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!

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.

 

 

 

 

 

My journey to America!

 

It has been a long time I did not have the chance to reflect on my life and appreciate all the intensive experiences that have been given to me to show up in this world! With a heart full of gratitude, I am writing these words to honor the stories that brought me to where I am today and  helped shaping my life into my current profession: a professional life coach who is fully committed to serve and to help people to transform their lives through heart-to-heart connections.

It was a dark night in a southern rural town of Vietnam, I was in my late teen at the time, and was ready to embark on a journey on a boat with my brother to escape communism. The boat was 15 meters long, but there were 300 people on that boat. We made it to the international border, and there were two big holes in the boat that caused issues. The captain decided to take the boat back to the shore… about 300 meters from the shore, the boat started sinking.. three hundred people crowd became so chaotic. Those who could swim jumped into the water and tried to swim to the shore, those who couldn’t hold on to the boat. My brother and I did what we need to do, swam to the shore and escaped the capture of local police officers and finally made it back to Saigon safely. Not everyone on that boat was that lucky. Half of the people died. I witnessed the first time in my life the fine line between life and death, and never forget those people who paid the highest price for freedom: their own life. This intensive experience stayed with me until today and became a flame in my heart reminding me how much blessed I am to achieve the freedom of living in America, the blessing that half of those people on that boat died without achieving it. Not every moment staying alive that I do not appreciate the gift of life, the gift of freedom that I receive from this country whom I am honored to call “home” in these past so many years. I am a proud Vietnamese American!

Fast forward, I came to Canada after several unsuccessful escapes, became Canadian citizen, graduated from college, found the love of my life and got married and moved to the United States, became active with the communities and became American citizen in 2000. It has been a beautiful journey for me to serve this great country as a proud citizen in the past 18 years. I remember vividly as I stood in front of 700 ladies and gentlemen (mostly ladies) to deliver my acceptance speech for the Americanism medal awarded by the Honor Society of the Daughters of American Revolution (DAR), listening to the national anthem being sung with so much patriotism… and given that I just lost my own mother a week before, I was deeply moved and touched. A sense of gratitude and loving was just so overwhelmingly felt in my body and I said the word “THANK YOU” again with a new meaning, the meaning of commitment to give back to deserve this precious freedom that I am given, the meaning of commitment to serve and to give! It was the night when I became solid about the new mission and the new purpose of my life: living a life of service through loving, giving and serving.

The year of 2017 was the year of transformation when I had to go through quite a few setback in life with my husband’s hospitalization in which I nearly lost him, followed by my mother’s departure, and then my father’s passing only six weeks afterward… Within the first six months of the year, I lost the two rocks of my life, my beloved parents, and coping with my husband’s illness while making the decision of stopping my corporate work to dedicate full time for the non-profit organization that my husband founded 12 years before. And yet, I never felt so much alive and full of an inexplicable energy that lifted  my spirit up and carry me so far! It was also through this turbulent time that I learned about the power of life coaching and how coaching can transform my life from darkness to light, from the deepest sorrow of my soul to the highest level of fulfillment. Going through these experience myself truly confirmed the mission in life for my next chapter: to bring more lights to this world through a life of service, through the non-profit work that my husband and I have been involved in the past three decades, and through the work of a professional life coach to help transform my clients’ life through a heart-to-heart connection, one person at a time!

I know that in my heart, I am ready to serve, to love and to give! I would like to end this note with Mother’s Teresa’s beautiful words

Daily Ritual that will help me to boost my productivity and happiness

I want to create this note to share with my FB friends some of the great insights from my leadership mentor John C. Maxwell.  I will pledge to follow this daily routine  in the next 3 months to see if it makes big difference and will share back with my friends.

Twelve (12) Pledges for daily routine

1. Attitude: I will display the right outlook daily.

2. Priorities: I will act on the things that are most important to me daily.

3. Health: I will follow healthy guidelines daily.

4. Family: I will communicate with and care for my loved ones daily.

5. Thinking: I wil practice good thoughts daily.

6. Commitment: I will make and keep proper promises daily.

7. Finances: I will properly manage dollars daily.

8. Faith: I will deepen and live out my faith daily.

9. Relationships: I will initiate and invest in solid relationships dailyl.

10. Generosity: I will model kindness daily.

11. Values: I will embrace good standards daily (in my case, I will embrace G.R.A.C.E. daily).

12. Growth: I will seek improvements daily.

Five things I will do every day:

1. READ:  at least 30 minutes – one hour will be dedicated for reading every day (can be reading books from my kindle, my iPAD, my online cloud reader, or listening to audio books, podcast, magazine..)

2. FILE:  at least 30 minutes to file my emails, documents, important artifacts in my system so that I can easily find it when I need it (this area, I am pretty bad, so I do need to revamp my system).

3. WRITE: at least 30 minutes of writing either by sharing on FB posts, or writing in my journal, or putting in a notes on my computer..

4. THINK: meditate at least 30 minutes per day, stop acting or doing and just reflect on things, reflect at the end of the day on things happening during the day and pray God for guidance. Practice and develop my spiritual wellness.

5. QUESTION: reflect and ask myself can something be done differently, or just question on the things around me during my daily routine, look for areas for improvements consistently on every single thing that I am doing… be curious and challenging myself on the things that I have been doing the same way even for a long time…

These are great thoughts shared by John C. Maxwell and it motivates me to practice starting TODAY!