The Black Belt Success Cycle is a great and easy way to teach kids how to set and achieve goals. #1 Know what you want. This is most important because we need to be specific. The more precise we are about our goal the easier it is to achieve it. #2 Have a plan. This sounds like its a no brainer, but we need to have a detailed plan of how we are going to achieve our goal. You make outlines for many other things in life before you do them, so why should you do anything different with your goals? Don't you make an outline of an essay before you write it in school. I know I learned to do that. #3 Have a success coach. A success coach is someone who has done what you want to do or can teach/help you do what you need to do. This could be a teacher, parent, friend...... But you have to have a person like this. You can have more then one success coach. #4 Take consistent action. The key here is not to burn yourself out in the beginning and have to take a break. Your plan from earlier will help you stay on track and take CONSISTENT action. Some goals take a long time to achieve and it is important to steadily make progress. Kind of like the story of the Chinese bamboo that doesn't grow for the first 5 years or so and then grows over 100 feet within a couple of weeks. The funny thing tho is if you didn't water it and take care of it every day over those 5 years it never would have grown. So you have to stay consistent with that. #5 Review your progress. It is important to review your progress and see if you are on track, maybe you are progressing faster then you thought, or maybe you fell behind due to an unexpected problem. Which brings me to the last step. #6 Renew your goals. Maybe you can renew when you are going to accomplish your goal. Maybe it can be done sooner. Maybe it can be done later. Maybe you can do more then you thought you could do. It is always a perfect idea to renew your goals right away and use this momentum you have built up to keep driving you forward. I hope the black belt success cycle can help you :)

I am very excited about the Brookhaven Holiday Parade this saturday. This parade is the longest parade we do. It is also very cold so I encourage everyone to bundle up under their uniform. We will be handing out candy canes and flyers during the parade. If parents what to bring a wagon or something like that..... That might not be a bad idea. We might have a ninja turtle to join us for the parade also. Ill keep you all updated on that. Please refer to the picture below for the modified schedule on saturday and all the information about the parade.