Personal Progress Project Inspires 100s of Moms and Dads
One small Personal Project idea inspired hundreds of moms and 14 completed YW projects.
The young women stopped doing their personal progress, and when I thought, “Why aren’t they doing their projects?” I heard a whisper in return, “Why aren’t you doing your projects?” I have to admit, my eyes almost popped out of my head when I first was called to Young Womens and heard that leaders also need to be doing Personal Progress in addition to teaching classes and doing weekly activities.
My biggest excuse was that I have no time. My second baby was only a couple weeks or days old when I was called as the Laurel Advisor, and I co-own a popular Youtube Channel with Jay P Morgan for Photographers and Videographers called The Slanted Lens, am an actress with the Campbell Agency, and teach a marketing class to photographers. It’s craziness to ask more of a person, but I was promised that as I did my personal progress, I would grow closer to Heavenly Father, and that’s exactly what happened.
I was doing my Personal Progress with my boys. My then 3 year old and I decided to do the Knowledge Project by teaching baby sign to an online community of moms through silly videos. Our new baby was just along for the ride. He mostly just slept. After getting the approval, my 3 year old helped me write the videos, get the props together, setup the lights, shoot the videos, and edit some of the videos. Some turned out super hilarious and others were just weird, but it was a whole lot of awesomeness.
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I wanted a place to send moms to learn more signs that truly honored the signs in ASL and taught moms how to teach their babies to sign without flashcards or study sessions—just in their normal day to day interactions. I also wanted all of the information to be accessible, so there were no barriers for moms with lower income levels. I wanted them to benefit from increased communication and higher IQ levels for their babies as well.
I absolutely did not want to make it though. I felt prompted to make it, and I wanted that idea to go away. It would take a considerable amount of time to shoot 700+ one-minute baby sign videos, edit those 700+ videos, upload 700+ videos, add annotations to 700+ videos, add 700+ descriptions, create 700+ pages for each sign on a website, and write the text for 700+ pages. The more I did not want to do it, the stronger I felt I needed to do it until I knew I had to and just trust the promptings I was receiving. I prayed all the time to solve problems and figure out how to do this the fastest and most effective way possible. It was an amazing experience and took a year.
I worked with the deaf community to learn 600 new signs. I knew about 100 from signing with my first baby. It took me about 12 hours to learn them and create a guide to help me as I shot. I shot for two half Saturdays, for four nights after I put my kids to bed, and I went to sleep twice at 7 pm at the same time as my kids, so I could wake up at 2 am to shoot until 6 am before they awoke. The set for the videos and lighting equipment was against a wall in my husband’s and my long bedroom–protected by a baby gate. My husband very graciously slept on the couch, so I could shoot at 2 am.
The young women were really excited about my project, and they wanted to help. That’s when I realized that I didn’t need to do it all on my own, and God definitely had his own ideas for this. Fourteen girls worked on their Knowledge Project by learning a marketable skill: content marketing and a bunch of other things startup marketers know how to do.
The young women learned how to use WordPress, how to create posts, what categories are, what SEO is, how to add meta descriptions and keywords, and then they got to work learning by doing. We sang silly songs whenever one of us finished 10 baby signs pages, and we ate snacks from Trader Joe’s and ordered food for lunch. Some of the young women also learned how to edit the videos. Others learned about Youtube and how to add annotations. Lastly, some learned about video production and helped me finish some of the videos.
I loved seeing how valuable the young women felt. I think it was important for them to see how the computer skills they have can benefit them. After a couple days, we were done making all of the pages. We did a photo shoot together to celebrate.
One of the young women suggested that I get more serious about Instagram and post everyday. I wanted her to stop talking, but I knew she was right. My kids couldn’t handle that much shooting, so I prayed a lot about what I should do to inspire mothers and fathers. I decided to teach them how to sign in 15 seconds a day with Instagram videos and feature adorable babies signing to inspire moms. I used the first part of my instructional videos that I had shot. This really took off! I mean, who doesn’t want to see adorable babies signing and who doesn’t want to increase their communication and IQ level of their baby by investing 15 seconds of their time?