https://trainingmag.com/content/8-tips-developing-positive-relationships/

According to our boys here are the basic ingredients for a positive relationship:

-Sharing

-Respect

-Banter

-Kindness

-Listening

-Trust

-Smile

-Empathy

-Common interests

-Positivity

-Support

-Help

-Love

-Belief

Mix them all together. Nurture it with time… the results can be for a lifetime 🙂

Our topic today was “Peer pressure”. It was around a bag of pistachios, kindly offered by Amirhossein, that we had an interesting talk about what peer pressure is and how it affects our lives.

While we were trying to define it, as a mean of influencing others to do something they might not want to, Junior raised an interesting point: peer pressure might be unvoluntary which means it might not start from a negative feeling.

After briefing about situations and how this can happen, we focused on the positive definition of peer pressure – where people’s influence towards each other leads them to do, produced or evolve in a positive direction. And we all agreed we would do our best to be role-models and positively influence each other.

However, Amirhossein has exerted a lot of negative impact on us as the whole bag of pistachios disappeared during the Well Being session  🙂

From Crans-Montana with love 😊

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pZC02SDkD8

This week we had our second session discussing an important topic within our third pillar of wellbeing – Building Positive Friendships.

We wanted to share this particular video to our students as it had some very important points and ways in which you can enhance your social skills. Please watch the video and take a look at the summary below of the important messages within the video.

1. It is absolutely fine to be an introvert and this can have many positive outcomes. However, communication and social skills are something we all come across each day, whether it is at school or in the workplace, and are very important.
2. Join a club and meet people who share similar interests to you.
3. Don’t be scared to make a fool yourself. Be an individual and don’t shy away from who you are. Have your own opinions. People have great respect for this and this will make things easier to start up conversations.
4. Talk to people you don’t know – whether they are in your class and you do not know them very well or you have never spoken to them before. Good things can come from this, great friendships can start from a simple ‘hello’ and you can really make a difference to someone’s life by being friendly and open.

Next week, the students will be sharing their experiences from the week where they have stepped out of their comfort zone, spoken to somebody new and done a nice thing for somebody.

Our Well-Being topic for the next weeks will be Building Positive Relationships.

What is friendship?

How do you become friends with another person?

What do we need from our friends?

How do you act when you are introduced to someone new?

What is unique about CDL and the friendships you can make?

In all fairness, it was a very pleasant session. The boys spoke from their hearts and they acknowledged how important their friends are to them. A friend is someone we trust ( this word came out as the main asset in a friendship ), we can rely on, we share things with and we care about.

In terms of social skills, we discussed how these help understanding other people and what an important tool those are in for their lives.

The international feature of CDL is highly appreciated, it creates global links that can last a lifetime. It was nice to see the boys speaking about such an important element of our lives and in the end, we all agreed that we all need each other 🙂

Our Houses are now open again and little by little, students are returning and it’s nice to see the joyful faces and energy after this nice end of year break.

Happy New Year !!!

L’Escalade, or Fête de l’Escalade (from escalade, the act of scaling defensive walls), is an annual festival in Geneva, Switzerland, held each December in celebration of the defeat of an attempt to conquer the Protestant city by the Catholic Duchy of Savoy. Troops sent by Charles Emmanuel I, Duke of Savoy, attempted a surprise attack during the night of 11–12 December 1602, but according to legend, were repulsed by a cook who dumped boiling vegetable soup on the invaders before raising an alarm. The celebrations and other commemorative activities are usually held on 12 December or the closest weekend.

The tradition this day is that people get little chocolate marmites (where once was the boiling vegetable soup ) full of sweets and share them with family and friends. Thank you Mr Usher for sharing those with us. Who said History can’t be sweet??? 😀

As we approach the end of the topic we decided to step back a little and have a little insight about our lives and how we manage our goals, as this is definitely an important part of our Well-being.

The video above, tells us about this inspiring experience, run by the Sky Cycling team and amongst other things, teaches us how little steps can play a big part in achieving higher goals. Sometimes we underestimate the importance of taking care of little things that can play an important part in a bigger picture. Our instinct is to look ahead and only aim at the final outcome but maybe this is something we should fight against.

As it states on this little tutorial, things like Commitment, Ownership and Responsibility lead to Excellence and these little features should be part of everything we do.

We felt this is fully within the scope of our Well-being topic because as a real team, we should all play together towards the same goal, and team spirit, support and effort are key elements to success in our House.

There is definitely a link between these facts in sports and in the boys’ academic life, in terms of preparation, making slight changes that can make a difference.

The boys seemed interested and we hope they could take some learnings out of this topic.