Inspire Them Early

My nephew started falling behind on schoolwork in one class and I caught him, thanks to the school's online progress site. I addressed a solution on the way home, after getting in touch with the teacher and despite my usual diplomatic approach, being caught never feels good and he was pretty dejected.

I had gone outside, talked with my neighbor for a while. I've known this woman forever, babysat her daughter who now has a toddler of her own, so it ate away at the time before I headed back in to make sure my nephews' homework was done and caught one nephew (the culprit) crying in the corner of his brother's room. He's not one of those kids that calms down right away when he's hurt so I cajoled him and sat there until he could tell me what was wrong and it turns out his brother had called him a failure and it hurt.

Number one, I don't allow that kind of talk. Name-calling when you're angry is one thing, impulsive and not pre-meditated, but you don't kick someone down like that. Especially not since last quarter, HE was the one that wasn't living up to his potential and it was extremely hypocritical. So I popped a squat on the floor and had a talk.

On this blog, I often post motivational and critical exercises in thinking. It gets some response, but I think a lot of adults have heard some version of it before and it's reinforcement. For my nephew, it was new and something he needed to hear when said thoughtfully.

I told him no one can make you feel like a failure but you. I'm not at all a stranger to failure and certainly not a stranger to doubt, uncertainty and critics that enjoy the misery of tearing people down. One very valuable thing I learned in college was how to help someone improve far more than a 'you suck' or 'this is perfect.' I talked to him about many things; the advantages of tailoring your education to your interests, the importance of failure to your definition of success and how you're never too old to start over if your path crumbles away. As I spoke, he stopped physically curling into his fetal position on the floor and his eyes actually started to sparkle with possibility. I opened him up to hope by confessing that sometimes even I cry or get angry when I face the harder blows that make me vulnerable, that those moments make the joy even sweeter.

In the eyes of a child, we get to see the purity of our strengths and weaknesses, get to test the possibilities and opportunities. I didn't just help him see that consequences of risk have their ups and downs, I reaffirmed it for myself and learned from his response and recognition. I have never been a teacher without being a student and that conversation made it abundantly clear that supporting those who struggle like you is SO important (even to an introvert like me) towards gaining the tools you need to succeed when things don't go as well as you'd hoped.

Let's face it; most of us did this when growing up, tested just how much we could coast or even outright cheated just to see what it felt like. Did we keep doing it? Most of us didn't. For me, nothing could replace hard work, knowing the true results of our own skills, untainted by the doubt of being found fraudulent and losing credibility. Maybe there are some golden children reading this, but I'm sure their hard knocks might have hit in other ways and maybe harder, either through being less resilient or just sheltered against the possibility.

To be honest, I'm glad my nephews aren't in a perfect bubble and that they do learn from failure. I also hope that when someone deigns to call them a failure, they start to brush it off with confidence because what I said revives in their mind, a powerful mantra that only pushes them.

Even once we gain experience, learn from the resilience of a child. Be childish in all the best ways. Remember the power of inspiration and let it empower you throughout your life. You'll need it for the rough patches. Not everything is adrenaline even after an epiphany, but it is completely in your power what you do with pain. Just like the string of insanity that deaths wracked me with did not make me give up, keep an impenetrable piece of yourself, cold as it may seem, to find and fulfill your purpose. You may not enjoy anything when life kicks you down, but there's a place for steely logic. If you can't create, edit or self-improve. You don't have to love it to do it. You just have to realize that you're still worth the pain of trying. And you are. No matter what asshole lives in your head at the moment, you are still the only one who can do what you do.

It's entirely acceptable to call your self-critic a failure and keep going. I've got your back so even if your support system is a big fat zero, consider me your +1.