Julio’s World

This past week I had dinner with some friends who are such life givers. Their joy and passion challenged me.  On my way home I was thinking about how our world needs more life givers. We have tons of energy drainers running around, some in our families, some at work, others at church or school. You know the type of people who only point out the bad, what’s not working and have a critical comment about most things. Their attitude is cynical and their thinking is limited. These people are the energy drainers.

I made up my mind a long time ago to stay away from such people. I try my best to surround myself with life givers and pray that I am a life giver. Life givers are those who encourage and challenge people around them. They inspire others, dream big and have passion for their work, family and purpose in life. In other words, life givers are people who add and multiply to your life, not subtract and divide. Today I took inventory of my relationships and am thankful that I have more life givers than energy drainers surrounding me. How about you?

I just got back from a family vacation to San Antonio, Texas, where one of our visits took us to Sea World. The shows were spectacular, Shamu was great, but the icing on the cake was hanging out with the Beluga Whales. OK, I admit that when I found out I’d be going behind the scenes and hanging out with the whales (feeding them, touching them and getting in the water with them), I was a little apprehensive. However, after watching my brave little girl’s excitement, it got me excited. I really got excited when I learned that most animals either fight or flight at the hint of an unknown creature or sounds near them, and the Beluga Whale is a flight animal, which means they run and are harmless. What a great experience!  They are smart, and they listened and obeyed instructions. But my big take-away from the experience was that the trainers only use POSITIVE reinforcement to train these animals. One of the trainers told me that out of all the techniques they use to train the whales and dolphins, that POSITIVE reinforcement and affirmation is what works best with these mamals. Interesting thought to me was that I think that positive reinforcement always works better than negative reinforcement with people too! Here are a couple of pics from our experience!

Hillary and I with the Beluga Whale

Jordan, Jonathan, me and Hillary exploring a cave