Daily Motivation – Jan 6
There is no greater gift than the gift of responsibility.
Sometimes we convince ourselves that the best thing we can do is to do everything for everybody else. As parents, I think it is easy to fall into that trap. But we’re not really teaching anybody anything except to be powerless and dependent upon others.
I made a decision to teach my children to be responsible for their own actions and I don’t make excuses for them if they make a poor choice. They need to learn the power of consequences. They are fairly independent little ladies who know how to make their own sandwiches and if they choose not to eat a meal they’ve been given, they can either opt to make their own meal in the future or miss out. I’m not going to be one of those parents who makes a different meal for each member of the family. No way!
It was only recently though that I realised I wasn’t extending this theory fully to the adults in my life. If somebody would share their struggles in a particular area of their life, I felt the need to fix it for them. This was piling a lot of additional stress and worry on my plate that I didn’t need. So I don’t need to complete the tasks for people. I just need to tell them what steps they need to take to reach their goal. Whether they choose to take those steps or not is not my concern. It’s their journey.
Learning to let go of this was tough for me. It generally shows up in my life as people who want help creating a web-based business. I would say that 9 times out of 10, they won’t follow through. But even if I built the entire website for them and set out the business plan, they still won’t follow it through. So my lesson was to make them responsible for their own success by telling them the first step and only when they have completed that will I invest time in explaining the next step. Helping is one thing but giving the gift of responsibility enables them to soar.
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