in your body you feel it, how it's affecting you
N stand for Nurture
Give the feeling kind, patient attention. Accept it and recognize that it is your body and mind trying to give you information. How can you give it kindness instead of just trying to get rid of it?
Just for Fun
Which item belongs in the empty square to complete the pattern? (no it's not the same one from yesterday)
Christmas Patterns with a Twist
What did we learn, practice, and/or review today?
What are we doing this afternoon?
Knowledge & Fun
Friday December 31th, 2021
Happy New Year!
Today is a program holiday. Enjoy your long weekend!
Choosing Fun Stuff to Do
Need some help deciding on an afternoon activity?
The activities are numbered. These numbers corrospond to brief activity descriptions listen in the linked document below.
