This week Awesome Stories brings you fun, enthusiasm, empowerment, compassion, education, listening and simplicity.

Prepare for Awesome!

Meet Elias. He’s a delightful bundle of joy! Watch until the end for an amazing treat.

Big Heart and Wisdom

This spunky young woman offers profound wisdom in her TED Talk. Adora Svitak has been writing and blogging since she was 7, and now at 12 travels around giving speeches! Her message is primarily that we need to encourage kids to dream big, be bold and maybe be more ‘childish.’ I love her point about reciprocal learning and trust between kids and adults. I’m excited to see what kind of world kids like Adora might create.

The Power of Listening

You’ve been enjoying my posts on listening, so here’s another. This is a touching tribute to the power of listening and how it can be a mutual gift. For Jalees Rehman, listening has become “an opportunity for great joy”, where the patient experiences the joy of having an audience and the healthcare provider experiences the joy of connecting with the patient. His work as a stem cell biologist and cardiologist was inspired by his childhood experiences with his grandfather in a hospital. Read more about his touching story in this Daily Good article. And here’s an older post of mine on listening and tuning into spirit.

Inspiration from Kid President

Use your words to uplift and empower others. The goodness spreads and comes back to you too!

The Power of Compassion

Recently I decided to make compassion a focus for my life this year. Dr. Kristin Neff gives a wonderful explanation of compassion and how to offer it to ourselves. She believes compassion needs to include caring, awareness and shared human suffering. She also gave a longer TED Talk that explains the benefits of self-compassion, the differences with self-esteem and the harm of self judgement. Here’s a post I wrote on the power of compassion. Warmth, touch and gentle voice are three tools to offer compassion. Self compassion is strongly linked to health, happiness and better relationships. Are you being compassionate?

The Power of Simplicity

I value simplicity and long ago stepped out of the rat race to keep up materially. I feel good living simply, focusing more on living life than buying stuff in a mad attempt to feel good. I’m pleased to see the growing trends with more bloggers writing about simple living and businesses based on the sharing economy model. Here is a post by Joshua of Becoming Minimalist with 21 benefits to living simply. Would you like more posts about living simply? I could easily write about simple living as it’s been my lifestyle for over 20 years.

Heather Hansen

I would love to experience the ‘drawings’ of Heather Hansen. She sketches with charcoal, using her whole body to create images in a graceful dance like performance. Enjoy!

I hope you enjoyed this week’s stories. Did you like all the videos? Thanks for tuning in!