4 Ways to Help Your Child be Great!
4 ways to help your child to be great!
(Taking tips from the Olympians)
It may not be a goal of every parent to see their child upon the Olympic podium, after all, today can feel enough of a challenge without putting such high expectation upon yourself or your child. If you watched the winter Olympics recently, you may have been as fascinated as me to get a glimpse into the mindset of these elite athletes and to see just how they managed to get to the top of their game.
Research shows that there are things that parents can do to encourage their children to be great at something rather than just good. Using these ideas can help your child to succeed at whatever their personal goal is and I have written a few tips for you!
1. Make your child’s happiness the main focus. If you want your children to be successful you first have to focus on their happiness. Most people think that successful people are happy because they are successful; However research suggests this is not the case and that success comes after a person is happy. Being happy puts a child in the right frame of mind to want to do well for their self. If you find that you child is in a particularly unhappy mood, try and take a break and go and do something fun for a while and lift their spirits.
2. Practice, practice, practice. While Olympic athletes may have an innate talent, it is neither the only nor the most significant ingredient to success. Instead, being great at something has more to do with the amount of practise you do. Highly intelligent people may not ever be truly great at something while those who are not the most intelligent may be the most persistent and really do what it takes to succeed. Elite athletes practice consistently and stay focussed and single minded on their goal.
3. Encourage self-discipline. Children who have learnt to self discipline are going to be happy to work hard and behave well even when you are not around. Self discipline comes from using positive parenting methods by bringing out a child’s natural innate goodness.
4. Learn to cope with failure. Children who are likely to keep trying and are willing to do the things that they need to succeed have learned to handle the disappointment of failure. Olympians have learnt to cope with failure and usually put a positive spin on it. Did you see the interview with ski champion Lindsay Vonn’s after her fall on the slopes? Here’s what she wrote;
“First off I want to congratulate Maria, Julia, and Anya on their great performances today they did a great job and it was cool to see Maria get the gold medal that she deserves! Unfortunately I ran into some problems in the second run hooking a tip and crashing in the SL portion that is just how it goes sometimes in alpine skiing. I have mixed emotions on my day, I am really disappointed that I didn’t finish and I lost a chance for gold in one of my strongest events, but on the positive side I was happy to have another solid run in DH and I was also happy with how my SL was going before skiing out. I went out attacking and giving it my best and I feel like that’s what the Olympics are all about, so I can’t be too disappointed. So now I am shifting my focus to the SG on Saturday.”
Winners know how to handle loss and have learnt to deal with failure, if you can teach your children to deal with the inevitable failures that they will have, they can learn, grow, and move confidently into the future.
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