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a lesson in happiness

KAVU athlete, Neil Amonson shows through his love for life that Happiness is indeed contagious!

Por KAVU

26 de June de 2018

In 2014, 'Jump For Joy' began visiting schools and spreading their message about how to find happiness. Now we all know being happy isn’t as simple as it sounds. It’s something each of us strive for on a daily basis, but sometimes life gets in the way, or as a friend of mine used to say, “hard things are hard.” But we decided it can’t hurt to try to help young people figure out what makes them happy and encourage them to hold it close, and to share that happiness with others!

So how do you teach something as abstract as happiness?

Well first off you have to try! The way we see it - the more adults taking the time to share with young people what makes them happy, the more likely those young people will be introduced to a method or technique that works for them. With Jump For Joy, we want to help teach kids how to make their ideas real. Many young people are easily inspired by the world around them, but without giving that inspiration some direction, often it gets lost in their childish excitement and never fully brought to fruition. At Jump For Joy, we want to do something about that!

This past May we received a call from a local PTA Mom who wanted us to come visit her sons school.

Awesome! “Lets do it!”

To make things even more exciting, the principal wanted to tandem jump in with us. Amazing! This required a few changes from our usual performance. First off we needed a bigger plane. So, we upgraded from the Cessna 182 we usually use to something called a King Air. A King Air has two engines, retractable landing gear, and holds 12 skydivers (as compared to the Cessna 182 which olds four). This larger plane would allow us to quickly climb to the altitude necessary to safely make a tandem skydive and land the principal with us in his own school playground.

How rad!

A few days before the event we got a call that the school district had found out about the principles plans and told him he could not be our tandem passenger. He even offered to take the day off and make the jump on his own time and they still said “no”.

Well when life gives you lemons you might as well make lemonade so instead of doing the tandem skydive with the principal, we filled up the King Air with 12 skydivers and planned to do our biggest Jump for Joy event yet!

For our usual events we fly up to about 4,500 feet before jumping. For this jump we went up to 10,000 to allow enough altitude for all 12 jumpers to exit and land safely without being crowded by each other. One thing I did not anticipate is how much harder it is to spot the school playground from twice as high.

Everything looked like the school playground!

As you can see in this photo, the details on the ground all sort of blend together. Finding the school from the airplane was harder then the actual jump itself

Photo below: Matt Hockman tracks towards Utah Lake with the Wasatch Mountains still topped with snow in the background

It’s always a relief after jumping from the plane when you fly your parachute over your intended landing zone and find the winds in your favor.

Even after checking the weather... you never really know if you can “make it” with absolute confidence until you are over your target. This morning made for perfect conditions and the canopy flight an absolute dream.

Even though we are thousands of feet in the air, we can still hear the kids cheering as we come in to land.

All it takes is one child to see a little parachute, and they quickly point it out to their friends. Before long everyone is staring up high in the sky.

With the perfect winds, each jumper landed right on target. For a few of our group it was the first time they had jumped somewhere besides an airport. As a skydiver your first demonstration skydive is something you will never forget and is very special.

Wearing big smiles, we gathered up our parachutes and got ready for most important part of the performance.

Talking to the kids!

School playgrounds are the perfect venue for our program. A normal-sized athletic field is plenty big to land on, and in this case.... we had Mt. Timpenogas as our back-drop.

I often wonder what I would have thought if I watched something like this when I was in grade school?

dream!

The first part of the message talks about where our dreams, goals, and ideas live (in our minds) and how they are invisible until you share them.

We throw up colored powder to represent sharing your idea, and to show how even after sharing it, your idea still isn’t something you can hold in your hand. You released your idea into the world, but you have complete some more steps to bring it into real life.

plan!

After you share your dream, you have to come up with a plan!

The kids seem to really respond well to visual aids so we use a marble and a beach ball for this next step. We ask which is a better plan, the marble or the beach ball? They always say the beach ball because it is bigger, but then we talk about how a small plan that is made of good quality things is better then a big plan that is empty.

d0!

The last step of bringing your ideas to life is actually trying out your plan!

We talk about why this is scary because sometimes your plan might not work and how to handle failure. Each plan you try out that doesn’t work gets you one step closer to the one that does!

After about 20 minutes of chatting with the kids, it’s time to send them back to school. We give them high fives and cross our fingers that they learned something that will help them be happy, healthy, young adults who find their passions and share their gifts with the world.

A few lucky students even get to try on our gear!

We always try to include at least one female jumper and, in this case we were lucky enough to have three beautiful, talented lady jumpers participate!

It’s easy to observe the girl students look up to female jumpers and see first hand that being brave isn’t just for the boys.

With another memorable morning in the books, it was time for us to gather up our parachutes and head home. If I could summarize a Jump For Joy event up in one word, it would be “rewarding”. It always feels so good to share our passions with these young people in a way that hopefully encourages them to follow their heart and make their own adventures as they grow up.

Jump For Joy is a 501c3 non-profit whose events are offered to the schools for FREE. We are a volunteer based organization funded through the private donations of caring individuals. If you want to be part of our team or make a donation, please reach our through our website:

www.jump-4-joy.org

We’d love to work with you!

Photo Credits:

Neil Amonson

Jacom Stephens

Joel Strickland

Footnotes

KAVU Ambassador/Athlete, Neil Amonson has a huge sense of adventure, a quick and effortless smile and is willing to share both with everyone! Follow his adventures world wide!

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FootNotes

KAVU Ambassador/Athlete, Neil Amonson has a huge sense of adventure, a quick and effortless smile and is willing to share both with everyone! Follow his adventures world wide!

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