Reflections from Athens

Fifteen years ago (2004), my husband and I visited Athens the first time in celebrating our 10th wedding anniversary. It was during those days that we made decision to start up some new initiative to carry out the mission of civic education that both of us have dreamed of a few years back. We came back with a dream and a commitment to realize that dream. My husband quit his teaching job and dedicated full-time to start the non-profit. We had a dream of establishing an online institution that teaches civic education, business management, civic leadership and personal development to the general audience in Vietnam and around the world to impart knowledge in the country. We also wanted to establish an online library of translated books for 100 great books of all time into Vietnamese and make them available online for those who want to learn to download and read. We want to bring knowledge to those who might not have the conditions to go to university.  We started simply with that intention and a strong commitment to make it happen. And as we build it, they would come!

Coming back to Athens this year (2019) also to celebrate our anniversary we were full of positive emotions. Fifteen years have gone by, the Institute for Civic Education in Vietnam has reached 14 years of age and it has become one of the very first online institutions for the Vietnamese audience that teaches civic education, business management, entrepreneur and leadership in Vietnam with an online library of 16 translated books from Plato, Aristotle, John Locke, Thomas Pain, J.J. Rouseau, to name a few! ICEVN has impacted more than 3000 students mostly in Vietnam, reached out to readership from 144 countries, had 2.5 million visits annually, and served a network of more than 100,000 subscribed readers from across the globe, mostly in Vietnam. It was also well known among social activists in Vietnam who are searching for training or studying material for civic engagement and civic leadership. The web site was also connected with a network of more than 160 blogs inside Vietnam to promote civic engagement and transparency in Vietnam. It has been an incredible journey for everyone involved. Scholars, community activists, youth activists, students, teachers, lawyers, reporters, women activists, and people from all walks of life showed up and together we created an incredible community of learners, teachers and practitioners who continue to strive for excellence and reaching to our best human potentials. Our life was never the same! Two years ago, I also stopped working in corporate work to dedicate full-time to this work and it has been the best two years of my life, as I align my passion for education with my work! Despite the hardship and adversities being thrown at us, we never feel so much alive!

As we came back to the original place when 2500 years ago, Aristotle defined the Greek four characters of a “good person” in his famous book “Ethics”, we felt so much grateful and connected with him and other philosophers despite the space and time difference. Human nature and human values do not change, only how we apply and practice these values and adapt them to the modern society have changed. We came back to Athens to be reconnected with these ancient philosophers, but we also came back to appreciate the decision that we made 15 years ago, without which there would be no ICEVN (www.icevn.org).  When you set the intention and made a commitment to a dream, and tirelessly follow the list of actions to enable you to approach the goal of that dream, you will make it into a reality. We have experienced that throughout the past 15 years and intend to continue with a bigger dream for the next decade.  We are forever grateful for the inspiration we received when we first visited Athens years ago and it came a full circle now as we came back and revisit this place. Thank you Athens, for the inspiration and the wonderful memory that made our life forever changed.

GRACE journey

 

What would you feel if 90% of your children, nieces, nephews and younger friends in the age of 15-21 suffered from stress and 50% of them were lack of energy and motivation and very easily fall into depression? According to APA survey in 2018, Generation-Z is currently suffering from this stress. As parents and educators, what can we do to help our future generations to improve their well-being and emotional wellness so that they can continue to carry out the legacy of America?

I want to invite you to join us in this journey of exploring the five values of GRACE which will become one of the most effective tools to help our younger generations to become happier, healthier, and more productive human beings. This GRACE framework was adapted by Lyceum to combine with the emotional intelligence competencies model to serve as a guidepost for the students in decision making, stress management, conflict resolution, problem solving and self-leadership development.

My name is Anhlan Nguyen, I am the Executive Director of Lyceum – a social enterprise focusing on Life Skills and Professional Development for Success. I am also currently an ICF certified professional coach specializing in emotional intelligence and coaching for transformation. GRACE has some very personal meaning to me as I was going through my own transformation with my transitioning from my 25 year of IT career to serving the non-profits.

In this model, GRACE stands for the acronyms of the following values

G stands for Gratitude

R stands for Respect

A stands for Accountability

C stands for Courage

E stands for Engagement.

By practicing and integrating these five values in our daily life activities, we can live our life with much more joys, happiness and fulfillment. I can attest to that since I continue to be a learner and practitioner of GRACE and it transformed my life.

Gratitude is a deep appreciation of life in all forms, valuing both its gifts and its lessons. A deepest sense of gratitude is toward oneself, appreciate of who you are, where you came from and how you get into this day. Practicing gratitude proactively every day will help us have several small joys in our daily life. If you look through the lens of gratitude, everything seems more beautiful and wonderful. One cannot get depressed if one is practicing gratitude and it is the key that leads to happiness.

Respect is the awareness and openness to oneself and to others, accepting other different belief, culture and perspective from our own. To practice Respect, it starts with respect oneself, respect others and respect the environment. Practice gratitude and respect will help to improve your relationship with anyone who come into your contact.

Accountability is taking full ownership of our own thoughts, emotions and actions. Regardless of whatever circumstances you are in, you always have the power to choose what kind of response you want to have toward the situation and what kind of experience you want to create for yourself and your loved ones. Accountability is to choose always showing up at your best at every moment of your life, and empowering yourself to do the right thing.

But doing the right thing sometimes is tough and it needs the fourth value to stay through, that is Courage. Practicing courage does not mean that you do not have fear, but instead it gives you the energy to face your own fears and going through it anyway.

Last but not least, Engagement is the intention of wholeheartedly contribute our gifts so that we can help benefiting the communities around us and the natural environments. Engagement is all about connection, connecting with your own self (self love), connecting with other (Empathy) and connecting with the nature environment.

By developing the lens of GRACE and making choice with GRACE mindset, you will start experiencing the transformation in your life. You will become more resourceful, happier, calmer and always bring out the light of joys, happiness and gratitude to everything, everyone whom you contact with.

I want to invite you to join us in this journey of learning and developing yourself through GRACE so that you can become a light for yourself, for your loved ones, for the community surrounding you and for the world. At the end of the day, you are one of the 8 billion people living on this planet, without you, there is no humanity, without them there is no you! I would like to close with a famous quote by sir Winston Churchill

“We make a living by what we get but we make a life by what we give!”

Choose to make a life with GRACE!

My Appearance on the Asian Women of Power Podcast

Be Thankful!

With Thanksgiving holiday around the corner, it is always my favorite time to reflect, appreciate all blessings in life, and giving thanks to all the ups and downs occurring throughout the year that brought us to where we are today… only more than one month till the end of 2018.  What do you have in store to be thankful for?

Being thankful for our health! The fact that the chance to have each of us being born by our parents is one of 400 trillion is pretty amazing, if not a miracle. As a human being, each of us has received such a unique blessing to exist on this earth, but how many of us had a chance to appreciate the fact that each of us is truly a miracle? a miracle of life!  If we wake up today and we are healthy, we can walk, run, play and can move around physically, it is already a tremendous blessing to be thankful for. Our physical health is something that most of us takes for granted until we are struck by some disease or illness. Thanksgiving holiday is a perfect opportunity to be grateful for our physical health as well as our mental and emotional health. Actually practicing gratitude has proven to be one of the best strategies to improve one’s happiness and emotional wellness.

Being thankful for our home and family! If we have a home to stay during this holiday season, it is truly a blessing that we need to be grateful for. If we have a place called home to go back, to be part of during the holiday, we are luckier than 550,000 people who are homeless in America today and 150 million people worldwide who do not have a home for themselves. If we have our own family with our spouse and our children, we are luckier than more than 21 million people who are either single mom or single dad in America these days. Simple thing like having a home to stay and a family to come back to celebrate Thanksgiving holiday are truly the blessings that sometimes we just take for granted. Abundance does not lie into the money in our bank, it lies in simple facts like these, when we realize how blessed we are in this world.

Being thankful for the relationships in your life, especially our friends and loved ones. How often we acknowledge the importance of our loved ones and our friends who are always there when we need them? Sometimes, we do not realize how much blessed we were to have our friends, our family with us, until we lose some of them. During this Thanksgiving season, please take time to reflect and appreciate each and everyone in your family and your circle of close friends. These are the people who will support you throughout your life, especially when things are challenging. They will be there for you and help you to pull through.

Being thankful for the food, the sunshine, the flowers, the birds singing, and all life blessings around us that sometimes we fail to notice. If we have food in our refrigerator, we are already luckier than 75% of the world around us. When we start paying attention to all the little details of the beautiful nature around us, we will find tremendous blessings and abundance everywhere we go. Practicing this kind of awareness and appreciation will make our life much more enriched and meaningful. Practicing gratitude brings us happiness, joy and fulfillment as we go through  life, and that is the best gift we can give ourselves in this holiday season.

I would encourage each of us take time to reflect, appreciate, acknowledge and reaching out to others who are less fortunate than us to give and to serve. Let us spread the blessings and the positive energy that we have to others as we practice gratitude. Our life will be much more lively and joyful if we practice gratitude not only through the Thanksgiving holiday but also throughout the year, in our daily life.  Just imagine how much light and sunshine one can spread to others if one’s heart is full of love and gratitude. The opportunities are endless.

 

 

 

 

 

Catherine Tran Charity – A journey of love

 

As a mother, have you ever thought of the pain you will have to go through if one day your child suddenly went away and you would never be able to see her/him again? It was the emotion that my sister had gone through as her beautiful daughter, Catherine Tran, passed away suddenly after a tragic bus accident.  How could you cope with the tremendous grief of losing your own child? How could you find your calm when you had to attend your own daughter’s funeral? The sadness was just like a deep hole that drained all of your energy…

It was at those darkest moments when my sister and brother-in-law’s families made the decision to give birth a beautiful organization, the Catherine Tran Charity Team, to honor their daughter’s passion in helping others. Being a young girl growing up in Toronto, Canada, Catherine Tran not only was a well rounded excellent student, she also had a golden heart. Her love for others and her compassion were shown when she was only nine years old by giving all the money she got from winning a piano competition to buy supplies and books for the poor students at the orphanage she visited with her parents in her first trip back to Vietnam. Catherine always exuded a sense of compassion, a sense of caring to everyone who was around her.  Her passing created such a shock to all her friends who knew her at the high school she attended. They organized a memorial service and sold more than 1000 black ribbons to raise money to buy gifts for poor children for the holiday that year in the honor of Catherine.

And although 2009 marked the end of her short life on this earth, Catherine Tran’s departure has inspired her parents and both of their families to start a new beginning, a beautiful journey of love and service with Catherine Tran Charity Fund established to bring joy and happiness to the children and needy families around the world, in the schools where she attended in Canada, in rural areas of Vietnam through the building of bridges, houses and clean water well, in those areas affected by natural disasters being Japan, Pakistan, Haiti… to name a few!

As we celebrated Catherine’s 25th birthday (if she were still here) this summer, I want to remember her gift of loving and sharing with this beautiful song composed by the born blind guitarist Nguyen, Duc Dat from California to honor her spirit.  As we celebrate Catherine Tran Charity in November this year for its 9th anniversary, we send her our deepest love and appreciation for teaching us the lesson of compassion, love and giving. Catherine Tran Charity has delivered 2,200 toys to poor children in Canada through CTV’s Toy mountain, provided over $30,000 in scholarships and youth programs in Canada, completed 38 infrastructure bridges, 311 clean water wells, 6 kindergarten centers, 14 homes for poverty-stricken families in rural areas of Vietnam and providing support to disaster relief in Haiti, Pakistan, Vietnam, and Japan and recently provided support for a center in Kenya for poor children. The list goes on…

Thank you Catherine Tran for teaching us the gift of love and service. You helped us to transcend the sadness of grieving into something beautiful and meaningful.