GRAVETTE -- Motivational speaker Rick Voisin definitely had the attention of the students at the Gravette Upper Elementary School last month as he related the story of his alcoholic grandparents, his alcoholic parents, his own struggle with alcoholism and his stay in prison.
Voisin's program was the culmination of a week of activities celebrating "National No Name-Calling Week" which focused on preventing bullying.
He told the youngsters that "bullies suck -- it's not cool to be a bully!"
He urged his listeners to pay attention, then emphasized the importance of respecting all people. He asked if any of them were bullies and said, if so, they must be honest before they could improve.
As part of his "Courage to Change" presentation, Voisin asked some of the students to participate by telling their goals. They responded by relating desires from becoming a better basketball player to winning the Nobel Prize. He urged them to pursue those goals and to make them easier to accomplish by making the right choices.
Using cardboard emblems to represent doors, Voisin displayed Door 1, "the happy face door" of happiness, success and joy; Door 2, with arrows pointing backward to 1 and forward to 3; and Door 3, with a sad face representing pain, misery, unhappiness. He asked the students which door they had chosen and warned them if they were behind Door 2, to do all they could to make the right choices and get back behind Door 1.
Voisin said he didn't learn from his grandparents' and parents' problems with alcohol but instead became a heavy drinker at a young age. He married at 21 and said, with his job as a restaurant manager and his wife an RN, "we had the American dream." He thought it was a weakness to ask for help when he encountered problems, but he has since learned it is a strength.
During the program, Voisin warned his listeners that alcohol and drugs make a person do things they wouldn't normally do. He related how he got drunk after being fired from his restaurant management job, went back and robbed the business and soon ended up in prison. He was full of anger because his mother had died and his wife had filed for divorce and said he simply made the wrong choices.
While in prison, Rick Voisin was known as "prisoner number 62873." He displayed the orange jumpsuit, the shackles and chains he wore while incarcerated. He stressed that prison is not a nice place because of the lack of privacy, the poor food and the loss of self-respect prisoners suffer. "You want to stay out of there."
Voisin admitted he couldn't change the past, so now he chooses to focus on the future. He has been sober since 1995 and is a court administrator, training court personnel, in Kansas. He travels to schools, from elementary schools to colleges, sharing his personal experiences. He stresses how quickly one's life can go from good to bad on the basis of just one wrong decision. He uses the example of a young girl who chose to go drinking with her friends to celebrate her 14th birthday and ended the day dead from alcohol poisoning.
"It takes courage to change," Voisin says, but he emphasized how important it is to get on the right track again if one has chosen poorly in the past. You don't want to end up behind Door 3, which he describes as "your worst nightmare." He concluded with a very positive message, telling the youngsters, "If I can change, you all can."
At the conclusion of his presentation, Voisin did an "illusion" as he had promised. Taking a large tower with red, yellow and green lights resembling a traffic light, he placed it on the table. He took three cubes with red, yellow and green circles and placed them inside the tower in a different order. He predicted that they would come out in the same pattern as the lights on the tower. Much to the surprise of the audience, when he removed the tower, the colors on the cubes inside duplicated those on the outside.
With a little sleight-of-hand "magic," Voisin left his listeners wondering how he performed his trick. But they didn't have to wonder how he felt about the importance of making the right choices in life. It's not a small, insignificant issue. It's a matter of life and death, he said.
General News on 02/04/2015