Going the Extra Mile
When a little extra work, has big returns!
In this newsletter:
Praxis Work: The beginnings of Phase Two, and whispers of an upcoming marketing campaign.
Praxis Reading: What is criticism really doing?
Youth Group Teaching: Sometimes I wish my circle of control was bigger.
Art of the Week: “A Calm Fury for Justice” & “Brett Cooper’s Portrait”
What in the Work?: Speedy secretary, and cleaning job accumulator.
Praxis Work
Jumping into Phase Two has been awesome! I started the content marketing module this week and have already learned so much. Content marketing is creating content about a specific idea or product to be shared with other spaces. In the module, I will build a landing page, start a social media campaign, and start an email welcome campaign. For all of these projects, I’ve decided to use my apparel store, Flora Fauna Fantasy Designs, as the product I will be marketing. This week we also researched the business that we were choosing for this module. I completed the exercise quickly because I created the business, but I’m very excited about what I will learn in the next steps.
Praxis Reading
This week we started How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. The book is about creating value out of any situation you might be in and becoming a more effective person. Chapter One discusses how criticism causes resentment and even lifelong hatred of the one who presents it. However, encouragement and building up of character, or reinforcing wanted behavior verbally, creates connection and respect between the mutual parties. Proverbs 29:1 says, “He who is often rebuked, and hardens his neck, will suddenly be destroyed and without remedy.” People are emotional before logical. Our general inclination when rebuked is to “harden our necks” and refuse to bend to the other person’s will. We can apply this knowledge to our relationships. If we too dislike criticism, we can realize that others don’t either. I try to use as little criticism as possible, but I still rebuke more than I should.
Youth Group Teaching
The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Teens by Sean Covey is a book that I am leading a youth group of 6-9th graders through. We discussed Habit One: Be Proactive, this week. Being proactive is, at its core, the idea that we have control of exactly one thing. Ourselves. This idea expands into saying, that we control our skills, our actions, and even our emotions. For example: Anger is a tool that we use to assert our beliefs over another set of beliefs. Nothing can make us angry. We choose it. This idea, along with giving up things outside of our own circle of control, can be a very difficult reality to accept. Things that are outside of our circle of control include the weather, the social/economic status we were born into, and, how others feel about us. When we step into being proactive, we release control over the things that we cannot and focus on the one thing that we can.
Art of the Week
This week I created/ finished a couple of acrylic paintings. I have never been much of a painter, tending to stick to the (in my previous opinion) easier-to-control art markers. But these past couple of months I’ve come to deeply enjoy it!
“A Calm Fury for Justice” presents an armor-wearing, flaming sword-carrying, humanoid angel. She rises above the dark clouds swirling all around her, and the sun highlights her flowing brown hair. The viewer is given a stark perspective, with the flaming sword seeming to reach towards them. Overall this grew my perspective skills, as well as the detailing on the wings, face, and armor. I am truly proud of this piece and it is the largest piece of artwork I have ever created, coming in at 36x24”.
“Brett Cooper’s Portrait” is also another first, being that it is the first time ever that I’ve painted a portrait and I didn’t want to immediately rip it to shreds and cry. I used good paints, a color picker app so my eyes wouldn’t deceive me on what the colors actually were, and I underpainted it. All the tips I’ve previously (and foolishly) ignored in the past. And who knew it? Following those tips actually worked! I chose Brett Cooper, a YouTuber with the DailyWire show, The Comment Section, as my reference. Normally when I paint, I listen to her videos in the background, but when I was painting her, I was listening to videos about the Middle East, which is ironic. Anyway, I am super happy with how this turned out! I can see how my photo-realism with pencil stage helped me to properly capture the values.
If you want to see my first sketch for A Calm Fury for Justice and that photo-realism with pencil stage I mentioned, check out my Instagram page, Lucid Ace Art.
What in the Work?
Finally, this week in my “Work Life”, (more on that in a minute) I picked up a new cleaning job. This was a follow-up to a request for my services that I had got a few weeks ago, and as one of my regular cleanings has been off for a month, I decided to go for it, bringing the total amount of places that I clean on a semi-regular basis up to four. I also seem to be improving at the secretary job that I picked up, as it took me a whole hour less to get what I needed to do done, and I didn’t forget anything this time.
As for work itself, our praxis call this week was about how striving to be your best at any work you do, opens up so many opportunities, even if you don’t stay at that work forever. This week I have been striving to give my all in all the activities I am involved in. Whether that be creating detailed and funny PowerPoint slides to go along with my lesson plan in youth group, to spending a couple extra hours on this newsletter, going that extra mile is exponentially improving my output.
That’s all for this week! Thank you all so much for reading!