My guest today is Mary Click. She is the National Intergenerational Tutoring Director for the Oasis Institute, a nonprofit educational organization that promotes healthy aging through lifelong learning, active lifestyles, and service.

Oasis Intergenerational Tutoring has positively impacted over 525,000 children since its inception in 1989, and has been implemented in more than 100 school districts across the country. The award-winning volunteer program pairs older adults with children in grades K-3 to work one-on-one each week not only as tutors, but as mentors and positive role models.

In her role with Oasis, Mary is responsible for developing resources to support the tutoring program in nine Oasis centers and independent sites in twenty cities. Mary collaborates closely with school district administrators, school district facilitators, and the Oasis network tutoring staff to serve volunteer tutors participating in the program. She previously served as the St. Louis Tutoring Manager and held other project management roles during her 15-year tenure at The Oasis Institute.

In this conversation, Mary and I talk about the importance of childhood literacy, how schools have changed over the last few decades, how reading impacts kids in many different ways, and how you can get involved as a tutor.

To explore how to get involved as a tutor, visit https://oasis.net/tutoring.

The post Tutoring Director Mary Click on Childhood Literacy and Changing Kids’ Lives Through Mentoring appeared first on Daily Writer | Essential Habits for Impact & Influence.

I’m thrilled to feature this conversation with my good friend M. J. James. M. J. is a member of our Daily Writer Community, and she has built an amazing podcast and website called Burned Out Business Mom. You probably heard M. J. featured on an episode of the Daily Writer Podcast a few weeks ago when I interviewed her.

Now we’re flipping things around and she interviews me about my new book 18 Words to Live By: A Father’s Wisdom on What Matters Most. I wrote this book as a gift to my son for his 18^th birthday last month.

18 Words is a short, fast read covering 18 values to guide your life. I have to tell you: this is my favorite thing I’ve ever written. I really tried to pour my heart and soul into this, and I share some very personal stories that I hope will be inspiring to anybody looking for a short, simple, book that is a handbook for life.

In this conversation, we talk about the story behind the book, the process of writing it, and the themes of many of the chapters. I hope you enjoy this conversation!

You can get your own copy of my book and follow the awesome M. J. James through the links below:

18 Words to Live By: A Father’s Wisdom on What Matters Most

TheBurnedOutBusinessMom.com

Burned Out Business Mom Podcast

Connect with M.J. on Facebook

Connect with M.J. on Instagram

The post Behind the Scenes of My New Book “18 Words to Live By” appeared first on Daily Writer | Essential Habits for Impact & Influence.

In his classic book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey famously wrote, “Begin with the end in mind.” Come with me on a journey to the end—the end of your life.

Imagine it’s the day of your funeral. You’ve had a long, productive life. There is sadness, but also a warm remembrance of a life well lived. The funeral service is over and people are telling stories about your life. These are people who knew you personally over the years. They can remember your mannerisms, the tone of your voice, your personality, and your quirks firsthand because they knew you and spent time with you.

Fast forward 25 years after your death. Anyone who knew you personally is now an adult. 25 years is a long time, and their memory is fading a bit. They still have pictures and videos, but those are probably archived on a hard drive somewhere or stored in the cloud on a server. There are still people alive who knew you personally, but the generation born after you died only knows you through the stories people tell about you, or things like pictures and videos that were left behind.

Jump ahead to 50 years after your death. We’re getting further away from those who knew you personally. The only ones still alive who knew you personally, knew you as kids or young adults, and now they are old, if they are still alive at all. Somewhere in a basement, someone might have some pictures or other mementos stored that were connected with your life.

It is now 100 years after your death. Several generations have grown up since you’ve been gone. There’s not a single person alive who knew you personally. Your kids and grandkids are probably gone as well.

The technology and media landscape will have changed so many times that ancient video and audio files, and even social media archives, from over 100 years ago, when you were still alive, have either been erased or archived in some vast collection of human data. But even if your great-great-grandkids generations after you can access all that, what will they find? They’ll find birth and death records, legal documents perhaps, and maybe a bunch of random social media posts if those are even accessible.

But how will they know YOU? What will they know about your story, your hopes and dreams, your ideas, and what your life meant?

There is only one way those future generations will know those things. They will know because you wrote them down.

Begin with the end in mind. Don’t leave your legacy to chance. Write it down so it won’t be forgotten.

Daily Question: Your life will come to an end someday—what do you want to leave behind with your writing?

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