One of the presents Jess got for Christmas was a dvd of Do Hard Things conference. We’ve read the book (and yes, got a t.shirt!) and now we are watching the dvd. It is a message that rings true to our hearts and we are enjoying seeing it delivered by Alex and Brett themselves. Tonight we watched session 1.

I thought I would just journal the lessons that were important for our family. Some of these are direct from what they had to say, others are thoughts that Peter and I had as an extension of what we heard and as application for our family. If you haven’t read the book – go and visit the blog and read some of their articles.

Our Lessons to remember:

1. The things we spend our time on will affect who we become. The character, the disciplines, the way we spend our time will shape us.
2. The power of public speaking. Peter reminded us that 7% of what we communicate comes from our words, 38% from our tone and 55% from our body language. This goes to show that when we communicate in print only we are only getting 7% of the message. When we communicate on the phone we are still missing a large portion (body language) of what is being expressed. Just goes to show how important face to face communication still is. Peter encouraged the kids to not shy back from public speaking, to practice, to become comfortable with the idea of sharing with people.
3. We need to have a message to talk about. Once again Peter quoted “Small minds talk about people, average minds talk about events, great minds talk about ideas.” The challenge is – what do we talk about? Do we watch a movie and talk about the words the people said, the one-liners, the animation and technical information or do we dig deep and think about a message, an analogy, an idea presented in the movie. Do we talk about the things that we read – not just to fill in time, but to generate conversation, to challenge each other’s thinking. Secondly, are we reading the things that challenge our thinking and give us something (an idea) to talk about.