Making Lemonade

Agile Best Self Principle #1: Our highest priority is to be our best self and enable others to be their best selves.

Agile Best Self recently turned 2 years old. In the two years, together we have built a community of like-hearted people, made up of people around the world, who share interest in being their best selves so that we can enable others to be their best selves. On Thanksgiving, Michaele wrote a great post about the reaches of our community globally. From my perspective, this was both amazing and humbling. It shows the power of community at a global scale.

Spreading optimism can be helpful to our health and the health of others. In this post from the verywellmind.com website, there are some well researched benefits tied to optimism and positive thinking. Because it’s front of mind in my personal life, caring for older parents, optimism is shown to be important in the reduction of stroke in older people. We could go on and on, as the science is plentiful in support of this point.

So, what are some ways we can spread optimism? Doing a Google Search uncovers so many options for sharing optimism and positive energy. Great! Doing one or many of these things can be a great help. Connecting with our own efforts to build our skills around optimism and then reaching out to others is at the core.

But can we go bigger, how can we scale this spread of optimism and positive energy, in general? Here’s an example I found that was inspiring:

During the pandemic, a couple of people in Milwaukee, Wisconsin launched Share Lemonade, a YouTube series designed to lift up good things that are going on in their community in the face of tough times. I watched a few of these videos and it had an impact on me — their message definitely has an impact. Their tag line is “Celebrate the Good” and they definitely do that. They take a simple idea, and leverage the technology to scale their impact.

Michaele and I are doing something similar, and have created a new podcast with a similar intention. Using the podcast format, we unlock pearls of wisdom from conversations with our guests to broaden impact. A very intentional expression of Agile Best Self Principle 1 for sure — a great way to turn up the good, as Michaele likes to say. It’s also intentional based on the fact we are still in a pandemic situation, and there is still plenty of uncertainty to go around. We hope that in addition to the agilebestself.com website, the podcast will further scale our efforts to be our best selves to enable others be their best selves.

Copyright © 2018 – 2023 Michaele Gardner and Brian Hackerson