Happy Success Condition #1 Success by fulfilling life’s purpose

Last week, I skimmed my bookshelves and found several books written by Robert Kiyosaki. I had a quick look at his best seller, “Rich Dad Poor Dad”. Robert wrote this book and created a world syndrome to be rich. The message is simple; “You do not need to be controlled by money but you control the money.” I was very intrigued by his money management philosophy and I did dig deeper to find out more about Robert Kiyosaki himself.

I found that he had not one, but three life threatening accidents during last 10 years, since he wrote his book and because of this, he had learned a big lesson.

He said, “I survived because there is something important that I need to do. I found out that what motivates me is not the money but life’s purpose that was given by god. We all do have things to do and purpose of life. We have unique talent and we have obligation to develop that talent and give back to world that we live in. That is our life’s purpose and obligation to fulfill.”

I agree with what he said and the core of achieving happy success is to find our own purpose of life and working towards becoming the best in that category. We need to see ourselves progress towards it each day and how it contributes to our world in positive way.

Therefore, the most important tasks parents must complete is to find our children’s purpose and talent, to then nurture them and maximize them to achieve their full potential.

As parents, we do need three special skills that we need to develop to help them along in this process.As humans, we only utilize 5 to 10% of our potential within our lifetime. The most well known scientist, Albert Einstein, could only use less than 10% of his brain. Sooner we help them to find their hidden potential, and talents, more chance to use higher percentage of their potential and closer towards happy success for our children.

1) Finding our children’s potential and talent

Children can be too young or inexperienced to know what their potentials and talents are. It is a parents’ responsibility to help them to find what they are. The easiest way to find their talent would be to provide lots of opportunity for them. Allow them to a lot of different things. Help them to find what they do like and dislike, and focus on what they like and help them in doing that specific thing more often.

2) Developing our children’s potential and talent

Once they are found, parents need to coach their children to develop it further towards their full potential. One of the great ways to achieve this is to find people who are already doing what your children wants to do, and to find out more about how they for there. Also find out what they have done in the past. For example, if a child wants to be a pianist, we may take them to a private art gallery in town and have an opportunity to see and meet real artists. It does not have to be a famous person, but anyone who is in the industry. That will provide a great opportunity for inspiring our children and maybe the person can even become the mentor of the child along the way.

3) Timing of developing our children’s potential and talent

It is like playing with gypsum plaster. Plaster gets hardened and difficult to change in shape as time goes by, so you need to make whatever desired shape before it gets hard. Same goes with developing talent. It is a lot easier to develop talents when children are young. Neuroscientists confirms that early experiences impact brain development, even more so than genetics.

Are you doing anything to find and develop your child’s talent and potential? If so, please share with us your experiences. We would love to hear your ideas and thoughts.

Lead our children to happy and successful Life

Let us imagine… If the world’s top athletes wanted you to be their coach, would you accept the offer?

My guess is that you would reject such an offer because you may not know much about the sport, or you may not be a great coach when it comes to sports.

It is same with parents. When a child is born, both parents receive a huge responsibility when it comes to raising the child.

We try our best, put our full effort, along with love into parenting, and raise our kids. However, we cannot raise children by just giving them our attention and love. We do need knowledge and skills to raise kids successfully, just like a sports coach needs knowledge and skills to train athletes.

To raise kids well, we need three things. First, we need to know how to understand them.

Second, we need to know how to communicate with them. Third, we need to know how to coach them to live happy and successful lives.

Only a well prepared coach can build great athletes. Like so, parents need to learn how to be great parents to raise kids as best they can.

According to statistics, to raise and support a child through college, it will roughly cost parents 200K. Nowadays, both parents work day and night to earn this kind money. Unfortunately, not everyone has the time to look after their children because of this.

However, is it the most important job as a parent to send them to school and obtain things like private tutoring after school?

Schools are primary places to learn knowledge, but it is only parents who can teach and guide them how to live life and principles of their life.

Becoming a parent is one of the most important achievements of our lives. Children’s education is not a job for a mother or father, but for both parents who need to work together.

In our parent’s age, raising and educating our children was a mother’s responsibility, while fathers were to bring bread and butter to table.

This is the wrong idea. When a child does not eat properly, the child becomes unhealthy and the same goes for parenting. Both mother and father need to work together to raise children who have balanced thought.

All of us parents want our children to be smart, and to learn faster than any other child. However, if the child becomes smarter and learns faster, would the child would be happier?

There is no doubt that the importance of study and getting good grades will widen opportunity when it comes to choosing the company your child will work for after graduation.

Fame and fortune are important in life, but the ultimate purpose of parenting is coaching children to learn the skills and to know how to live happily and successfully through life in whatever path they choose. It will be the ultimate inheritance that we can give to our children.

Let us set our parenting goals right. If we do so, we will see our children becomes leaders of future generations in 10 or 20 years time.

Look forward to hearing your thoughts and opinions.

Actively Listen and Question – Most important Coaching Skill

Last week, how much did you talk with your children other than the typical conversation such as “Have you had lunch? Have you done your homework?” What about topics such as children’s interest, worries, recent activities and happenings, and so on?

If teenagers are asked who make their life hard, they will likely say that it is their parents.

It is shocking to hear that since we, parents, are meant to be their supporter and lifelong friends. But, we are the ones who make their life hard.

A recent survey conducted on 1,000 children aged between 10 and 12 years old, were asked if they communicate with their parents over 1 hour (per week? per day?. The results revealed that only 30% said Yes, while 70% of children said No.

Even during that 1 hour, the topics discussed included;

– Have you had anything to eat?
– Have you finished your homework?
– Wash your hand?
– Eat vegetables?

There is no topic or question that intrigues their thinking and opinions.

It is essential to communicate with children and to sympathize with each other in order to properly grow them into successful adults.

The communication is often a one way street because of the responsibility of parents to raise children. However, we cannot coach our children by warning or lecturing them on what to do. This actually raises children’s hostility.

If we really want to change our children, we need to actively listen and sympathize with our children first, and then ask good questions for them to think about. They need to come up the solution for themselves.

Active listening and good questioning is the most important coaching skills that we need to master as parents.

Let us look into active listening.

Communication with children starts with listening thoroughly in order to understand what they are trying to express and sympathizing with their feelings.

If a child who speaks well suddenly stop communicating with parents, we need to look at our communication habits.

Are you saying any of below sentences daily?

Why was your score is so low? Do you know that Jack next door got a top grade in his class?

Stop playing games and go to your room and study.

School tuition fee is very expensive. You need to study harder.

Our child needs not preaching, but our understanding and sympathy.

For instance, if our child had a fight with another child in school and the teacher reported it to you, instead of saying to your child, “Do not fight with school mates,” we can say, “Why were you very angry?” Try to understand the child’s feeling. Children already know that it is bad to fight with school mates. When we try to understand their feelings and communicate together with sympathy, children can solve problems for themselves and try not to fight in the future.

In other words, we need to actively listen to our child, we should not scold them immediately but acknowledge their feelings and try to understand why they are angry.

Next, let us look at good questioning skills that help children to think for themselves.

To ask good questions, we need to reduce frequency of “why” and increase the frequency of using “How” and “What” instead.

For instance, if a child is angry or crying, instead of asking, “Why are you angry?” or “Why are you crying?” ask “What do you think? If your friend is also angry, what do you want to tell her? To do so, what shall we do?” or “What would your hero, Spiderman, do if he was you?” This helps them to express their feelings and thoughts.

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Let us look at how Thomas Alva Edison‘s Mother asked Edison.

When Edison was young, he wanted to sell vegetables that he had grown in order to buy materials for an experiment. Edison found that his vegetables are not selling well.

His mother asked, “What vegetables are not selling well? Hmm. those vegetables are common vegetables that others also grow for themselves, aren’t they?”

Edison realized that those vegetables which were not selling, were the ones that customers grew for themselves in their own gardens. Edison mother then said, “Yes, so what is required to do next?”

Edison told his mother that he would go to the town and ask others what vegetables they would need.

What Edison’s mother did was to ask good questions and that helped Edison to find his own answers.

Good questions help our children to think and make our children find answers for themselves.

Lastly, to ask good questions, ask positive questions instead of negative ones. Ask open questions instead of closed ones, and ask present or future oriented questions instead of past questions.

The one simple practice that will drastically improve our questioning skills is to record what questions we are asking and review them on a daily basis. This will help us to know what kind of questions we are asking daily and how to improve our questioning skills.

Please share your thoughts or experiences and look forward to hearing from you.

Parent! Let us lead children by example

The great American author, James Arthur Baldwin, once said, “Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.”

The core of a child’s education is that parents show them how to live life by example. Therefore, instead of thinking about how to teach our children, we need to look at ourselves first, whether we are living our lives the way our children are expected to live or not.

Of course, it is very difficult to show our children what the perfect adult should be all of the time. We make mistakes and do things that we should not do because there is no perfect human being in the world.

However, one thing that is for sure is if we show our children we as their parents are doing our best to be good parents, our children will learn from us and become good adults when they grow up.

What do you remember from when you were child? Perhaps your parents did something that really impressed you and you still remember it to this day?

I have one. When I was young, I grew up in a very rural, small town and my family decided to move to the metropolitan area. The level of education was much higher than what I used. I got the lowest ranking within my class during the first semester. I was so ashamed that I could not let my parents know that I got such a low ranking in the class. Because of this, I decided to change the score report. I altered it to 5th instead of 55th out of the entire 55 students. My parents were very impressed that I could be at the top of the class in new school. They even celebrated my results. They invited the neighbors over for the celebration and they told everyone they knew how good I did in class. They kept praising my efforts and outcome. This has put me into flutter. I felt so nervous because I didn’t want others to find out about my lies. Long story short, I had to live up to what I lied about. I had to study hard and because of this, my score got better in class. After a few months, my score fell between 6th and 10th on average in the class. I was less burdened after that.

Seven years later, I still believed that my parents were not aware of my lies. I ended up telling my mother that I had lied about my score and guess what? She already knew! It turned out that the score card had delivered to my parents a few days after I had shown them the false results, but my parents do not want me to be embarrassed. They also knew that I was under a lot of pressure because I was trying to adjust myself in the new school at that time. They simply pretended that they did not know at all.

When I found this out I was puzzled. I wasn’t sure if it was a good thing for me, and then I realized how hard it would be for them not to tell me immediately and scold me for being a liar. Instead, they just believed me without question. In the end, I had to live up to the expectation that I planted on them, and it made me study harder. I graduated school at top ranks after all.

This experience impressed me so much. It led me to believe in my children unconditionally and made me take a look at the positive side of my children. I try to find out what my children did well and praise them for that specific action. I do not pay much attention on the negative side of things as long as they are not severe. So far, it seems to work great. I see my children do good in school and in kindergarten, and they behave the way I wish them to behave.

This is my story, but I am sure that you will have many stories about what your parents did for you. Please share with us. I would love to hear from you.

No teaching but coaching

Detail of the painting The Death of Socrates by Jacques-Louis David. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

When we think about education, we imagine a school with a teacher teaching in front of the class and students who are listening quietly. Therefore, we follow the same one-way method when it comes to teaching our children, however, this is not the best way to educate our children. The great philosopher, Socrates, said, “The role of a teacher is helping students to think themselves.”

A better way to educate our children is not to teach them all the time, but to help them to think and find their potential within themselves. This is another way of saying not to teach, but to coach children to lead them.

So what does coaching mean to parents?

It means that parents believe in their children’s potential and they want to be their partner in finding and nurturing their potentials, and solving problems together as they make their way through the journey.

Children struggle to find and nurture their talents and potentials. That is where a parent can help.

Help them to find their talents and apply themselves in their chosen field when it comes to achieving their goals and dreams.

We call this kind of helper a coach, and that is what a parent needs to be for their children.

So what needs to be done to be a coach of our children?

First of all, we need to truly believe in our children’s unlimited potential and possibilities.

Darold Treffert, Clinical Professor at the University of Wisconsin Medical Schoolonce said, “Do not look at what is missing in a child, but look what is in a child. Then the child will be changed.”

The great writer, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, once said, “If your treat an individual… as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought to be and could be.”

Believing in your child’s unlimited potential is the core spirit of parent coaching.

If you have not watched Team Hoyt, it is truly worth watching it again and again. That is what parent coaching’s core spirit is all about. Please visit, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flRvsO8m_KI&feature=colike

Look forward to hearing your thoughts.