Sweethearts & Heroes brings powerful and empowering programs to schools, districts, healthcare workers, athletes, educational conferences, and more. Our presentations engage and inspire audiences with stories and lessons that speak to the heart.
Whether you're an educator looking to inspire students, a business leader looking to energize your team, or a community organization seeking to spread hope, Sweethearts & Heroes has a program for you. Our speakers have found great success overcoming adversity in their lives and are now using these experiences to encourage others to embrace their full potential.
The Sweethearts & Heroes’ mission is to empower everyone to become someone’s Sweetheart or Hero. Let us motivate your group with tales of strength, H.O.P.E., and the power of the human spirit. Our programs aim to reach people of all ages and backgrounds to live their lives with purpose, compassion, and empathy for all.
OUR FOCUS
OUR CIRCLE WORK
Circle is one of history’s oldest human connection and community-building practices, stretching back over 400,000 years. It is a powerful, reproducible ritualistic process that brings together people who may not otherwise cross paths. It provides a secure place and time to share and be part of profound life experiences or transitions, break down barriers, reorient perspectives, and forge new bonds among individuals in different ‘outergroups,’ prompting the formation of new ‘intergroups.’
By definition, a Circle is a secure space created to invite the sharing of stories, perspectives, and emotions. It is designed so everyone can see each other and hear all voices. It requires mutual consensus to listen and, often in sequence, respond to a central question. The Circle format has no beginning and no end. No one is in a position of prominence, which serves to encourage individuals to speak honestly about their feelings and beliefs.
Sweethearts & Heroes Circles are built upon the ancient tradition of communities coming together to share stories and, most importantly, listen. Storytelling unconditionally invites us into a shared experience where listeners and speakers form connections and identify commonalities. Through this, we practice the 5 Core Human Skills of social and emotional learning and build empathy and compassion through small shared moments of honesty and vulnerability. This is especially important when we are focused on helping others acquire strategies for talking about and dealing with difficult life situations, including destructive decisions on the rise in humans today (including suicide and suicidal ideation).
THE HUMAN SKILLS
In addition to the growth of empathy and compassion, Circle is one of the best intentional activities any group of individuals can do to develop and improve the deteriorating Human Skills within the 5 Core Competencies identified in social and emotional learning.
We take a traditional approach to these skills, which have been critical throughout all human history. These skills were developed for centuries in self-directed and self-controlled play, acquired while working around the house or community and built with families at dinner tables. But the fact is, many of these face-to-face human interactions are quickly diminishing or changing. Thus, in the 1960s at Yale Medical School, James Comer implemented these 5 Core Human Skills into mainstream education, reducing incarceration rates and greatly affecting students’ academic achievement, attendance, and disruptive behaviors.
These skills can be learned just as students learn how to multiply and divide. Circles are specifically engineered to acquire, maintain, and develop each of the Human Skills as we learn how to manage emotions, problem-solve, and create positive relationships with others. Circle consciously moves these competencies to the front of our collective awareness and puts their development into action so that our students can work on these critical skills. Time permitting, it is a good practice to ask participants to discuss how they have developed these skills in and through the Circle.
SPACED REPETITION PRACTICES
To retain any information in our brain, we must refresh it periodically with specific time intervals.
Spaced repetition is an educational practice of reviewing information at gradually increasing intervals, statistically proven to increase retention. It is an ideal system that allows you to review the material before it is forgotten, helping you to retain it in your long-term memory. Rather than learning information quickly, which can lead to quick forgetting, spaced repetition focuses on long-term retention of new information. This process helps build competence, a basic psychological need (next to autonomy and relatedness) that humans need to develop to achieve engagement and fulfillment in their lives.