Clean Speech Minnesota: 30 days to creating a new and more positive view of the world

By Leah Persky, PhD & Certified Family Life Educator  • Family Life Education Manager

JFCS is excited to partner with the Minneapolis Jewish Federation and more than 30 other Jewish organizations in the Twin Cities to present Clean Speech Minnesota to the community. This free community program starts April 1 and lasts throughout the month. Clean Speech is an awareness-building and educational campaign that supports personal awareness and mindfulness with the goal of making more peaceful communities.

The program is designed to promote mindful speech – this will allow each of us to build a more peaceful world for ourselves and the world around us. By the end of the month, we will be better equipped to combat hurtful and harmful words that are spoken about and to each other. This has the power to help us improve our own lives and improve our own self-talk and worldview by relying on the wisdom of Jewish teachings. These may seem like grand goals, but we can accomplish so much with a little focused effort and community support each day.

Clean Speech Minnesota offers an opportunity to engage, reset, build awareness, and put Jewish teaching into practice. This program is designed to help us more gracefully deal with the negativity, gossip, and divisiveness we encounter in the world and to help us bring more positivity to the way we view and understand the world and how we interact with it.

Making new positive habits takes time and mindfulness. How many times have your resolutions quickly fallen by the wayside? This describes most all New Year’s resolutions, for pretty much everybody. Researchers have found that for a new habit to really stick we need to make it manageable and do it every day. This means we need to focus on making small and realistic changes over a period of about a month. It takes this amount of time to create new connections in the brain and establish new habits. The beauty of habits is that they become automatic. Herein lies the power of habits and this is why it is so hard to change habits that might not be serving us well. For more tips on how to successfully create new habits, click here.

The Clean Speech program has the power to allow us to make new positive habits and re-wire our brains to see the world in a more positive light. In about five minutes a day, participants will focus on one aspect of mindful speaking with a short video and supportive materials. To participate in this program, you must sign up. Once you sign up, you will receive a daily email for the entire month of April. The daily email will include a short video contributed by one of the partner organizations and supportive materials designed for you to spend more time on the daily theme (whether that is five minutes or an hour). The themes build upon each other, and by the end of the month you, will have completed the curriculum, which empowers and unites each of us in the mission of mindful speech and community unity. Sign up here – it take about 30 seconds. 

Also, check out Clean Speech on Facebook