EdCircuit Staff 
Table of Contents
The 10th Annual Choose Love Awareness Month shines a light on the importance of essential life skills in schools in February. This year’s theme “Ripple of Love” focuses on how using the Choose Love Formula™ can create a ripple effect to create a safer, and more loving world.
When you learn and practice the Choose Love Formula™, you will find the courage to be grateful when life is not easy, forgive yourself and others, and cut the cord that attaches you to pain, and step outside of the busyness of your life to help others. By practicing this every day, you can positively impact yourself and others.
Creating a Ripple Effect
Every thought that becomes our words and actions creates a ripple effect. Picture throwing a stone in a pond, the ripple it creates keeps going until it hits the shore! That is the same effect we get with our words and actions. The ripple extends beyond us, in all directions.
Once our words or actions are received by another person, they ripple back to us in what physics, the study of motion, calls reflection. Then the other person reacts or responds and creates their own ripple effect, and so on and so on. The ripple can be negative. When we think angry, resentful, or frustrated thoughts, that will directly impact our feelings, and then words and actions. It can also be positive. When we think grateful and forgiving thoughts, it impacts how we feel, that then determines how we show up in our relationships and behave.
It all starts with your thoughts.
“We’re about as happy as we make our minds up to be.“ – Abraham Lincoln
When you Choose Love™, you radiate a loving thought to create a positive ripple that can help create the world we all want to live in. One that is safe and peaceful. The incredible thing is that our influence on others is a choice that we make. A choice that can potentially impact millions of people.
“If every one of you changed the lives of just 10 people — and each one of those folks changed the lives of another 10 people — just 10 — then in five generations — 125 years —[you] will have changed the lives of 800 million people.” – Admiral William McRaven
We can bring light to others, even if they’re in darkness. We can turn on the light by choosing gratitude, forgiveness, compassion, and acts of kindness and caring. Really a lot of it begins with how you feel about yourself. Ask yourself: Do I love and accept myself? Do I feel like I don’t deserve love?
Sometimes people are hurt, and they stay that way. Some people are told they are not worthy, and believe that. Here’s an incredible truth: we all are deserving of love, each and everyone of us, every day, all day long. When you Choose Love on every thought, word, and action, it looks like kindness, caring and compassion for ourselves and each other. People who don’t feel they are worthy of love are the people that are not kind, they yell, lose their temper, and say mean things.
Choose Love Awareness Month
“Although we can’t always Choose what happens around us, we can always choose how we respond, and we can respond with love.” – Scarlett Lewis
Throughout the month, you will find ways to Choose Love for yourself and others. Choosing Love impacts all of the decisions that you make on a daily basis, and is the most important choice you make throughout your day!
Each week will be focused on a different pillar of the Choose Love Formula™ so you can learn and practice each character value.
Week 1: Courage
Courage is the willingness and ability to work through obstacles despite feeling embarrassment, fear, reluctance, or uncertainty. It is being kind and gentle, doing the right thing when no one is looking, and thoughtfully responding to a reactive situation.
When you practice courage, you make positive choices even when it may be difficult for you. It takes courage to express your feelings, make ethical choices, tell the truth, admit mistakes, ask for forgiveness, and to be kind. This is especially true when others might not be leading by example.
Courage requires self-awareness, and self-regulation. Choosing Love helps students practice identifying feelings in themselves and others, and thoughtfully respond with love.
Practicing courage helps us learn how to help our brains regulate the amygdala (fear center) by activating the prefrontal cortex, our highest and best selves (Martinez, 2015).
Week 2: Gratitude
Mindful gratitude and the ability to be thankful even when things in life are challenging.
When you practice gratitude, you feel thankful, and want to share that feeling with others. There is always something to be grateful for. Choose Love uses gratitude as ‘the great mind shifter.’ You cannot focus on more than one thought at a time; thus, gratitude can help shift the focus on your lens from negative to positive.
When we practice gratitude on a regular basis, it fortifies us from the inside out to be better able to face difficulty in our lives and move through it with greater ease.
Week 3: Forgiveness
Forgiveness is choosing to let go of anger and resentment toward yourself or someone else to surrender thoughts of revenge, and to move forward with your personal power intact.
Forgiveness is not just about forgiving other people, but also about forgiving ourselves. Sometimes we are hardest on ourselves. You want to let go of anger in order to feel better, and because we have no control over how other people react or respond, only ourselves.
What if the other person doesn’t care that they’ve hurt us? This is why it is so important to realize forgiveness is a choice that we make for ourselves, for our own health, to take back our personal power, and relinquish the poison of negativity inside of our bodies that’s holding onto anger and the bad feelings it can produce.
It takes courage to forgive, and we have already learned that we have the courage, each and every one of us, within ourselves. Practicing gratitude helps us to develop the strength to face our pain and consider forgiveness.
Week 4: Compassion-in-Action
Compassion-in-Action is BOTH the understanding of a problem or the suffering of another, and acting to solve the problem or alleviate the suffering.
Compassion-in-action is when you understand another person’s suffering, and want to take action to decrease it. It involves extending empathy and care beyond ourselves. Engaging in acts of kindness—volunteering, helping a neighbor, or simply lending an ear to someone in need—creates a bridge of mutual understanding and support. In helping others, we not only combat our own feelings of loneliness but contribute to a larger culture of connection and empathy.
The beautiful thing is that when we help others, we help and heal ourselves.
Choose Love programs
In an increasingly complex world, essential life skills that offer a path to flourishing are becoming more and more necessary. In the best case scenario, these are taught at home, but it is necessary to reinforce and practice these skills in schools, and within our communities.
Choose Love programs incorporate elements of positive psychology, grit, growth mindset, neuroscience, character education, social and emotional competence, and posttraumatic growth, all on a trauma-informed basis.
About The Jesse Lewis Choose Love Movement™
Jesse Lewis, a six-year-old first grader, was a victim of the Sandy Hook tragedy whose action saved the lives of nine classmates. Jesse left behind a message on a household chalkboard, “Nurturing Healing Love,” that became the inspiration for his mother, Scarlett, to found the Choose Love Movement.
The Jesse Lewis Choose Love Movement is a 501(c)(3) charitable organization with a commitment to reach students, educators and individuals, nationally and internationally, and provide them with a simple, yet profound formula for choosing love. The Choose Love Programs are comprehensive, no cost, lifespan, next-generation social and emotional learning and character development programs. They teach children and adults how to choose love in any circumstance and help them become connected, resilient, and empowered individuals. These skills, tools and attitudes have been proven through decades of scientific research to be the best way to ensure a healthy, meaningful, and purpose-filled life.
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