It was someone no less than the Dalai Lhama who said that education today focuses too much on material and economic success and not enough on education of the mind, the emotions and personal growth.
I was in a gift shop some months ago, looking for gifts for primary school age children. I came across some books with inspirational life messages and thought I would love to give the children something like that when they get a little older. In fact, I asserted, I could write such a book myself!
From my subsequent investigations I concluded there was indeed a gap in the availability of this sort of book – amazing, given the huge issues of teenage depression and suicide. Some say there are more suicides than there are road deaths.
So I put my mind to work, culminating in the world-wide release of
“Enjoy Being Proud of Who You Are: 52 Inspirational Life-Skill Messages for Teenagers”.
It is available in print, e-book and e-reader formats through Amazon/Kindle.
I am not an expert in today’s teenage issues (I vaguely remember being one myself many years ago). It’s simply my attempt to provide a series of thoughts that I have gleaned from my mentor work, my life experiences and from the lives of various other people who gave me some great thoughts they had absorbed sitting at the feet of their own parents and passed down to their children.
Will teenagers read it let alone like it? Who knows? When did you last read a book of inspirational messages from cover to cover? If one teenager who is struggling with adolescence is helped by one message, the task will have been worth the effort.
If you are a parent, grandparent, guardian, aunt or uncle of a teenager, I urge you to give him/her an opportunity to make their own decisions about reading and, with luck, identifying at least one message in the book that may help them make sense of this mad life.
I also ask that you heed what is in fact the 53rd message in the book, directed at you:
“Loving your teenage son or daughter is not enough. He or she needs to feel that you appreciate them as a blossoming human being, whose talents and uniqueness require constant nurturing, support and encouragement and whose dreams are sufficiently intriguing to be worth exploring”.
I would love to hear any anecdotes of outcomes from a reading of my book – by you or by your teenager – or even have you put a review on the sales site from where you purchased your copy.
And I hope His Holiness the Dalai Lhama would approve of my efforts to try bringing some balance into the world of education.
