Free yourself from fear of failure.
Michelle Obama’s book and others I’ve been reading recently have really resonated with me. Our mindset is so powerful in terms of what we enable or allow ourselves to achieve.
Don’t stop yourself or your children from achieving for fear of failure. Through failure you learn. You learn what doesn’t work; that option wasn’t quite right but maybe if you tweaked it you could do it differently next time.
I know I’ve failed at times. There were times in the past when I was terrified of failure. I had to get it right all the time! Actually now when I get it wrong I can shrug it off.
NVR and tackling the fear of failure:
Part of the NVR philosophy and approach is if you get if wrong apologise. Model to your child what getting it wrong looks like, what it feels like and do that then move forward. Don’t feel guilty or bad about it and hold onto that feeling.
You’re showing your child what to do when you get it wrong so they’re learning. You’re helping yourself and your family to grow and have that aspiration to achieve more with their life. For some of our children their aspirations might be very small because they don’t believe in themselves enough. We have to help them believe in themselves. I’m not saying this is quick thing or it’s going to happen overnight.
The words we use:
Our words are powerful. I was listening to something about finances and instilling a positive financial mindset in our children. How the words we use can have a significant impact. For example, if you’re in the supermarket and your child picks up something but you don’t have the cash to buy it today. Maybe you’ve gone in and you know what you can buy, you know what you can afford and that’s not on the list. You say to your child “we can’t afford that now” that’s instilling one belief system into your child; we don’t have the money to buy stuff.
If you say ”we could buy that today but we’re choosing to buy this today, we’ll buy that next time we come” or “we’ll buy that another time”. You are then showing your child it’s a choice about where you spend your money rather than not having enough. Just that change of wording is very empowering for us as parents but it’s also hugely empowering for the child. It’s not that we don’t have money but we are making a choice how we spend it.
Over the last few weeks I’ve been incredibly conscious about wording around my son, I realised I don’t always use useful wording. Just by changing my wording to something like “do you want to spend it on that or would you rather save the money for something else” I’m slowly seeing a change.
Sometimes he says “no I really want that” in which case I’ll say “Ok, that’s fine” but other times he asks for it to be put in the holiday pot. He’s starting to learn it’s about choices, deciding how we spend things and that we have those choices with everything. I’m not getting it right all the time but by making those choices slowly it has impacts on their own belief systems.
Instilling beliefs
If we want our children to grow as confident caring human beings, we have to think about our own words. A lot of that will come from our own belief system so we need to really be aware of our own beliefs. Our beliefs about money or how slim we are, how fat we are, what we should look like, how much we should be exercising – all of those things make a huge difference. I’ve been aware of the words I use around fitness, health and exercise. Just so that I’m not putting a negative image out there and being careful of what I say because what we say is often what we believe. Also, to help my son have that positive image and belief in being healthy and fit as opposed to skinny being gorgeous and fat being bad.
Changing our mindset:
There’s a lot we can learn from Michelle’s biography. It’s long at over 18 hours if you’re listening to it. The real inspirational message that comes through is that you can achieve what you want with the right mindset and the right work.
Not fearing failure has really come out very strongly for me. Don’t hold yourself back and don’t hold your children back from fear of failing. Failing is absolutely safe and it’s ok. It doesn’t feel great but if we can use it as learning it’s ok. Step back and think, well that didn’t go as planned, how can I learn from that or what can I do differently next time? This way we’re moving forward and we’re growing, we’re stepping out of our comfort zone and our whole world can change. If we choose to not even try then we’ve not growing, moving and developing.
We do a lot of mindset work in the Connective Parenting hub. Come and join us – https://connectivefamily.com/connectiveparentinghub/
There are also lots of resources in my free Facebook community – https://www.facebook.com/groups/connectiveparentingusingNVR/
