ready to turn good intentions
into supportive actions?
Enthusiastic Neighbor is ready to help!
Focusing on social-emotional learning for adults, we provide services, products & resources
that encourage and support you to embrace connection, care, compassion and context.
We know that showing up is a skill,
and it’s time we started treating it that way.
More and more classrooms are officially making social-emotional learning an important part of the curriculum. Alongside teaching these skills to kids, educators improve their own skills to both better support their students and model supportive behavior. Parents are asked to engage to give kids supportive environments at home.
But embracing connection, care, compassion and context is definitely not just about the kids in your life.
When we're kids, we hear over and over again that we need to share, love each other, think about how to make friends and build communities, and be kind. But as soon as we grow up, so much of that goes away and we’re basically told to get what we can from everyone else through mostly transactional relationships.
Maybe it’s your best friend? It could be your geographic neighbor; a co-worker, your sibling; the person next to you on a bus; an internet acquaintance halfway around the world.
A lot of times, we’re just expected to know how to effortlessly show up with exactly the right words and actions, even though the stakes feel much higher than when we were thinking about who got to play in the sandbox next. It’s almost impossible to make it make sense.
We know that showing up is a skill,
and it’s time we started treating it that way.
More and more classrooms are officially making social-emotional learning an important part of the curriculum. Alongside teaching these skills to kids, educators improve their own skills to both better support their students and model supportive behavior. Parents are asked to engage to give kids supportive environments at home.
But embracing connection, care, compassion and context is definitely not just about the kids in your life.
When we're kids, we hear over and over again that we need to share, love each other, think about how to make friends and build communities, and be kind. But as soon as we grow up, so much of that goes away and we’re basically told to get what we can from everyone else through mostly transactional relationships.
Maybe it’s your best friend? It could be your geographic neighbor; a co-worker, your sibling; the person next to you on a bus; an internet acquaintance halfway around the world.
A lot of times, we’re just expected to know how to effortlessly show up with exactly the right words and actions, even though the stakes feel much higher than when we were thinking about who got to play in the sandbox next. It’s almost impossible to make it make sense.
Being in meaningful, connected, supportive relationships is hard, no matter our age.
There’s so much to consider!
And it can be a lot of hard work.
No wonder it sometimes feels easier
to just stay disconnected.
to listen to the messages that we have to do everything on our own.
to lean into the ways we’re taught relationships are transactional.
Enthusiastic Neighbor supports and encourages adults to take all that we’re learning and reading and feeling and turn our best intentions into supportive actions.
Hi y’all!
I’m Samantha - the CEO of Enthusiastic Neighbor — our Chief Encouragement Officer.
I founded Enthusiastic Neighbor in 2020. You can read more about me, our commitments and our history here.
I truly hope you like Enthusiastic Neighbor as much as I love putting it together. But, if you don’t, I still hope it makes you think. You won’t always agree with everything I have to say or like/use everything that’s in the box. Maybe sometimes you’ll even initially vehemently disagree with content we post or the way we phrase something (or the amount of profanity we use)!
But a huge part of what I’m trying to achieve with is Enthusiastic Neighbor is to support folks in thinking about a world full of different perspectives, where we respect that we can live our best lives, and let other people live theirs too - whatever that may mean for them (as long as they aren’t, you know, dreaming about being a serial killer.)
You should always take time and discern what your opinions are and how you will show up as an enthusiastic neighbor, in the way you think best represents your own values merging with the need to respect everyone else’s humanity. Enthusiastic Neighbor is about opportunity and encouragement; not trying to convince you to live life exactly the same way I do.
With gratitude, from one enthusiastic neighbor to another,
