The Hispanic Community Embraces Mind in the Making: Part II

Editor’s Note: Elizabeth Sierra is a Mind in the Making facilitator who recently led six bilingual individuals through the complete training. These new facilitators are now ready to conduct Mind in the making workshops in Spanish throughout the Suncoast region.

It was a great experience going through the Mind in the Making facilitator training with these individuals. We all had a great sense of satisfaction as we worked our way through the training modules.

These six new facilitators are now ready to impact the entire Hispanic community as they share the Essential Life Skills Modules based on Ellen Galinsky’s book entitled, Mind in the Making: The Seven Essential Life Skills Every Child Needs. These workshops are available to any group of 15 or more people thanks to the generosity of The Patterson Foundation.

From our first gathering, these facilitators were connected and actively involved with the material. One of the joys of Mind in the Making is the way each module is crafted to encourage the participants to share and learn from each other. These six facilitators shared openly and reinforced everything they learned with their observations and humor.

It was interesting to see the excitement, the joy, the desire to learn and how each gave examples of how they were putting into practice everything learned.

The most beautiful thing for me as a facilitator, offering this course to future facilitators, was to see that some were already putting into practice what they learned in their work with their families and their personal lives. Some even reported they had started using “WOOP” with their children.

WOOP is a skill Gabriele Oettingen — a professor at New York University and the University of Hamburg — and her colleagues developed. It stands for Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan. (The less-catchy term is “mental contrasting.”) When you WOOP, you think about your ultimate goal, the best possible outcome, the personal obstacle(s) that stand in the way, and the plan for getting around those roadblocks.

Others, in their work, began to strengthen their focus, while still others reported they were using their perspective taking skills more in their day-to-day interactions.

It is inspiring to these new Spanish speaking facilitators ready and eager to help others achieve their highest potential.