80 Things I Learned from My 80 Year-Old Teacher, Mentor, and Friend: Dr. Sidney B. Simon

1. Love unconditionally
2. Up the risk to grow
3. It doesn’t help to try to fill one’s bucket with self-esteem until we patch all the leaks that prevent us holding that esteem in.
4. IALAC – I Am Lovable (just because I am) And Capable (because I prove to myself that I can do things and because I am both lovable and capable I can conclude that I am of worth.)
5. Don’t look at the world with ‘red pencil glasses.’
6. Time alone is an important element for overall wellness.
7. Ask ‘brave questions’ to generate real and meaningful conversation.
8. I don’t have to kick myself in the butt all the time.
9. Negative Criticism is destructive – whether it’s directed toward myself or others.
10. I should only offer negative criticism after I filter it through at least 6 rigorous filters – which in my experience rarely allow such criticism through.
11. Everyone is somebody’s baby – and should be treated with the tenderness we reserve for babies.
12. Skin requires the nourishment of touch.
13. When loving words might be hard to say, loving touch communicates deeply and powerfully.
14. Words are important – and we can grow to find them easier to say.
15. Loving touch added to loving words communicates unmistakably.
16. One man or one woman can touch many lives in innumerable ways.
17. Writing freely – in the style of Ira Progoff’s journaling method – uncovers thoughts and feelings that may have been lurking beneath the surface, and helps me know what to do with those thoughts and feelings.
18. Writing, music, touch, and community – are all windows for my learning.
19. “80 is the new 60!”
20. It helps to have the right tools for the job of living.
21. Validation – giving one’s ‘stamp of approval’ helps build relationships.
22. Relationships can be fragile – gossamer thread fragile.
23. Abundant validation helps build a gossamer thread into a steel cable that can withstand the occasional inadvertent unfiltered negative criticism.
24. We are all vulnerable to attacks on our self-esteem – but we can learn to fight off such vultures.
25. It’s not only okay to have feelings – regardless of one’s gender – it’s more than okay to share those feelings with others.
26. Sharing feelings is how we develop true intimacy with someone else.
27. If I can’t remember what I did last Saturday night, then I probably need to make my weekends more enriching and memorable.
28. Creating a sense of safety is crucial to creating a great learning community.
29. Creating opportunities for learners to think, write, and speak – especially in small groups – helps them own and be responsible for their own learning.
30. To be your ally, I can ask what you specifically want me to do and then to ask you if you have felt my support. I’ll need effective feedback and validation that I’m giving you what you need.
31. Taking turns is a good system.
32. There is never enough time. If something is important, you’ll get back to it. And if it is really important, don’t worry, it will get back to you.
33. #32 is true if you’re talking about feelings that are real. If, instead, you’re engaging in melodrama, it won’t be important enough for you to remember to get back to it.
34. A component of overall wellness is having a sense of order and beauty in one’s life.
35. Another component of wellness is having a counseling outlet – someone who will listen when you need to have someone listen even if you have to pay that person to do the listening.
36. A great way to evaluate something is to ask Mamie Porter’s 3 Questions: What did I like about…? If I had it to do again, what would I do differently? What support do I need?
37. Mamie Porter’s questions can also be adapted to very practical things like job performance appraisals: What do you like about your performance? What would you do differently? What support do you need from me?
38. It’s good to be able to say “I respect myself for..” and then list as many respectable qualities as you can – even 50!
39. When you’re motive is ego, saying something publicly is a negative “Look at me,” but if you’re motive is to benefit the community, it’s not a “look at me” situation.”
40. It’s useful to look at the things – both positive and negative – that shaped one’s life – and then to make new choices to shape one’s own life.
41. Support – someone to listen, to encourage, to cheerlead, to give truthful feedback – is really important for living well!
42. It’s wise to seek out different people to fill the different roles of support listed in #41 because asking it all from one person may be expecting too much of that person who also has a life that needs supporting.
43. It’s a risk to share who we really are – a risk that helps us grow.
44. Risk needs to be tempered with safety. We don’t need to share who we are with someone who isn’t safe.
45. It’s important to forgive – the people who hurt me were probably doing the best they could do with what they had.
46. Denial is not a bad thing. It can protect us when we can’t deal with what’s happening. But getting stuck pretending not to know what we really know has a very high cost.
47. Self-blame is a rung higher than denial because it acknowledges that something has happened – and sometimes we do need to claim true responsibility for what we attract. But when we’ve been hurt in ways that we truly could not control what happened to us, we need to learn that IT WAS NOT OUR FAULT!
48. Abuse of any kind is no way to treat a little kid!
49. Victim-hood is another rung higher on the road to forgiveness and healing because we can then say, “this happened to me. It wasn’t right. I did NOT deserve that!” But we don’t have the capacity yet to draw boundaries to protect ourselves.
50. Victim-hood has several flavors – self-indulgence, whining, and mean-ness.
51. Victims – who get stuck in that stage – beget victims – people who have been hurt and then hurt others in both intentional and unintentional ways. Hurt people hurt people.
52. Victim-hood is a natural and in some ways helpful stage – but not a healthy place to get stuck for 20 years or more.
53. A powerful lever out of the stage of victim-hood is a commitment to seek and achieve overall wellness.
54. When we exercise important self-care – taking care of ourselves first – then we are less likely to hurt someone else and more able to be of genuine help to another.
55. When we can say, ‘this happened to me, it wasn’t right, I did not deserve that, AND IT WILL NOT HAPPEN TO ME AGAIN!” we’ve reached the strong stage in healing called Anger.
56. In anger, we commit that something has to change.
57. In anger, we draw boundaries around ourselves that protect us from the hurt we’ve previously been dealt.
58. A cost of anger is that we seem to attract angry people and angry reactions to us.
59. It is no fun to date a person who is angry!
60. One lever out of the anger stage is humor that helps us put our hurt into perspective.
61. Another lever out of anger is the genuine desire – and growing capacity – to help others.
62. Humor and the desire and capacity to help others allows us to slide to the next rung of survivor-hood.
63. Until we reach the survivor stage in our healing, we should not attempt to help others. We don’t yet have the capacity.
64. Surviving a hurt is a great feeling – but even here we tend to identify ourselves in terms of the hurt and not all the other parts of our being.
65. When we can acknowledge that the hurt has shaped our lives, and also recognize that we have other gifts and joys and arenas of our lives that the hurt is not part of – then we reach the stage that Sid and Suzanne Simon called Integration (and which I call Thriver-hood.)
66. Knowing the stages of healing intellectually is not the same as feeling them emotionally – but can help us prepare for the natural hurts of living and identify hopeful ways out of mire we might find ourselves temporarily stuck in.
67. There’s a difference between guilt and shame. Guilt is internal, I caused it, I can atone for it. Shame is external, visited upon me by someone else, and it is neither fair nor reasonable to visit shame upon someone else.
68. If it’s good to contemplate what shaped my life, isn’t it also useful to contemplate what shaped the lives of others – like my parents, my sibs, my lover? Might that not make me more understanding of them?
69. It is not necessary to be perfect. Excellence will do just fine!
70. Taking time out to consider my feelings right here and now (using a tool called the Here and Now Wheel) is a useful process – under stress, in great happiness, and at the myriad moments in between.
71. From Louis Raths, “If a person has a cold, you don’t give them pneumonia germs.”
72. Healing unfinished business with someone who may be the next to die – and anyone may be the next to die – is important to both the person who is dying and the person who survives.
73. I can’t control what has happened already in the timeline of my life, but in the time I have left – my rainbow years – I need to frequently list what I want to have, do, experience, and/or witness in the precious time I have left.
74. When you do make a list of what you want to do, have, experience, and/or witness before you die – you get a lot more of what you want in your life!
75. Six things that trainers/facilitators need: something to teach, some way to organize it, a compelling way to present the learning, a way for learners to follow up, a way to market one’s gifts, a multitude of ways in which to renew oneself and keep growing.
76. Effective strategy sequences include: a tool to help support a concept or theory, leading from something to something, a grabber, active learner involvement followed by closure and processing time for the learners, as well as hints about where they might go next in their learning.
77. From William James: “to make a change, you must start immediately and flamboyantly, and make no exceptions.”
78. I can design and redesign a day, an hour, a minute, by considering what I’d have it contain, “In my perfect fantasy…”
79. From Louis Rath’s: “To be a value, one must choose it freely, from alternatives, understanding the consequences of the choice, prize and publicly affirm it, and act with repetition, pattern, and consistency upon it.” My own twist: it must also be morally right and good.
80. If you come up with an idea, that doesn’t mean you have to carry it out. If no one else steps up to carry it, it might be an idea ahead of its time.