How Do We Define Success?

Of course simply said, our child is a success if they grow to be healthy, happy and able to be independent of us. However for most of us, while we say that is all we want for our children, it’s not all we expect from them

Take a moment to look at your own life/ How do you measure your own success? Is it through the type of possessions you own, the work you do, the way you live your life? Is it your relationships, your children? Think about what you feel is a success in your life and write them down.

The amazing thing about parenting is that we teach our children even when we don’t mean to. So that list of your own successes is important. It gives you a starting point of what your child is already learning form you about what is important in your life, and they will follow it.

Once you have created your lists read over it once more and think about how you learnt those elements of success. Put them into groups – emotional, spiritual, and physical and economic. This report will help look at all of these as a group, but it’s important to consider them individually, to begin with.

We all have different areas that we consider are the moment important to measure our success in. For some finding one person to spend the rest of your life with, raising children together, maybe the pinnacle of your success. For another, it maybe growing a business and becoming the CEO of a world wide organisation, and for another, it may be working with a group of people who need the services f someone committing a lifetime of free work alongside them. All of these are important. All of them add to the world we live in.

TO create a successful child, we need first to recognise that success isn’t just about being the richest child on the block. It’s about awakening the inert dreams and hopes each one of our children holds inside their heart and bringing them to life. If we do this, then our children will succeed.

While our children will copy us, and follow us, they are not carbon copies of us. Even if you’ve come from a long line of doctors, and you yourself are one, it doesn’t mean your daughter is going to be the same. Once we have worked out how WE measure success and what values we want to share with our children through our modelling of those measures, we then need to acknowledge they are a separate person from us and still may go a completely different route.

The precise nature of how they show their success isn’t as important as how they carry out any task before them. The skills we need to run an NGO in a third world country are very similar to those of running a business or a home. It’s just placing them in a different context.

To succeed children need to be able to work with a wide range of people (have good people management and leadership skills), to be able to identify a problem and then also have an idea of how they can go about solving it. This combination is a winning success formula suitable to a variety of ways your child may display their success.

Children need our expectations and our ability to call out of them positive attributes, but they don’t need us to carve out a specific future for them. They are able, even at a young age to do that themselves.

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