My daughter is an amazing dancer and gymnast. Watching her grace will stop you in your tracks. But she will fall down and get hurt just walking through the living room. She did that last weekend and I asked my mom “how can someone be so graceful and clumsy at the same time?” Her response was “you may need to ask yourself that question.” So OK my daughter is pretty close to a clone of me, especially when it comes to physical grace and clumsiness.

Also last weekend I went on a reading binge. I read 5 books from Thursday afternoon to Sunday night (it was a 3 day weekend and I was at the beach). In the car on the way home I read “Graceful” from Seth Godin. I thought as I read it “how can I be so clumsy but expect to be graceful?” I also was surprised to find myself graceful in some areas but other areas I’m just plain clumsy.

I am having a hard time finding difference between being graceful and being brave. Bring graceful is allowing failure, but I wonder how many times you can fail before you completely crumble. I wonder how to be graceful when your failures pointed out to you. All I know is that I do not always fail gracefully and I definitely do not take enough chances to fail for fear of it.

Godin does talk about sharing with others. I did love that, I love sharing my passion. He talks about having an “abudance mindset” and says:

engaging with the mesh, building communities that benefit from sharing resources instead of destroying them is a strategy that scales…It encourages you to focus on your work and the generosity that comes from interacting with (and helping) your community.

I love this so much. I get asked often why I “tweet” or why I put so much time into blogging or going to conferences on my own dime (registration for edcampBham is now open by the way). The answer is simple. Learning with and helping other educators is my passion. I do not get the luxury of doing this as my “job” but it is what I love to do and it is what I will keep doing (probably to fulfill the extreme aggravation that it is still not the job I have). Last night #edchat was focused on how to get other educators to develop a PLN, I do not know the answer to that but what I do know is that if you are reading this and not sharing with others, it is time to be graceful it is time to have an abundance mindset. No you do not have to use the internet, twitter, blogs to share but the internet is a:

connection machine, connecting people and ideas and organizations.

We need to take advantage of this wonderful “machine” and connect. Internet is cheap and what we get from it is huge wealth of knowledge and learning. This is huge during our recession, don’t you think?

So the purpose of this is not to push this book, but it is to reflect on what being “Graceful” is, which will eventually help me grow personally and mostly professionally. Not always easy but through sharing fear and failures as well as sharing what I am learning is a step closer to becoming Graceful.