photo credit: _foam

This is an invitation – an invitation to join a conversation about making the most out of life no matter what it throws at us.  Ellie and I have been doing a lot of talking and we’d really like to hear from you.  Please, join the conversation.

I met a friend for dinner over the weekend.  We used to work together and we’ve been friends for a very long time.  Not wanting to be pushy, I waited until the end of dinner to ask her if she’d had a chance to go out and look at our new blog.  She said that she had, but that she didn’t know quite what to “do” with it.  Since she isn’t the first one to express this sentiment, I thought I’d take a stab at what you “do” with a blog.

The purpose of our BouncebackCafe.com blog is to build a community of people who believe that life is good even as we struggle with the challenges life presents.  Since Ellie and I started working together, we have always included a segment in our training which related to how to persist in the face of adversity.  Training is the process of teaching new skills to “willing” learners.  Part of teaching any skill is to practice it in the classroom and then implement it on the job.  The skills we taught were human interaction skills, sales, customer service and presentation skills.  Because each of these skills involved practicing with another person or in front of an audience, there was an element of personal risk.  We taught resilience skills because failure is part of learning and without the ability to bounce back from having performed in a less than perfect manner, no change could occur.  To help our students have a higher success rate we focused on both the skill and resilience techniques for recovery.

Blogs Are Conversations

They say that we teach what we most need to learn. (There “they” go again.  Who are those people anyway?)  I think that for those of us who are not natural born optimists, we need to continuously practice the skills which help us bounce back and meet life’s challenges with resilience.  That’s what this blog is all about.

So, Ellie and I and occasional guest authors write articles about what is on our minds at the time we write.  Consider each post to be the beginning of a conversation.  No doubt, there are some things we write that you read and go “ho-hum, I don’t care about that.”  Hopefully, there are other things we write about that you really agree OR disagree with.  Tell us.  The idea is to expand the conversation and enrich it with many viewpoints.

Neither Ellie nor I feel that we have life figured out.  We just do the best we can to add some joy and laughter and knowledge and insight to life every day.  Just like you, we struggle some days.  The good news is that because this is a community, when one of us struggles, the others can help us get through.  We learn from each other and we would like to learn from you.  Please, come join our conversation.

And so we respectfully and HOPEFULLY say again: Please, come join our conversation.