WE MUST PROVIDE QUALITY
TO THE LIVES OF OUR CHILDREN!
This is not a part-time job… there is no such thing as
‘quality time.’ There is 'time' period! To do a good job raising our children,
we must give them time, our time… and lots of it!
The best way to treat a child as if he/she is responsible,
capable, intelligent, and important is to give him/her the tools of goal
setting! Teaching these skills says, "You are capable and responsible so here
are the tools to run your own life and make your own decisions."
As was said earlier, this does not mean you are becoming
permissive or are telling your kids to do anything that they want. If you have done a good
job of helping them to select the values that are used in making good decisions, this
process will be the farthest thing from permissiveness! Rather, the process of guiding
children to set goals becomes an internal regulating mechanism which guides them to make
good decisions… and it does not require you to be present at the time the decision is
made. Goal-directed children are highly disciplined children and they are guided by
the only true kind of discipline: Self-Discipline.
When you give your children the gift of Goal Setting, you give
them a lasting and life-long tool to live fulfilled lives with maximized success and
minimized disappointment. Here are the basics:
Select What You Want
Parents guide their children to use the "Top Twenty
List" from the last class ("Teaching Your Values to Your Kids") as a guide
to setting their list of goals. That list is a wonderful place to start in setting goals
for life. Teach them that it is also very reasonable to set short term, daily or weekly
goals as well. The first step must always be to pick exactly and precisely what you want.
Teach them to be extremely careful in what they select because once it is selected,
worded, and used correctly it will probably become a reality in their life. (Remind them
at every opportunity, that the ideas in their head will rule their world and that nobody
else can put any idea in their head without their consent. They are in charge of the
direction of their own life by choosing the ideas that they live by! (At this point many
parents wish to suggest religious teachings as being of great help in selecting the ideas
which formulate their choices.)
Apply the "Three P's" of Goal Setting
Personal: Divide the world into two parts… the part that you can control,
and the part that you can't control. Then word your goal so that it focuses only on
the part of the world that you can control. So often people set goals for things
that are out of their control, like grades in school or to be a starter on an athletic
team. Those are controlled by someone else (namely the teacher or the coach.) So, as you
guide your child in the process of wording their goals, help them to aim for things in
their control. If they want to achieve excellence in school help them to write things
like: "I always get to class on time, I complete every assignment and turn them all
in on time, I obey all classroom rules, I study for every class every night (even if I
don't have a specific assignment), I always ask questions when I don't completely
understand, and I am always cheerful and respectful of my teachers even if I may not
particularly like them.
Present: Change is a "today activity." Teach your children to word their
goals in present tense, as if they do, be or have what they want right now and then start
today! So many well-intentioned goals never become reality simply because the person never
got started. Help your children to set reasonable time frames for accomplishing their
goals and include those in the wording of their goals. If their goals are long-range in
nature then help them to select intermediate goals to measure progress. But above all,
help them to start now!
Positive: Effective goals must focus upon what you do want and not on
what you don't want. Help your children to word their goals so that they
state clearly the exact description of what they want. (Just as we discussed in our Lesson
on discipline where we said that you must decide exactly what you want, so to must anyone
who is setting a goal for their own performance.) It really helps to word the goal to
include many descriptive terms that not only explain what is wanted but also explain why
this goal will be of benefit. A well-written goal brings to mind the excitement, the joy,
and the ecstasy of accomplishing it!
Watch Out for the "Roadblocks to Success"
Pushback: "The natural human resistance to change." Help your kids to see
that anytime that they try to change that their mind and body will resist. Ignore it and
reread your goal and move ahead.
Rationalization:
"Blaming failure on circumstances." The human mind will try to
blame circumstances for any perceived lack of success in accomplishment of a goal. Parents
must make kids aware that it is normal for their mind to do this and that they must not
let it happen. (Talk about teaching accountability… this is exactly what you are
doing!) This again is where it is a good idea to get out the goal as it was written and
read it carefully because the goal was written to cover only what the individual can
control.
Projection: "Blaming
failure on other people." Just like rationalization, projection is normal but very
unproductive. Anytime that our mind can blame someone else for our failure, it will. Kids
must be taught that if they truly wrote their goal correctly, then nobody else can prevent
them from achieving their goal.
Procrastination: "Putting
off until tomorrow what you can accomplish today." Help your kids to use the wording
of their goal to prevent procrastination by continually focusing on their timeframes for
accomplishment of their goals. Help them to see that the more measurable short-term goals
that they have the less apt they will be to procrastinate.
Creative Avoidance: "Dodging responsibility by simply not facing it." Help your kids
to realize that the mind will allow you to forget to work on your goal by letting you
become so busy with, interested in, or distracted by other less important things. Just
like the other roadblocks, reading their carefully written goals most effectively fights
creative avoidance.
DECIDE, WRITE (3 P'S), READ, & VISUALIZE!
and ALWAYS BEWARE OF "ROADBLOCKS!"
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