In a world where acts of kindness seem rare and random, what makes this act of kindness notable?
Last Wednesday I opened my laptop and there they were, Sheena and Jacqueline, in a photo, grinning at me from Stuttgart at the 3-day beVisioneers Global Summit.
Sheena is the Mentorship Lead for the Do School and Jacqueline Cruz-Aguila is my Mentee from Mexico City, Mercedes Benz Fellowship beVisioneers selected to attending. I have never met them in person. The number of times I’ve met them virtually, I can count on both hands. And yet my heart burst wide open. So much awe, wonder, and joy spilled out. My reaction was raw, rapid, and reflexive. I wondered why.
We miss so much in our day to day, going fast, faster, and fastest. We scramble to embrace new ways in which AI allows us to escape the mundane, saving us from having to make sense from swamps of data. But I didn’t have to ask Chat GPT to reflect for me, to think for me, to feel for me. All I had to do was stop, savour, and say, “There IS good in this world.”
Sharing this photo was notable because of Sheena and Jacqueline’s:
intention.
execution.
recognition.
tenderness.
empathy.
spontaneity.
What would happen if acts of kindness weren’t rare and random? Would our hearts suffer from being open? Would our hands hurt from being extended? Or would our lives flourish from being kind? What does it take? Ask Sheena and Jacqueline.
What does it mean to “Level Up Your LinkedIn Profile”? Look no further than Ms. Portia Obeng! Her generosity of spirit is unsurpassed!
Which words (illuminating? relevant? brilliant?) could possibly express the magnitude of our #gratitude for your endless support of so many students, Portia?
I don’t know about you but my parents taught me anything worth having requires hard work.
Hard work may mean a lot of hours which doesn’t fit neatly into this world of fast > faster > fastest.
With no formal #marketing background and the infinite support and encouragement from all my instructors, friends, family, and colleagues University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies, I owe a huge debt of #gratitude. It’s no small feat to earn this certificate over four years.
Squinting at tiny source code through my reading glasses, scratching my head at search engines and landing pages, sweating at the possibility of simply not “getting it”, these are the benefits of being a lifelong learner.
I also have the privilege of teaching “Fearless Networking: Connecting Creatively and Confidently” at the School of Continuing Studies and with our learners, my learning has compounded like interest earned.
Our School is not only a place where you can build skills and learn more but it’s also a community and network where we help one another and stay connected. Why not join us as a lifelong learner? It’s hard work but it’s definitely worth it!
When working
with groups as a speaker-facilitator, what’s important is making a meaningful and
authentic connection with your audience.
Last week my
audience was an exceptional and talented group of sixty
internationally-educated professionals in Business and Technology at York
University at the beautiful New Students Centre.
As newcomers, our parents’ arrived in Canada 70 years ago. And yes, it’s a new world now but courage is courage. And at times, it must seem as if there just isn’t enough courage to go around. So my final remarks of the evening are a tribute to our parents:
“Like our parents who came to Canada in 1949 from China and Hong Kong, you have come a long way from home. Our parents came with very little and still managed somehow to put a roof over our heads, gave us a safe place to sleep, books to read, clothes that kept us nice and warm, and fed us well, always too well.
What our parents accomplished was truly remarkable. Our parents gave my siblings and me their entire lives. We can’t come even close to giving back to them anything that resembles what they gave us – extreme selflessness. Holding them in high regard and respect are all we have for them.
You, too, have something unique to give to your children. And when you’re frustrated in your job search and you can’t find the right word to say, remember all that you have.
You have:
the
ability to give more.
the
agility to bend more.
the
capability to build more.
the
knowledge to create more
the
experience to understand and see more.
the
best of many worlds to dream more.
more
than you know.
Your Bridging
Program’s motto is “Make More.” You have abundance and I wish you success,
health, and happiness.
Her first flight took her 13,400 kilometres away from her home in Chennai ten months after her wedding day. Selvi Thambimuthu landed at Lester B. Pearson International Airport, Toronto on December 4, 2004.
Three Generations
“I felt really happy to see my new husband and new country but also a little bit sad leaving my family back in Chennai. I was also very curious about snow,” she recalls.
Now thirteen+ years later, Selvi and Siva, her husband, and their three handsome sons Pragadheesh (12), Harshan (10), and Vadhanan (8), are busy getting ready to open their second restaurant franchise next week in Toronto – “Starving Artist”!
Stars Align – A Love Story
A match made by both our parents and confirmed by 4 different astrologists, Selvi and Siva were married within eighteen days of meeting one another in person for the first time in 2004. They came to know one another long distance by phone and her first thought was “he looks just like his photograph”. Strong faith in family and even stronger faith in dreams bridged the distance then and now.
Living the Dream
“Work for your dreams. It will happen whatever you dream. It will come true. You need to believe.” she repeats to her sons. “I want my sons to have their own dreams and I will support them as my parents always supported me. Education is important, first and foremost!”
She remembers how her parents set her up for success, always reading, exploring, and fuelling her curiosity about the world. At age 12, her father gave her a black radio and brought the world inside their home each night at dinnertime.
Her earliest memory of Toronto was “Everyone on the subway was reading!” She used to buy “packages of books” for her sons and read Dr. Seuss’ favourites including “Cat in the Hat” twenty to thirty times a day.
Entrepreneurship & Education in Progress
It’s not clear if “Green Eggs and Ham” set the tone as Selvi and Siva bought their first waffle restaurant franchise in 2016 and opened “Starving Artist” in Midtown Toronto. It was also the year Selvi started (and now graduated!) George Brown College’s Office Administration – Health Services two-year diploma program. And 2016 was the year Selvi’s Mom came from Chennai to help them realize their dreams.
The entrepreneurial spirit thrives in their family. Her father once owned a machine shop in Chennai. And as all entrepreneurs know, you do what it takes to make things work so they live above their restaurant which makes a whole lot of logistical sense.
Soccer Dreams
Listening to Pragadheesh talk about his passion, soccer, with his eyes shining brightly, he is like most young first generation Canadians. They are strivers, strong-willed with extraordinary grit and determination.
When his father suggested they should book their tickets for the World Cup 2026 (Canada, U.S. and Mexico will be hosting), Pragadheesh reassured his father, “Don’t worry, Dad. I’ll be playing so I’ll have tickets for everyone.”
The Next Big Dream
And what’s next you might wonder from the lady who once pushed a stroller dubbed “The Rocket” by her co-workers to get her son to school on time?
Selvi now dreams about how she will furnish their next house, a much bigger house as their home as she remembers fondly her childhood home in Chennai, 10’ x 50’, where her dreams began. And now 13,400 kms away, I have no doubt this dream will also come true. Small business, big dreams!
“No thank you” or “No, thank you”? Have you heard the one about the panda who walks into a cafe with a gun, orders a sandwich, fires the gun, and leaves? Ask British author, Lynn Truss. Her 2003 bestseller “Eats, shoots and leaves” bemoans the lost art of punctuation.
But what might be a case of “syntactic ambiguity” – when a reader/listener can reasonably interpret one sentence as having more than one possible structure – is actually me bemoaning the lost art of politeness.
On certain, not all, occasions lately, what’s been heard is silence, i.e. no thank you’s. Does the receiver of an act of kindness assume the giver has somehow understood “thank you” through telepathy? Or perhaps such an acknowledgement is passé or is rejected because it’s too de rigueur?
Look, I’m not from the #smartgen nor the #nextgen but from the #othergen. And I’m old school so that my favourite pastime is writing and sending notes of thanks, yes, paper and yes, snail mail. I purchase “thank you” cards so often that my friends have started gifting them to me and you can guess who receives the first one out of the pack.
Our lives are fast and fleeting. Has “thank you” disappeared along with “please, may I, pardon me”? Please say it isn’t so. The foundation of relationships is built on gratitude. When you experience loss in life and need help, what will ground you is gratitude. Wharton Professor Adam Grant says it best in his 2013 best-selling book, “Give and Take” and his 2016 TED talk , He describes how people are givers, takers, and matchers and how most effective leaders are givers.
When someone gives, offers, surrenders, volunteers, sacrifices their time to help you, will you remember to say those famous almost-forgotten last yet powerful words, “THANK YOU”? Because if you don’t, you might not get another chance to say these words again. Ever.
I’m one of the lucky ones. Although I seldom see my Dad (too late to teach him Skype. He’s 88 and lives 4 hours away by plane), I can often summon up and savour moments of his love instantly.
Oh how he longs for my safety, health, and happiness as I do for him. He expresses his love simply, clearly, and often, regardless if we’re on the phone or face to face.
He catches me off guard sometimes because his timing is not during those special celebrations anniversaries, birthdays, Christmas, but when we are alone together, just the two of us. I’d like to think my siblings also have this special time with him, too.
He tells me he counts the days before I visit them in Calgary. And once I’m there, we would go for our morning walks on our regular route and stop in for our senior’s coffee at the Golden Arches. We always take a selfie before heading home.
Sometimes after a drive and I’ve dropped him off at their condo, spend 5 minutes checking my phone for messages, and about to drive off again to meet a friend. I would see him standing still in the front lobby waiting to wave and see me off.
In the morning, I would ask him how was his sleep and he would tell me how well he sleeps when I’m there.
We share the same love for and watch the Raptors on TV while yelling, laughing, and cheering so loudly that my Mom would say, ‘they can’t hear you!” which makes us laugh even harder.
I’ll be calling him today and we’ll have “our talk” which is a bit of a guessing game because he dislikes wearing his hearing aid at home. Nonetheless to hear his voice makes me happy and when I call today, I’ll hear him loud and clear this Father’s Day and also the next.
One of my favorite things to do is write “thank you” notes, not virtual but paper notes you post by tossing them in one of those big boxes on your street corner. They’re still there. You could say I start each day grateful for being grateful. Another is when I talk to people, I love to look and listen for positivity. So you could say I hope for Hope. And my final confession is I can easily spend an hour or two listening to convocation addresses. This “secret” pleasure helps me aspire to inspire.
Yes, I’m the annoying person who jumps out of bed every morning, not with a partner (happily single) but with hope. When all you have is hope, you jump … you jump for joy, for love, for the next big idea, for whatever the new day brings!
However, for some and understandably so, loss and suffering make it difficult to get out of bed. Some fear having expectations because the disappointments are too big to bear. Some are grateful just ‘having a cup” because asking if your cup is half empty or half full would hurt too much to even ponder. And some start their sentences with “But the problem is ….”
We all have and will continue to experience loss – large losses like losing your identity, your job, your love, your business, your purpose in life and small losses like losing your car keys, forgetting a name, sometimes your smartphone (maybe that’s a large loss). This is what we call living.
Here’s how hope transcends loss. Listen to Sheryl Sandberg’s recent convocation address to the grads at Virginia Tech. Listen with or without judgement. Given Ms. Sandberg’s position of privilege and working as the COO at Facebook, some cynics refuse to acknowledge and sympathize. But we’re all human and when you suddenly lose your life partner, well, I feel very sad and sorry for her loss.
In her convocation address, Ms. Sandberg’s voice quivered and cracked slightly as she gave us a glimpse of her heart still raw and reeling from her loss – tender, emotional, and vulnerable. She continues boldly and brightly, wishing the graduates hope. She showed them the way to find hope:
“Seek shared experiences with all kinds of people. Write shared narratives that create the world you want to live in. Build shared hope in the communities you join and the communities you form. And above all, find gratitude for the gift of life itself and the opportunities it provides for meaning, for joy, and for love.”
The power of hope is about setting expectations and intentions, building dreams, big dreams, and believing you can make and leave the world a better place. “Resilience is a muscle. which we need to build.” says Ms. Sandberg. Why not exercise our resilience muscle first thing in the morning by jumping out of bed? Jump because you’ve been given another day. Jump because you are alive and kicking. And jump because together, we can make a big leap forward.
Today I had the honour and privilege of facilitating one of 14 round tables for 55 about-to-be #NewCanadianCitizens at the Ontario Science Centre as part of an initiative called #BuildingCitizenship for The Institute For Canadian Citizenship. The citizenship ceremony which followed was presided by the very warm and welcoming Justice Albert Wong. What a judge! Justice Wong came via #Malaysia and landed in #Sudbury (as I aspire to earn more medals)!
Justice Albert Wong
As a co-facilitator, my role was to ensure everyone at our table had a chance to share stories on why they chose to become a #Canadian citizen. We had such diversity in age, culture, and profession – a father who became a citizen 4 years ago came to witness his identical twin 20+ something year olds from Lahore, Pakistan; a smiling Dutchman who has been here for 14 years with his Montreal-born spouse; a lovely Colombian fellow who also married a Canadian and has been living in Canada for 8 years; and my co-facilitator, a distinguished retiree who came to Canada in early 70’s with $200 in his pocket from Zanzibar, Tanzania and now has a daughter and two grandchildren in Canada.
We were tasked to complete the sentence “I became a Canadian when ….” So at the end of our hour, we presented in 6 words our collective thoughts. It made us pause to think and reflect. The sports enthusiasts immediately shouted @BlueJays #ourmoment @Raptors #wethenorth . Sports always unite and binds community… immediately! No language needed. The more “seasoned” generation spoke about Canada as a land of “peace and heaven on earth” and “the beginning of new beginnings”. The creatives focused on the scale and scope of the beauty and vastness of Toronto and the distinctive four seasons in all their colour and glory.
However, the one person who I believe said it best was “when I am at the end of my travels, I am looking forward to coming home. Canada is “home” to me.”
Having worked and lived in faraway countries and in cultures so different from where I was born and brought up, a small Prairie town, I know this feeling all too well – “coming home”. Canada is home. Is it this feeling of comfort, joy, and love with undeniable certainty? Without a doubt, I couldn’t feel prouder to hear voices, young and old, from many different countries calling Canada “home” , “OUR home and native land”! #OCanada!
