Weekly Wellbeing Focus – Hope & Choice / Less is More

Welcome to the Weekly Wellbeing Focus. The focus for this week is Hope & Choice / Less is More.

Parent Wellbeing: Having a purpose is the difference between getting by and making a life for yourself every day. It offers you fulfilment and the drive to succeed because you care. Purpose will always come from within, and will always be fuelled by the belief that you matter as a person.

Dig deep to live with meaning and purpose.

While having choices gives students a sense of autonomy, which is an essential ingredient to be self-determined, too many choices can often confuse and frustrate them, leading to procrastination. Also, advertising is forever targeting young people (and us) that more is better; the reality is that this is untrue.

Teaching students to identify the minimum they need to meet their needs, and then choosing that, will enable them to be more decisive and autonomous. They are many things in life where “good enough” is the best fit for everyone. While we are all being encouraged by advertising to be maximisers, and have a world of choices at our finger tips, in most cases, being a satisfiser, where our needs are sufficiently met is the best way to go.

The most difficult thing to communicate to students is to know what are their needs and what are their wants. The pressure on them from all sorts of media often smudges the difference between needs and wants. An effective way to clarify things for them is to write down the barest minimum they need to get by, and then choose that. Let’s encourage students through our role modelling that less is more. Accepting that enough is better than more, is a great starting point in assisting students to set goals.

Acknowledgement: Snyder, Schwartz & Boniwell

Some useful videos that discuss this week’s focus:

Jake McIntosh
Assistant Head of Secondary – Wellbeing