A Message From Kid President

Every Monday, the therapists in our office meet together for a treatment team. We spend this time helping each other by problem solving our clients’ needs and also validating each other’s as well as our own emotions. At the beginning of the meeting, we do a mindfulness practice, ranging from meditations to activities to watching videos. On Mondays especially, I like to find funny and uplifting mindfulness activities. In my search for a mindfulness video, I ran across this little boy on YouTube. He goes by the name Kid President.Around three years ago, a client of mine introduced me to this little boy in a suit. She had seen one of his videos during a training at work and told me that how awesome they were. I promptly forgot about it. Until a week ago. The first few I watched made me laugh out loud. And then I ran across one video called “A pep talk from Kid President to you”.I rewatched it a few times and the one thing that stood out to me the most was the simplicity of the message. In order to prevent spoiling the whole thing, I’ll talk about one line he said which was “If life is a game, are we on the same team?”I myself have many times had the feeling of being so different from others, so this statement resonated with me. We as therapists work towards a common goal of helping our clients to better themselves and their lives. We also work towards helping each other to help ourselves. As different as our personalities, our histories, our lives are now, we have that in common.In life, we want to work towards common goals of being happy and productive, even if not in the same ways. So we’re really not all as different from one another as we think we are. We so often think about how we are different from others, whether it’s our hair color or how much money we make or how we live our lives. If we could think about how we are similar to someone else, what would happen?The concept that we are an island is simply untrue. No, no one can experience exactly what you have experienced in the exact same way. No one can literally walk in your shoes. However, we do walk the same roads. We do breathe the same air. We do experience the same emotions, even when the situations causing them may be very different. We can all be on the same team. And as Kid President, we can all work towards “giving the world a reason to dance.”