Weekly Wellbeing Focus – Kindness, Sorry & Forgiveness / Showing Courage

Welcome to the Weekly Wellbeing Focus. The focus for this week is Kindness, Sorry & Forgiveness / Showing Courage

Parent Wellbeing:

Self-discovery is a lifelong process. It is about continuously developing your self-awareness and making small adjustments to be gradually moving forward to be the person you want to be. The key is to be totally honest with the person you see in the mirror, to celebrate your accomplishments, avoid justifying your behaviours and refrain from explaining your mistakes away.

To live a fulfilling and meaningful life, it is important for students to show other people matter by having the courage to apologise to others who they have upset or done the wrong thing by. Similarly, when the shoe is on the other foot, they need to be prepared to forgive others who have upset them. And, also it will benefit their own wellbeing when they forgive themselves for silly things they have done.

It is quite amazing how much emotional energy gets used up every day by people holding grudges. In some ways, this situation is quite understandable, because it takes a considerable amount of courage to open our hearts to say sorry or forgive others who have upset us. The issue can be that others may not be prepared to accept our apology and forgive us, and that’s where courage comes in. Making the effort to at least try, will lift a load off our shoulders.

And to do this, students will have to use their character strengths to their fullest. While many students know about and talk about their strengths, they don’t often use them. Apologising and forgiving are ideal opportunities for students and ourselves to consciously and deliberately practise using them. And from doing this comes personal growth.

Acknowledgement: Lyubomirsky and Diener 

Students have discussed these things during this week’s focus:

Jake McIntosh
Assistant Head of Secondary – Wellbeing