4th of July
I was doing research on the founding fathers for the 4th of July and ran across Benjamin Franklin’s 13 Virtues.
I had no idea he made this list in an effort for self improvement. I texted a couple of friends about it and they all knew about them. Apparently, this is a thing.
Benjamin Franklin attributed most of his success to practicing 13 core life virtues, to the best of his ability. He believed that by living those virtues, he had done everything he could to put himself in a position to be on the good side of life.
The intention he had behind his card system is pretty amazing stuff for the time, now he would have an App on his phone, but he had to use paper. Oh the horror!
For the majority Franklin’s adult life, he carried around a card in his pocket that depicted a simple table with seven columns and 13 rows on it.
Each column on this card represented a day of the week – Monday through Sunday. Each row on this card represented one of 13 virtues that he wanted to work on.
During the day, he might glance at these virtues a time or two to keep them fresh in his mind. At the end of each day he would ask himself if he’d actually practiced them during the day and marking the box if he had done so. His goal was to fill in as many boxes as possible, and each week, he would start with a fresh card.
If Franklin was my client, I would have been thrilled when he showed me his checked off card. This level of accountability is so great!
Interestingly enough all of his Virtues are things we still need to work on today. All have Wellness or Mindset applications and I am going to take one a day over the next 13 days and go through it.
HAPPY 4TH OF JULY !!!!!!!!!!
Tomorrow- the Virtue of Silence
Erin Wathen
As a Holistic Health Coach, it is Erin’s big hairy audacious goal is to change the dialogue around how we look at weight loss. It is not a matter of being it Ketosis or Food Swaps but the feelings we have that we are avoiding by overeating. Why are so many of us not tackling the real issues we have? It is easier and safer to obsess over the latest diet fad. Whether it be with our job, or our Mom, boyfriend, politics… until we address how we manage our feelings in the world, we are not going to.
