Mark your calendar for this Friday, December 16, 2016, 9:00am PT (12:00pm ET). I'll be a guest speaker for the free monthly Nurtured Heart Approach podcast. This month's topic is The New Year: Replacing Resolutions with Intentions. The podcast is a great resource for learning about NHA.

I offer this as a word of encouragement to anyone who needs. Particularly those of us caring for special needs children. Failure is a necessary part of learning. You aren't going to make the right choice every single time. No one can. Accept that fact.

Some people keep souvenirs of their failures to remind themselves that life is too hard to even try to be successful. They use these souvenirs as evidence to justify their belief in the lie that they should not even try. Don't collect souvenirs of failures. Don't hang them around your neck like millstones to drag you down. Instead lay your failures before like stepping stones. Learn from your mistakes and use them to build yourself a path to where you want to go in life. Choose to build a path for yourself to great places.

Teaching children how to handle failure is a vital life lesson. It is a lesson that children will learn as much from what is said as from what is done. Modeling for them how to learn from failure sets the stage for building a life of success. None of us who now walk would ever have learned to do so if the first time we fell down we stayed down and refused to get back up.

There will be lots of failures in your life. Each and every one of them will be an opportunity to start over and strive for success and mastery in life. So what are you going to do with your failures? Will you collect them as souvenirs or will you build a path to greatness?

I got my first taste of NHA® one wintery Thursday afternoon when the program director of a local agency visited my honors abnormal psychology classroom. I asked the question above and she proceeded to provide a very effective demonstration of how NHA® can have a powerful impact on a person’s life. Her answer grabbed and held my attention. I was hooked in less than five minutes. She mentioned that there would be a workshop on NHA® that very weekend. I wanted to know more.

I wasted no time signing myself and my husband up for that workshop. They were providing childcare so I didn’t have to worry about what we would do with the kids. Sitting on the edge of my seat more often than not I listened as NHA® was explained. Designed to bring out the greatness of the individual it was what I had been struggling to teach my children about themselves for years. I discovered I was already on the NHA® path. It was a gratifying experience as a parent to find such like minded people in the world.

I went home and tried out NHA® on my children. They were as stunned by it as I was. One child declared to himself, in that child’s whisper that has the ability to reach every corner of a room, “Something is wrong with mommy. She’s excited that I’m doing something right!” He was as stunned by the application of NHA® as I was. It makes sad sense if you think about it. How often do we pull out all the stops to celebrate people when they are doing what is right? Unless you are steeped in NHA® you have to admit that that hardly ever happens. NHA® brings to light the power of doing just that. It can transform lives.

In the months following that first workshop I purchased some of the NHA® books and set about dazzling my family with their own greatness. I watched as my children bloomed under the realization that they were indeed formidable human beings. As for myself I was more and more drawn to NHA®. Just to be sure that it was something I really wanted to commit to, I confess to having a reputation for impulsiveness in some quarters, I took another full day workshop. By the end of that workshop NHA® was looking more and more like the way I should go for myself and my family. They were so many tantalizingly wonderful possibilities with NHA®.

To that end I completed the one week NHA® Certified Trainer Intensive in Syracuse, NY. It would have been a grueling week had it not been for the nature of the subject matter presented. Instead it was an intense week spent delving into the foundations and application of NHA®. I came away from the week ready to guide others along in the path to discovering NHA®.

Now I look forward to the daily challenge of helping others discover and nurture what is good within them. Life is a completely different experience when you realize the greatness that you are capable of.