Written by: Sanchita Udyavara Rao, Grade 7A CBSE, GIIS East Coast

A Leadership Lecture Series on ‘Positive Thinking’ inspired us at GIIS East Coast campus as Ms Kimpu Shah and Mr Kenal Kothari, the members of Shrimad Rajchandra Mission Dharampur, Singapore, visited us in January 2019.

The students had a great time listening about positive-thinking from the experts of the Shrimad Rajchandra Mission Dharampur, which specialises in conducting self-development workshops.

The three-hour-long LLS-cum-workshop begun in an engaging way as participants were made to play an ice-breaking game. The students were divided into four groups and each group was given individual products which they had to advertise. After a couple of minutes for brainstorming each group had to present their innovative ideas. At the end of the game, Ms Kimpu Shah explained how a particular situation can be interpreted in various ways and used our ideas to explain different types of thoughts - positive, negative, neutral and waste thoughts.

The experts explained to us in different ways as to how we can replace our negative and wasteful thoughts with positive thoughts. An inspirational video on Janine Shepherd was screened for the students. Janine was an athlete whose career ended after she got hit by a truck during a training bike ride. However, she defied her disabilities and moved forward to become a commercial pilot, aerobatics instructor, motivational speaker, best- selling author and a mother of three. Her story inspires many to find the silver lining when one is faced with debacles.

We were then given situations and were told to express our positive and negative thoughts about it. This activity made us realise that we can change our thoughts if we wish to. We also learned about the ‘ABC’ approach which stands for Adversity, Beliefs and Consequences and how we can apply this in our day to day lives. 

The positive-thinking session came to an end with unlimited learning for the students on the ways to change the thought-process from negative to positive.

We thank our school for giving us such a wonderful opportunity where we learnt the basics of time management, anger management, goal setting and effective communication, some of the key life-skills.