Immortality of Influence — by Salome Thomas EL

Brilliant! After attending the “Leader in Me” symposium in March of 2013 and listening to the opening keynote Principal EL, I decided to purchase his 2nd book.  I loved the simplicity of his ideas.  All adults, not just teachers can do a better job mentoring our kids. The premiss of his ideology is covered in chapter one.  “FAILURE IS MOTIVATING” The title of chapter one is Failed Influence.  A great collection of stories about how our society has failed our kids.  As parents we often want to protect our children from failures. When in fact, the failure we experience shapes us into the people we are.  We’ve all heard the saying, it’s now how often you fall, but how you respond. His introductory chapter explains how we’ve failed and what we should learn from those failures.  It is our responsibility to care about the success of ALL students.  If we each cared about ALL kids in our country as much as we cared about the kids in our own communities education would  be on the uprise instantly. We’ve allowed negative influence to control our kids and school.  No amount of money, program, curriculum or politician will influence our kids as compared to our mentors.  Little league coaches, youth football coaches, dance instructors and teachers will influence our kids daily,  Its up to us to make sure we are an agent for change.  Individuals want to blame and give negativity a boost of energy by discussing our short falls as mentors.  Instead if we want change in our students across the country we need to use the power of our influence in a positive fashion.  In closing, there once was a villager approached an elder and said he had two fighting dogs.  One dog was evil the other positive. The villager had argued that both dogs were fierce and very strong.  He asked the his elder, how do I know what dog will win the fight.  The elder simply responded by saying “which ever dog you feed more.”  What are you feeding the negative publicity or the positive power of influence you each hold?