Saturday, February 8, 2014

Habit 1 - Be Proactive

Being proactive is often referred to as the habit of choice, which means that you take responsibility for your choices and behavior. According to Stephen Covey, there is a space between the stimulus and response, and it is in this space that you have the potential to choose your response.  To be proactive means that you have the foresight to think and act ahead of anticipated events. It means that you take conscious control of your life, set goals, and then work towards achieving those goals. Rather than waiting for life's events to happen to you, you take control and engineer your own events.

Reactive Language
•I’ll try
•That’s just the way I am
•There’s nothing I can do
•I have to
•I can’t
•You ruined my day
Proactive Language
•I’ll do it
•I can do better than that
•Let’s look at all our options
•I choose to
•There’s gotta be a way
•I’m not going to let your bad mood rub off on me


Habit 1 - Be Proactive
 

Are You Proactive or Reactive

Sunday, February 2, 2014

Building Leaders ~ Our Third Annual Career Day

For this year's Career Day, we were fortunate to have 38 different professionals come to Cooper to share information about their jobs and how leadership plays a role in what they do each day. We are so grateful to all of them for taking time out of their busy schedules to prepare such outstanding presentations to share with our students. In addition to learning about various professions, our students also had the opportunity to display and practice their leadership skills. Many students helped us get ready for Career Day, and others served in leadership roles such as registrars, travel guides, greeters, photographers, hosts, singers, and speakers on Career Day. The morning began in the library with a welcome from Mr. Taylor and Mrs. Aherne. Under the direction of our vocal instructor, Mrs. Danke, a group of students then sang and performed the Leader in Me cup song. Tour guides then called speakers by name and walked them to their respective rooms to present.

Students each had a lanyard and card that had their schedule on it for the morning, which included the profession they would be hearing about as well as the room in which they needed to go. They each did an amazing job traveling to the various rooms and were a respectful audience for our guests. At the conclusion of the third session, students went back to their classrooms and the speakers went to the library for lunch, which was generously donated by Jimmy Johns. The morning concluded with some of our students sharing the 7 Habits and how leadership has had an impact on their lives both at school and at home. We were so proud of how passionate and authentic they were when they spoke about leadership! We continue to learn from them everyday!

It was truly an exciting morning! Our student leaders not only learned a great deal, they did an outstanding job in everything they did to help make the day such a success!