At the end of the day, can one person really make any impact at all? When the world’s problems loom large and your ordinary life stretches you thin, it is still possible to be a difference-maker–one small, intentional, extravagant act of kindness at a time.
When it comes to disagreement, we are in perpetual fight-or-flight mode. Rather than respond with a posture of compassion and connection, we are encouraged to “resist” others. Either we engage in fruitless arguments with people who refuse to see things our way or we retreat to our echo chambers where everyone agrees with us. But the real resistance, the kind that helps us grow, is learning to love others–especially those who disagree with us.
As a trauma-informed professional life coach, Janell Rardon spends a good deal of her day-to-day work with brokenness–broken families, broken relationships, broken hearts and souls. In response to the pleas of her clients, she developed a set of emotional-health tools to help them repair the broken parts of their lives. In Stronger Every Day and on today’s episode, she shares these powerful tools with you, showing you how to:
Our bodies are designed to heal. We fall off our bikes and skin our knees―and without effort on our part, the skin looks like new in a few days. But while our skinned knees easily heal, it can sometimes feel like our emotional and relational wounds are left gaping open, broken beyond repair. If our bodies instinctively know how to heal physical injuries, could they also help us understand how to restore painful emotional and relational ruptures?
The Gordon family was confronted with that very challenge when their five-year-old son, Sawyer, known for his big blue eyes and vivacious spirit, cheerfully pedaled his bike onto their busy road. Moments later, a distracted driver, someone the family knew, stood over the motionless child—the unthinkable had happened.