Self-Reliance Course

 My calling right now is the ward self-reliance specialist (and also stake auditor). One of my responsibilities is to facilitate the self-reliance courses put on by our stake. 

Shantel and I took the personal finance course 2-3 years ago and loved it. It was such a great course. Since then I've had the opportunity to facilitate that course a few different times. For the fall 2020 classes, we found out that they have just released a new course titled Emotional Resilience. I was so excited when I saw that. Given the current pandemic (and life in these times in general), I knew it would be a great course. 

We got a great turnout of people within the ward who were interested and were all set to do a class on Thursday night. Shantel was planning to join my class as well and we were both excited. 

I found out that another ward had a group that wanted to take the class as well at the same time as my class, but did not have a facilitator. However, my class had gotten so big that we could not really add any more people. Immediately Shantel volunteered to facilitate the class. It was so kind of her to even offer. It ended up working out they did need the help, so we both started facilitating the self-reliance class on Thursday nights at 8 pm. 

We were definitely a little nervous about both facilitating at the same time. If Shantel was in my class as a participant, she could step out and help the kids, but not if she was facilitating. We made a chart for our kids with 10 boxes, one for each self-reliance night so they could start working towards a self-reliance prize for staying in bed on self-reliance nights and they did amazing. They stayed in bed and made it possible for us to both facilitate without interruption. 

The course was really fantastic. The principles were so timely and relevant and we both learned so much and felt uplifted. It is so nice to have the spiritual principles mixed with the temporal principles. It is so important do understand how to deal with different emotions and how that can really bless our lives.