The Education You Most Need

The French philosopher Montesquieu wrote: “We receive three educations: one from our parents, one from our schoolmasters, and one from the world, and the third one contradicts the first two.”

There’s a lot of truth in that. And it raises the question: What is the education every human being most needs? Or, more personally: What is the education you most need?

For decades, Landon Saunders, President of Heartbeat, crisscrossed the country, talking to people about such an education in his highly popular workshops, Feeling Good About Yourself and Life That Loves To Happen.

The Living Conversation is based on this work. Week after week, these posts will give you a chance to pause and think a little more deeply about your life, about your “inner conversation”…and about the education you most need in this world.

There are three reasons why this is important:

• Every human being deserves a chance to feel good about himself or herself. You are the most valuable thing in the world—a human being. You are also unique, one of a kind. There is no one in all the world just like you. And that means you fill a place in the world that no one else can fill; and if you don’t fill it, it will go unfilled. The education you most need would help you fulfill your unique life.
• Every human being needs an education in making relationships work. Relationships are very important to us, but also very difficult. Learning to enjoy your relationships, even with hurts and disappointments, is key to winning as a human being.
• Every human being needs an edge in dealing with problems, failures, setbacks and even tragedy. It’s been said that our problems won’t destroy us, but the way we think about them might. The education we most need would help us face the world as it is, with all its troubles, but without the loss of joy.

Finally, if there is one theme here, it’s this: We all need an education for joy. Not Joy as an end to which we work, but joy as an energy with which we fight.

Joy teaches us to feel good about ourselves. Joy teaches us the way to be with others. And joy can even help us weather whatever troubles come our way, without being defeated.

Someone has said that the greatest source of stress is the living we don’t do. And the greatest source of joy is the living we do well.

The Living Conversation is about pointing you to the education needed for living well and joyfully each day–all the way to your last day!

Geoffery Alan Moore, Editor