When you feel like you can do nothing right, do the opposite!
Welcome!
Many of us are either about to be on vacation from school, or we already are.
A well deserved break from the pressures of school, including your bully if that’s where you see them.
Regardless of whether getting out of your regular routine means you won’t see the bully or not, it’s still a time to for you regroup.
Young people grow quite a bit over the summer holidays, and you’ve been working through some tough challenges in your personal development.
You’ve earned this chance to reflect and incorporate what you’ve learned this year.
I realize long vacations can be anything but fun for kids. They can equal many hours spent waiting for parents to get home from work. They can be lonely, and they can also be too social with siblings and neighbors, while missing school friends.
My point is summer days off mean different things to different people.
Transitioning to vacation time is a difficult adjustment for lots of us, just as hard as returning to school can be.
Opposite Day can be abrupt, but often it’s just the ticket!
Anytime we switch and do the opposite of what we’ve been doing, change happens, often for the better.
This brings me to the theme of today’s lesson, which is to do the opposite.
And vacation is a perfect time to shift who you are, switch up your game, try new things, become a new you.
I’ll be blunt here. Bullies can make us feel like losers, and when you feel like a loser, it can feel like everything you do goes terribly wrong.
So, why not do exactly the opposite? If what you’ve done up to this point hasn’t worked, wouldn’t it be better to just do the opposite?
Albert Einstein said it well with this quote: ‘Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.’
What he meant was to experiment and try new strategies if you want different outcomes.
When it seems like nothing is going your way, take a step back and see where you can switch it up.
There are several ways to approach this:
1-You could be almost silly about it and do exactly the opposite of what you usually do.
2-Another way to do the opposite is to look at your habits. Take a hard look at the patterns, behaviors, and moods you habitually do, and see if doing something new would be just the change that makes the difference.
3-A third way to do celebrate Opposite Day is to do things the wrong way or the more difficult way on purpose. This isn’t so much about making intentional mistakes, which is a great strategy for overall success. It’s about interrupting what’s normal.
I would never encourage you to ignore your gut instincts or do what you know is bad or wrong. However, we must be flexible and openminded about ways we could improve. We can all improve. Nobody is perfect.
This is a great time to get good at being different. People forget details about each other when they spend time apart. Use this vacation time to become a new and improved version of yourself and resist any impulse to use it as a way to hide.
