‘Yuva 2018’-Youth Leadership Workshop in Seattle

On Saturday, April 21st  2018, Mr.M.K.Ramanujam conducted the youth leadership workshop, Yuva 2018, for children 10 and above. This was conducted at YMCA in Sammamish and had very good attendance by about 25 children.

The talk walked the children through various stages that one goes through before having an emotion. Through this process, the children became familiar on how to deal with these various stages and how not to end up in an emotion without understanding why they are experiencing it. Through these types of workshops and through the teen Gopa Kuteeram classes, our hope is to instill self-confidence, clarity of thought and love for life with the generation next.

‘Building Inner Strength’-Workshop for Students in Bay Area

MK Ramanujam (Ram) held a youth workshop on Jan 15, 2017 in San Ramon and it was attended by 25 middle and high school students as well as many of their parents.

The workshop encouraged students to first develop one’s inner strength by understanding one’s feelings and needs. Then to build close relationships with others by understanding their feelings, actions and needs. Relationship building will become particularly important as the student transitions into college and work environments.

Needs are expressed through feelings. Reading one’s feelings correctly is key to analyzing the underlying needs. Ram stressed the importance of distinguishing ‘wants’ from ‘needs’ in order to build inner mental strength and to empathize with others’ actions. The message to students was that more one is open to understanding and fulfilling others needs, more they will be willing to connect and reciprocate to fulfill one’s own needs.

Students were grouped in small teams and given an exercise to act out feelings for their teams to correctly guess them. To wrap things up, each team had a chance to share three things they learned from the workshop with the rest of us.

Many parents also attended the workshop and in the end were able to share their learnings with the students as well.

‘Building Inner Strength’ Workshop for Middle and High School Students in Richmond, VA

Love to Share Foundation of America invited Mr. MK Ramanujam (Ram) to conduct the Youth Leadership Workshop on Building Inner Strength for Middle and High School students in Virginia. 22 young aspirants attended the workshop from 10 am to 12 noon on Saturday, Dec 10th and gained a useful life skill to empower them to stand out amongst the rest of the crowd, identify and improve upon that inner strength.

Mr. Ram’s unique way of connecting with the young minds resonated beautifully with the teens in attendance.

The morning started off with some introductions, followed by the first module that dealt with principles and precepts of Leadership, the first of which was all about ‘emptying the cup’, a.k.a keeping an open mind and listening. The mirror principle and many other tips and anecdotes from Mr. Ram’s wide experience made it a very enjoyable session.

Session 1: 4 volunteers were chosen and each of them were given a word by Mr. Ram and their team’s tasks is to identify the word.  Words given are all related to expressions and during this fun event teams understood that there are more than one word to an expression.  Kids showed their amazing expressive techniques to showcase the words given to them.

Session 2: 8 volunteers – 2 from each team were chosen to perform a role play.  With less than a minute to understand the concept and perform, kids did great.

Session 3: 4 volunteers – 1 from each team were chosen by their own team to present what they have learned during this 2 hours session of building inner strength.  Each of them presented their notes, their thoughts on what is an inner strength, how to identify it, how to improve upon that, how to use it better to advance in their life.

Finally, Mr. Ram, gave feedback to the students on their presentation, a participation certificate and wished them all success in their forthcoming challenges.

“Building Inner Strength” Workshop for middle-school and high-school students in Concord, Boston

On Friday December 2nd 2016, from 3-5pm, Love to Share Foundation America organized an interactive talk /discussion session under the title “Building Inner Strength” for middle-school and high-school students in the Concord/Acton area at the May Fowler branch Library in Concord MA. The session was led by eminent speaker Mr. Ramanujam.

In this session, Mr. Ramanujam talked to the teen participants about how one should how one should look at the problems with an open mind and how important it is to understand other’s emotions and respond accordingly. Those who understand others are better  leaders. Highlighting the difference between the terms ‘need’ and ‘want’, he said how one could use the sense of judgement to prioritize their needs – thereby eliminating conflicts.

The session was well received by the twenty young adults who enthusiastically participated in exercises like role-play as part of the workshop. The young minds certainly had a take-away or two that they could put to use in their life for the betterment of their self-confidence and live a happier life.