YEAR 1 - LESSONS 1-18
WEEKLY LESSONS
WEEK 1: HOPE FULL
Hope. It’s such a small word, but at times, it seems like an overwhelmingly large concept. Something distant, like the moon, so far away that it looks small. But then, humans have landed on the moon, haven’t they?
Hope isn’t a distant object in the cosmos. It’s all around you if you look closely. It’s within you if you let the hope you feel and see fill you up until you are hope full—full of hope.
The question is, do you choose to be full of hope or full of doubt?
Doubt wants you to believe you aren’t worth achieving your goals and dreams; that you don’t have what it takes or you shouldn’t bother trying because you’ll only fail anyway. It wants you to think that your goals aren’t worth the struggle that comes with them.
Do not listen to that doubt! It doesn’t know what it’s talking about anyway.
WEEK 2: NEXT STEP
The last 15 steps (or lack of steps) don’t matter because that’s in the past. You can’t change anything that happened during those steps. If you haven’t even started yet, you can’t go back and start earlier. Those moments are gone, and you can’t get them back.
The next 15 steps aren’t that important yet, either. So many things could change between now and then. The future is built from the actions you are taking right now, so predicting what steps come after this isn’t very helpful. You can plan what you think is going to happen, but you won’t actually know until you’ve put in the work to get there, so why borrow trouble early?
Instead of ruminating on the past or trying to predict the future, you should be focusing on the one thing you can control: the next step.
WEEK 3: EXPECTATION VS. REALITY
It’s not fair. Why is this happening to me?
These are common thoughts when reality doesn’t meet up with your expectations. Common, but unhelpful. Life isn’t fair. Bad things happen to good people. Everyone makes mistakes.
Even if you do everything right, you may still fail, but you have an opportunity to learn from this event and prepare for similar situations in the future. One method for seizing opportunities like this is the OODA Loop, originally developed by US Air Force Col. John Boyd: Observe, Orient, Decide, Act.
WEEK 4: WE OR ME
We live in a me-centered culture. Traditional and social media tend to cast a spotlight on individuals’ appearances and actions. That’s not all bad, but it can contribute to feeling bitter, jealous, and selfish when it leads you to compare yourself to other people. According to science, you don’t want to be constantly driven by purely selfish aims.
Specifically, scientists at Zurich University have found that human brains are wired to be generous, and that generous behavior makes the person committing the act of generosity feel happy. (1) Generosity has a measurable impact on the brain, and the brain is what controls our thoughts, feelings, and actions.
WEEK 5: WORDS MATTER
As you think, so you speak. Your thoughts drive your words. If your thoughts are negative and self-centered, your words will be, too. If your thoughts are positive and others-centered, your words will be, too.
The way you express yourself—especially your words and body language—influence how others see you and how they in turn express themselves around you. Words are powerful. They can lead to greater unity and understanding or contribute to further separation and tension.
The words and phrases you use every day have the potential to stick in the minds and hearts of the people who hear them.
Train your thoughts to be positive and others-centered, so your words will be, too.
WEEK 6: SERVE FIRST
You’re probably aware of the phrase “First come, first served.” But we want to challenge you to flip that phrase to “come first, serve first.” Instead of being first in line to eat, we want you to strive to be first at the counter to feed others.
Serving others doesn’t have to be complicated. You don’t have to start a non-profit or join the Peace Corps to serve others. It starts with small gestures. A smile, an invitation, a helping hand. These small acts of generosity and kindness help you learn and practice how to put the needs of others before your own desires.
This is meant metaphorically in that service to others includes a lot of charitable and simply kind actions. And it could be taken literally in that food banks and homeless shelters need help dishing up grub more than just at Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Serving others doesn’t have to be complicated. You don’t have to start a non-profit or join the Peace Corps to serve others. It starts with small gestures. A smile, an invitation, a helping hand. These small acts of generosity and kindness help you learn and practice how to put the needs of others before your own desires.
WEEK 7: INSIDE OUT
You don’t need to be what anyone else tells you to be. You don’t have to hide your uniqueness. You don’t need something else to be enough. You are enough.
Being you is a choice. You could pretend to be someone else or follow dreams that aren’t yours. But you are the only you there has ever been, so why would you choose to be anyone other than you?
Every person on the planet is a unique individual with their own preferences, personalities, and passions. You should celebrate your unique qualities and those of the people around you. You were created on purpose and for a purpose, and it’s up to you to figure out how that translates into the kind of life you want to lead.
WEEK 8: FAIL GREATLY
People say “Failure is not an option” so often it has become cliché. The phrase is right in one sense—though not the way most people mean it. Failure is not an option (or is not optional) because failure is a fact of life. Everyone will fail at some point.
It takes a lot of courage to admit failure. But, if you can summon the courage to admit your mistakes, you take ownership of them. By taking ownership, you give yourself the power to avoid making the same mistake twice. That’s how you learn, and that’s what propels you forward to reach your goals.
WEEK 9: PURPOSED PAIN
Pain is inevitable. You can’t dodge it. You cannot escape it. Pain comes for all of us. Everyone’s pain looks different, but no one avoids it. Uplifting message, right?
Over the course of your life, you may have to experience the pain of abuse, violence, broken homes, family struggles, stress, physical pain, emotional pain, mental pain, bullying, betrayal…the list could go on.
When something bad happens, it’s easy to take on a “poor me” attitude and wallow in it. And sometimes, that’s an important first step for dealing with the pain. But you can’t stay in that place. You have to transmute the pain into something else, something better. Otherwise, your pain will just end up owning you and preventing you from moving on with your life.
Do not let pain be something that happens to you, turn it into something that happens for you.
WEEK 10: OWN IT
Making a mistake doesn’t make you any less worthy of success. A mistake is not the end of the line. Even if it’s a really big mistake, with seemingly devastating consequences, it’s not the end of the world—as long as you are willing to take personal responsibility for your mistake.
Adults take personal responsibility for their actions. And they hold themselves accountable to the consequences of those actions. If you don’t take personal responsibility for your mistakes, if you don’t own them, those mistakes will end up owning you.
WEEK 11: POSITIVE PRESSURE
Pressure is meant to catapult you forward, not to crush you. The difference lies in how you choose to view and use pressure in your life.
When a peer wants you to help cheat on a test, skip class, or consume illegal products, that is pressuring you to do something you know is wrong. You want to be liked and you don’t want to seem lame. But what’s really lame is them putting you in that position to begin with. Choose to accept the pressure as a positive by refusing the offer. By doing that, you buff your character. You get stronger in your convictions and the peer pressure becomes a positive gift.
Pressure is neutral. It is your choices which change that neutral state to a positive or a negative.
WEEK 12: BALANCED LIFE
A balanced life will go further, faster. Think about a fancy Ferrari. If it’s got four flat tires, it’s not going to go anywhere very fast, and the faster and further it tries to go, the more damage it will cause. If the Ferrari were balanced (i.e. had four good tires) it would go much farther, much faster, and without the damage.
If you want to go farther, faster, you have to find balance in your life.
WEEK 13: GET CAUGHT
Too often people think “If I don’t get caught, then it doesn’t matter.” They think it’s no big deal to shoplift, cheat on a test, or vape. But those things do matter. What we do when no one is looking is just as important as what we do when everyone can see us.
Integrity means being the same in private as we are in public. Living otherwise shows a lack of honesty, as well. A life of honesty and integrity is a personal choice, but it’s one that often has a public impact. When we value honesty and integrity and see it realized in our personal lives, we can create a campus culture that also values them.
The things that we do matter whether other people see it or not. Living with integrity starts from inside of us, but by valuing integrity, we can create a campus culture that also values integrity and honesty.
WEEK 14: PLUS ONE
The basic concept behind marginal gains is: Let’s improve by just 1% every day. That doesn’t sound like much, does it? But, if we improve by 1% today, then 1% tomorrow, and keep up that level of gain, within 100 days, we’ve got 100% improvement from where we started.
Little changes that create just 1% improvement over time grow to become big gains and great success.
Tasks that seem hard or impossible today can become easy within an astoundingly short amount of time if we just try to improve 1% each day. Success comes from mastery of the fundamentals, in the tiniest increments.
Little changes that create just 1% improvement over time grow to become big gains and great success.
WEEK 15: YOU CHOOSE
Living the fullness of your purpose starts with three simple choices: choosing to Accept responsibility for what you can change, choosing to Believe that what they do matters even if it only impacts one person, and choosing to Commit to act based on your responsibility to do so and your belief that it will make a difference.
It is your choice to live the fullness of your purpose. When you make the choice to accept responsibility, believe what you do matters, and commit to act, there’s no limit to what you can accomplish to improve the world for everyone.
WEEK 16: SEEK FIRST
You encounter people who are different from you every single day. When you meet them, your first response will either be to try to understand them, or to try to be understood by them. In the first case, the focus is on the other person and trying to establish a broader world view. In the second instance, you care only about making your beliefs and opinions heard.
Seek first to understand rather than seeking to be understood. To do this, you must first respect the other person, then discover empathy for them, and then you can hope to achieve understanding. When we respect others, we listen to them, we draw parallels to our own lives to empathize with them, and through these means we find ways to understand their alternate viewpoint.
WEEK 17: TWO CHAIRS
Conflict is guaranteed, but our response to conflict is not. We choose how we respond when someone wrongs us or when reality isn’t meshing with our expectations. It’s important to understand conflict resolution and practice it well because it limits the damage caused to our relationships and helps us move on together. Conflict resolution teaches us when to respond, what to respond with, and how to respond.
We choose when, what with, and how we respond to conflict. Let’s be the generation that is overly generous with our forgiveness. Let’s learn to resolve conflict well, so it doesn’t cause further damage our relationships.
WEEK 18: ONE TRIBE
We all have a tribe; they’re the people who are closest to us. Our tribe could be our sports team, our band, our family, or our classmates. However we define it, our tribe can either make the world a better place or a worse place. It’s up to us. For example, there are five characteristics of a tribe that makes the world better: Trust, Respect, Integrity, Belief, and Enthusiasm.
We all have a chance to make the world a better place. To make the world better, our tribe, however we describe it, needs to be equipped with good characteristics. When we trust and respect each other, act with integrity, believe in something greater than self, and pursue our purpose with enthusiasm, there’s no limit to the good our tribe can bring to the world.
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Meet COACH MACKEY
Stephen Mackey, CEO & Founder
Stephen Mackey is a player development coach, keynote speaker, Wall Street Journal best-selling author, and founder of 2Words Character Development, one of the top Leadership and character curriculums in the country. Building on the Six Pillars of a Championship Character – Toughness, Integrity, Belief, Excellence, Effort, and Service – Mackey equips teams and organizations to elevate their performance by building a culture of character.
Patrick Jones - Course author
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