Today’s class opened the 2016-2017 Hope Life Skills program.  The message to students was hopefully clear:  the Hope Life Skills

mission is to introduce and develop critical life skills for students to maximize their abundant potential for their life time success.

“After 13 years of teaching at Hope High, the students have repeatedly proven their intelligence, resilience, respect, curiosity, creativity and empathy.  To maximize this obvious and impressive student talent, the Hope Life Skills program focuses on introducing and developing other skills, ‘life skills’, sometimes called ‘soft skills’.  From networking and brand development to collaboration and critical thinking, these are the skills the world’s top companies, from Google to CVS Health, are demanding from their 21st century employees” I said in today’s class.  “This is what we will focus on”.

On Thursday, September 15th, several of this year’s Life Skills students will attend

the all day BIF 11 Forum at the Trinity Theatre in Providence.

Successful people from all over the world share their personal stories of success.  Stories reveal challenges pushing out of their comfort zones, being curious, overcoming challenges, often adversity, and finding trusting mentors on their journey to  be successful.   All within 15 minutes. On the Trinity stage, in front of hundreds of listeners.  The Hope Life Skills student objective for the forum is straightforward – start building a network of successful, ethical, interesting people.  In order to do this, students will need to exhibit their positive personal brand with good communication skills like respectful, attentive body language, listening and observing, eye contact, a firm handshake, ‘please’ and ‘thank you’, a genuine smile, and questions, all followed by a respectful request for a business card.  Admission, breakfast and lunch, and the opportunity to meet and speak with interesting people will be available, free of charge.  It will be a fun and interesting day.  Students interested in going to BIF need to email their request to me at scronin@signatureprinters.com

no later than Sunday, September, 11:59pm.

BIF 10. One of the Forum’s storytellers on stage at Trinity.  This storyteller was sharing his story about his recent brain operation and showing the video he asked doctors to take when doctors opened his skull to remove a malignant tumor.

Hope Life Skills students Gisabel Salcedo (left) and Fernando Perez (right) share conversation after lunch with one of the BIF story tellers. This BIF storyteller shared her story about becoming  a professional singer/songwriter.

Homework –

1. Read pages 1 through 28 in the book entitled “The Development of the American Brand in the Twentieth Century” posted on the Hope Life Skills web site (www.hopelifeskills.com)
2. Send me 1 (one) question about this reading.    Please know that there is no ‘best’ or ‘perfect’ question I’m looking for.   If you are curious about something you read or there is something you want to know related to the reading, or something you thought about as you read these pages, this, then, is the ‘best’ question I am looking for.
3. send to me your question, electronically, to scronin@signatureprinters.com before Monday, September 13, 11:59pm.