Put Some 'Whoop' In Your Day

LINCOLN -- Motivational speaker Kim Hodous of Fayetteville recently addressed Lincoln teachers, encouraging them to "Work, Live, Play Full Out," both in the classroom and in their personal lives.

The keynote speaker at a district-wide gathering the week before school started, Hodous is a former teacher, a yoga instructor, business owner, wife and mother of five. Her website describes her as someone who "specializes in waking people up so they can live full out in all areas of their lives."

Hodous credits her high school history teacher, Mr. Cunningham, with giving her strategies for going all out, being positive, upbeat and making a difference.

Of course back then, Hodous said, teachers did not have to deal with cell phones or computers but she said Cunningham was "totally present" as a teacher, focused on his students.

Hodous told the teachers to be focused on the people around them, not checking their phones or their Facebook page.

Mr. Cunningham also looked toward the future, not his past.

Many times, people approach their attitude based on their past. Instead, Hodous said, she believes how people feel when they show up for work, play or life in general, should be based on where they are going, not where they've been.

"Here's the trick," Hodous said. "You can't change the past. We all have stories of betrayal."

Stories of betrayal and hard times in the past should not define a person. She pointed to fairy tales as an example. Cinderella lived a miserable life until her fairy godmother showed up. She did not live in the past.

One tool to living all out is setting goals and heading toward those goals. A person who has set goals can seek guidance and direction in meeting them, Hodous said.

"You can't hit what you can't see."

Statistics show that only 20 percent of Americans set goals and of those, only 3 percent write down their goals and only 1 percent write their goals and review them regularly. Case in point, she asked teachers who had set goals for the year to raise their hands. A majority had but only a few were left when Hodous asked how many regularly reviewed their progress in reaching those goals.

Negativity is another area that affects living full out, Hodous said.

"We live in a completely negative society."

Negative messages can be found everywhere. Hodous threw out a few phrases that are popular and the teachers recognized them: "No pain, no gain." Or another one, "Save for a rainy day."

"Negativity is a pattern we need to break. We reinforce the patterns of negativity with our words."

She did a few exercises with the teachers to show how positive and negative messages can affect a person.

She encouraged them to practice positive thoughts and words with each other.

"Every thought and every word builds people up or weakens them," Hodous said.

Another danger to negativity is that it lasts. She asked how many of them still remembered something negative said to them 25 years ago. Many raised their hands.

"That negativity could have been contradicted hundreds and hundreds of times since then and yet you still remember that," she said.

A positive person is a happy person and Hodous said she believes happiness is a choice, noting there are people who have every reason to be miserable because of what's going on in their lives and they choose to be happy. Others have every reason to be happy and yet they are miserable, she added.

Hodous has her own tragedy and her own "excuse," she said to choose not to be happy. She shared that she and her husband lost a daughter to leukemia when she was 2 years old.

"I fell into a pit of despair and didn't know if I could dig out of it," Hodous told the teachers.

She attended a conference and with guidance from a therapist said she realized she needed to forgive her daughter for dying and forgive herself.

"I realized I had only two options. Life was going to get better or life was going to get worse."

Hodous cautioned the educators from having the "I'll be happy when disease," making happiness dependent on a new raise, for example, or when reaching a certain milestone.

She added, "If we put happiness off and make it conditional, we have no control over it. When it comes to happiness, 10 percent is external circumstances and 90 percent is how we process it and view it."

Hodous gave one last piece of advice for living full out: Have more fun and laugh a lot.

She recommended the schools create a Fun Committee and told the teachers to have fun at school, fun at home with their families and make fun intentional.

"Put some whoop in your day."